Animal Rights Talk

About a week ago, the topic of discussion for Philosophy club was animal rights. One member, whose name I cannot recall, gave a brief presentation on why animals have rights, and I got up, gave a brief explanation as to why they do not, and we all had a good discussion from there. This is just an outline of my talk, I deviated and gave some examples, and I took questions as I spoke. But this was requested by a friend, so, here it is. 

So, I think we’ve all seen that emotionally manipulative video of Sarah Mclachlan talking about animal cruelty, while showing footage of abused animals and playing that horrendous song, Angel. It’s a tear jerker! And it gets you hooked, and it makes you want to do something for these poor animals, right? Well, I’m here to argue that, she’s full of crap.

But I will say this: she gets an intuition right, and it was something that Garcia touched on last week when we talked about AI, which was, we seem to want to base morality on a kind of sentience, and want to avoid pain. When we see that animals, or AI, feel pain, we have an urge to want to stop that pain. That intuition is correct, but it is not sufficient basis for morality.

The topic is animal rights, but that can be a bit broad, so I want to just narrow this down to what is probably the most popular manifestation of animal rights, which is veganism, and from there we can talk about animal rights, if there such a thing. The basic argument goes something like this:

1. It is wrong to cause pain without a morally good reason
2. If we can nourish ourselves without eating meat, then nourishment is not a morally good reason to cause pain to animals
3. We can nourish ourselves without eating meat
4. Therefore, nourishment is not a morally good reason to cause pain to animals (from 2,3)
5. Therefore, it is wrong to eat meat (from 1, 4)

There are a few ways we could go here, tackling premise 3 and looking at our evolutionary history with the way our digestive tracts are designed to break down enzymes from meat, or by looking at our canine teeth, and whatever. We could look at this in a more utilitarian way, and look at empirical data of these agricultural businesses and see if they actually are causing pain, and if so, maybe the amount of pain is justifiable. But, instead, I want to argue for a few things. I want to argue that animals have no moral status whatsoever, and so have no rights whatsoever, and I will do this by showing that mere sentience (of which pain a state of that mental sentience) is not a sufficient ground for rights.

So, what does it mean to have moral status? To have a status in something, you are part of some group or you are partaking in something which is common to everything else in that group. So, if you attend LBCC, you have status as a student, and everyone else has the same status because we all have the same goal, or the same purpose, or the same telos. So, what does it mean to have moral status? This depends on what morality is, and I think most of us can agree that morality is just striving towards some kind of good, or the pursuit of the good life.

But not all goods are moral goods. A knife that cuts well is a good knife, and a knife that does not cut well does not function as a good knife, but this is not a moral good. We don’t say that the knife is being moral or immoral because it does or does not cut well. So, when animal rights activist want to claim that animal harm is grounds to stop such a harm, they need to make the connection clear that it is a moral harm, and not a non-moral harm. A dent in a knife harms the purpose of the knife, but it is not a moral harm. An animal that suffers harm doesn’t automatically entail that it is a moral harm, just as harming a plants growth is preventing it from fulfillment, even if that harm is psychologically present, and some people do believe plants, like animals, are psychologically present. What matters is if it is morally present, and that conceptual connection to sentience isn’t made clear. So, what then grounds moral status if not consciousness?

As I said, to have moral status, you are striving towards the moral good. But moral striving is not like other types of strivings, like the eye strives to see or the heart strives to pump blood. Those are natural and involuntary. Moral striving is voluntary, and so requires free will and knowing why they are striving towards that goal, that is, they need rationality. Freedom and rationality are necessary and sufficient conditions for being a member of the moral community. This in turn entails that they know what their own good is, what the good of others are, what goodness and badness are, and how to get there. They can internalize these concepts, rearrange them to gain further insight, and act upon them. In short, they must be able to grasp the form of a thing. But they don’t, so they have no moral status.

That might be controversial, but if it is, it is because I am using a medieval conception of rationality and intelligence, and that’s not common these days. So, let me consider some objections. Perhaps the most common one is to say that animals do have intelligence. As I mentioned, that understanding is not the same as the scholastic understanding of intelligence, but grant for the sake of argument this is true. Say some animals like gorillas, bears, and dolphins have rationality. If rationality comes in varying degrees, then so does moral status. But then it seems like only a select few animals have intelligence, and so only a select few have moral status, which is contrary to the intuition that vegans and animal rights activists play on, which is, it is wrong to harm any animal. So, that won’t work for the animal rights proponent.

Another objection might be that if animals have no moral status, then I cannot object to their cruelty, but this is not so. As Aristotle has said, being a bad person is it’s own punishment, and being a good person is its own reward. When we harm or do damage to something, we are not only doing damage to the object, but also to ourselves, and since it is also largely uncontroversial that humans have a higher moral status than other animals, we are doing a greater moral harm than we could with any other animal out there. So, it would still be wrong to be cruel to animals under this view.