I suppose this question follows on logically from my post about whether inalienable rights exist.
To people who believe that inalienable rights do exist: do animals have any? Do they have as much right to life as we do? If so why? If not, why not?
I tend to think that they do not. However, I do think that curbing things like animal torture are in humanity’s self interest, as we’ve seen a high correlation between animal abuse and other antisocial behaviors.
I consider that animals, like humans, have the right not to suffer unnecessarily. Pain mechanisms in many animals are largely similar (if less advanced) to those in humans, and so it could reasonably be said that torturing a dog to death will cause it “suffering”. However, a quick death involving minimal pain causes suffering neither to the animal itself, nor to similar animals (who unlike humans have not the capacity to become stressed based on information such as “someone’s going around killing examples of your species”), nor to humans associated with the animal (unless it is a beloved pet or the like). And so, I conclude that animals have no right to life (unless they are the property of a human), but do have a right not to suffer from human action.
And so we come to what suffering is unnecessary. Suffering is necessary in the wild. Suffering is to some extent necessary in medical experiments (which ultimately seeks to minimise human suffering in future). I consider that suffering is not necessary in food production, given certain thresholds for which I voluntarily pay a premium at my supermarket.
Thomas Reagan, probably the foremost philosopher who advocates giving rights to animals, talks about this. As he sees it, if animals have ANY significant right not to suffer, it’s going to trump humans’ rights to experience the tastiness of a steak.
It’s an argument that I don’t fully accept–I think he really trivializes the cultural and emotion significance of food–but I still find compelling in many ways. It’s the primary reason why I’m a pseudovegetarian.
Daniel
I haven’t read his works, but I pay more for my steaks in the knowledge that they have been reared, transported and killed in a manner that I consider avoids suffering (or at least involves vastly less suffering than the life and death of a wild cow). I try to avoid meat whose origin might well have involved battery conditions or the like.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve read his stuff. But I think his point is that all agriculture, even small-scale, “humane” operations, involve enough suffering for the livestock that the pleasure we get from eating their meat is unjustified.
If animals have a right not to suffer, it does seem like a difficult case to make, that the pleasure we get outweighs their suffering. If we were really unable to eat meat, could we really be said to suffer?
Daniel
No, inconvenience is a more accurate term, but I believe the same question can be asked of a cow’s death. I’d be interested in seeing precisely where and when he considers the suffering to occur in a ‘humane’ food production cycle: Cows show no stress upon their calves being removed past a certain age, and transport in large enough containers presents none either. So we come to the moment of death: I have been knocked out cold by a well-placed blow, and the experience was actually not unpleasant. So long as the blood is let out further from the other animals that they do not panic, I struggle to see where the suffering happens at all.
The question “how would you like it?” is answered “if I was a cow, I wouldn’t mind at all”.
Fair enough. The only answer I could suggest, perhaps, is that the calf itself (whose removal from the parent is a vital part of the meat production process) suffers from the removal.
It’s an interesting question.
Daniel
Do plants have any rights?
Can plants suffer?
Daniel
Perhaps, but I think I’m correct in saying that past a certain age, this is not the case either.
Of course, cows being cows, actually getting them to move around requires the use of prods or tools which might cause “suffering”, or something.
Any udder suggestions?
:smack: Speaking of causing unnecessary suffering…
Daniel
I read somewhere about plants reacting to another plant in the room being pulled up.
(I would have given a cite, but I am still giggling over SentientMeat posting in this thread.)
Is the above your only criteria?
What about people in a lifelong coma - can we use them for organ donations?
I don’t have strong opinions either way, but (out of curiousity) how does Reagan deal with the suffering to animals caused by the production of crops (e.g. fieldmice plowed under, bird nests destroyed, spiders and insects killed by insecticide, crushed worms, etc.) Or better, how do vegetarians account for these lives?
I think there’s a distinction to be made between “pain” and “suffering”. No doubt animals feel pain in a technical sense, but do they suffer, in the sense that they have a consciousness of what is happening and that there’s an alternative, or that a choice is being made to hurt them.
Animals in my opinion have as much rights as humans do, and i think that humans at the end of the day, have no real rights. Seriously, what can happen if some country drops a nuke on your city?? we have no rights, they have no rights, everybody’s STILL happy,
GOD BLESS THE WORLD…
Hahaha
Some answers:
glee, Plants don’t have ESP, and it’s pretty unlikely that they suffer in any sense meaningful to humans. (Their biological systems don’t include the systems that result in suffering for humans; if they “suffer,” it’s through a so-far undiscovered mechanism).
Also, people in comas, IMO, either have a chance (however slim) of recovering from the coma–in which case it’d be murder to kill them for their organs; or they don’t have such a chance–in which case it’s a massive waste of resources to keep their body alive. If there’s any doubt, I’d err in favor of keeping them alive, barring expressed wishes to the contrary (e.g., through a living will).
Jervoise, I consider the field-mice argument to be the strongest argument against an animal-rights-based veganism. The only defense I’ve heard is that livestock production in the US actually consumes the majority of crops, so by cutting cows out of your diet, you end up saving more field-mice. Of course, this doesn’t at all address the issue of hunted animals or animals raised on a grazing diet.
Daniel
I’ve just finished my physical anthro class and one of the last sections for discussion was primatology, the study of our non-human (evolutionary) cousins. Many of them have culture! By that I mean they exhibit an organized body of sybmols that are historically transmitted. They have language, they use tools, etc. It’s all quite rudimentary, but it is there. I don’t expect to see a simian version of the Mona Lisa coming out of the African jungles any time soon, but who knows when they might discover fire! 
Based on this it seems that we could classify animals, those with culture and those without. How should we treat our accultrated animal cousins? Do they have rights like we do? If not, why not?
Do animals think either we or they have any rights? Does the concept of a “right” mean anything to them? If not, does that matter?
I dunno. Do infants think either we or they have any rights? Does the concept of “right” mean anything to them? If not, does that matter?
It seems to me that not everyone that we believe has rights is capable of understanding or respecting this concept, and that an inability to understand or respect this concept does not prevent a being from holding rights.
Daniel