Animal Rights
Summer 2000
by Roger Scruton
"Negotiation, compromise, and agreement form the basis of all successful human
communities. And this is the true ground of the moral distinction that we make, and
ought to make, between our own and other species. The concepts of right, duty, justice,
personality, responsibility, and so on have a sense for us largely because we deploy
them in our negotiations and can invoke by their means the ground rules of social order.
They define strategies with which we coordinate our social life, but which we can only
use when dealing with others who also use them.
To use these strategies on animals is to misuse them; for if animals have rights, then
they have duties too. Some of them—foxes, wolves, cats, and killer whales—would be
inveterate murderers and should be permanently locked up. Almost all would be habitual
law-breakers. All would deserve punishments from time to time, though maybe they could
hire lawyers like Steven Wise to argue that they could not possibly be blamed, since
only humans are blameworthy."
Animals and Ethics
by Scott Wilson
"The issue of animals and ethics is a philosophical issue mainly due to the fact
that common sense thinking is deeply divided on it. Animals exist on the borderline
of our moral concepts; the result is that we sometimes find ourselves according them
a strong moral status, while at others denying them any kind of moral status at all.
For example, public outrage is strong when knowledge of such operations as puppy mills
is made available; the thought here is that dogs deserve much more consideration than
the operators of such places give them. However, when it is pointed out that the
conditions in a factory farm are as bad as, if not much worse than, the conditions
in a puppy mill, the usual response is that those affected are "just animals" after
all, and do not merit our concern. This disparity of thought gives rise to a
philosophical question: what place should animals have in an acceptable moral system?"
Animals Don't Have Rights: A Philosophical Study
by Ingemar Nordin
Do animals have rights?
by Roy Halliday
"While I agree that we should not be cruel to animals and that it is more
objectionable to harm animals that have richer lives than animals that are
relatively unconscious, these issues cannot be settled with the certainty
required for justice, so they must be left to each person to figure out for
himself without interference."
Fossil Rim Wildlife Center
"Fossil Rim was founded on the conviction that all creatures have a right to exist; that
the natural world has intrinsic value apart from human perceptions and needs; and that
this right and this value deserve our deep respect."
Good Will Toward Animals
December 25, 2002
by John A. Baden, Ph.D.
"Here's a suggestion for your New Year's resolution. Register your opposition to meat
from confined operations. The market works. Use it to express your values. It will
respond."
A Libertarian Replies to Tibor Machan's "Why Animal Rights Don't Exist"
by David Graham
"I find it strange that so many of my fellow libertarians and anarchists oppose
and ridicule animal rights with such passion. For one thing, an animal right is
perfectly libertarian in that it is a negative right. Unlike incoherent positive
rights, such as the “right” to education or health care, the animal right is,
at bottom, a right to be left alone. It does not call for government to tax us
in order to provide animals with food, shelter, and veterinary care. It only
requires us to stop killing them and making them suffer. I can think of no other
issue where the libertarian is arguing for a positive right—his right to make
animals submit to any use he sees—and the other side is arguing for a negative right!"
The "Rights" of Animals
by Murray N. Rothbard
"But the fundamental flaw in the theory of animal rights is more basic and far-reaching.
For the assertion of human rights is not properly a simple emotive one; individuals
possess rights not because we “feel” that they should, but because of a rational
inquiry into the nature of man and the universe. In short, man has rights because they
are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual man’s
capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt
goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive
and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings
and to participate in the division of labor. In short, man is a rational and social
animal. No other animals or beings possess this ability to reason, to make conscious
choices, to transform their environment in order to prosper, or to collaborate
consciously in society and the division of labor."
The Use of Animals in Biomedical Research
May 1999
by Frederick K. Goodwin, MD
"The radical animal rights movement has become an increasingly powerful force that
threatens the continued discovery and development of new treatments and prevention
strategies for a variety of illnesses. The effort to end biomedical research with
animals is based on a profound misunderstanding of how science really works and the
gains we have achieved. Fundamentally it represents a philosophical position reflecting
a profound moral confusion that equates our use of animals with the enslavement of
human beings, and treats them as moral agents on a par with people."
Value and the Environment
by Jacob Halbrooks
"It is not shortsighted to say that we need only be concerned with the desires of
living human beings; living human beings are the sole source of all value in the
known universe. If existing humans wish to burn fuel, cut trees, and kill animals,
then that is exactly what they should do."
Why Animal Rights Don't Exist
by Tibor Machan
"My point was, in essence, that rights are just not the sort of things animals
other than people could have. Could animals have guilt, be blamed, feel regret
and remorse, or apologize or anything on that order? No, and why so, that was
the gist of my thesis: They are not moral agents like us, not even the great apes."
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This page was last updated on May 4, 2007.