Week 10: Animals

Introduction

• The use of animals in research is controversial due to concerns about animal rights and suffering.
• The article argues that neither the violation of animal rights nor the imposition of avoidable suffering are valid grounds for halting animal research.
• Both arguments against animal research are based on misconceptions.

Why Animals Have No Rights

• A right is defined as a claim one party can exercise against another, which may target individuals, groups, or even all humankind.

• Rights claims vary from repayment of loans to non-discrimination and freedom from state interference.

• To understand a right fully, it is essential to know who holds the right, against whom it is held, and the nature of the right.

• Sources of rights include constitutions, laws, and moral principles, with some having legal standing and others being purely moral.

• Rights are claims within a community of moral agents and can be defended only among beings who make moral claims against each other.

• Rights are necessarily human attributes possessed by persons and human beings.

• Philosophers describe the origins of moral capability as inner consciousness of free will (Saint Augustine), grasp of moral law by reason (Saint Thomas), participation in an ethical order (Hegel), membership in a moral community (Bradley), and consciousness of other moral selves (Mead).

• Immanuel Kant emphasized the universal possession of a moral will and the autonomy of its use of humans.

• Animals lack the capacity for free moral judgment and cannot exercise or respond to moral claims.

• The holders of rights must comprehend rules of duty and recognize conflicts between self-interest and justice.

• Only in communities capable of self-restricting moral judgments can the concept of a right be correctly invoked.

• Humans are self-legislative members of moral communities with rights, while animals lack moral capacities and cannot possess rights.

• Research on animal subjects does not violate their rights because they have none.

• A natural reverence should be given to animate life, but the possession of rights presupposes a moral status not attained by most living things.

• The assertion that all animals have a "right to life" simply because they are alive and have interests is an abuse of the term.

• Humans have obligations towards animals, similar to other human beings that are unrelated to rights but are rather obligations

• Rights and obligations aren't reciprocals of one another

• Moral physicians have obligations to its patients, and are not based on 'rights'

• Obligations arise from commitments made, differences in status, and special relationships.

• Some believe a general obligation not to do gratuitous harm to sentient creatures exists, along with a general obligation to do good when reasonably possible.

• Treating animals humanely means acting with decency and concern, but it does not equate to treating them as humans or holders of rights.

• The Objection states if rights require moral claims, grasp/apply moral laws, then humans may be without rights. Which proves rights do not depend on these

• This objection fails; it treats a human feature as a screen for humans

  • The capacity for moral judgement distinguishes humans from animals and not on administered humans
  • People who can't perform full moral functions are not ejected from the moral community
  • Humanity is a test and must be respected

• It does not succeed at distinguishing humans from other animals

  • Animals also reason, communicate, care, have desires, preferences
  • These moral features are not for humans
  • There is not distinction between humans and other animals

• The argument fails: is that it is not the ability to communicate or to reason or dependence on one another, or care for the young, or the exhibition of preference, or any such behavior that marks the critical divide

• Animals exhibit remarkable behavior, but membership in a community of moral agents remains impossible for them.

• Humans, unlike animals, can discern whether an act ought or ought not to be performed by applying some moral rule to the facts of a case.

• Genuinely moral acts have internal dimensions: criminal acts require a guilty mind (mens rea).

• Criminal trial is the mark of primitive ignorance.

• Moral right is applicably to animals

• The concept of right doesn't belong and doesn't make any sense.

• You cannot condemn someone for violating ''animal rights''

In Defense of "Speciesism"

• Abandoning Reliance on animal right, some critics resort instead to animal sentience - their feelings of pain and distress
• The critics that resort ask to desist from pain that may be imposed.
• The end sought does not justify the agonies
• The variety of agreement is utilitarian
• Jeremy Bentham states: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
• Animals certainly can suffer and surely should not be made to suffer needlessly!
• The first serious error is that animals have equal moral standing from humans
• To deny such equality give unjust preference to one species over another this is called ''speciesism''
• You cannot be racist
• The argument is worse than unsound; it is atrocious
• Racism has no rational ground
• Differing degrees of respect/concern is an injustice based on race
• There isn't any morally relevant distinction for racism
• The same is said regarding sex.
• Humans on the other hand: morally relevant differences are enormous
• Humans engage in moral reflection
• I am a species
• Speciesism is not merely plausible: it is essential for right conduct!

Practical Consequences and the Principle of Equality

• If all humans lived by speciesism, then it is forced to conclude (1) that neither humans nor rodents possess rights, or (2) that rodents possess all the rights that humans possess
• You must take into account animals for whom obligations are owed and be considered!

Substitution

• The humane treatment of animals requires that we desist from experimenting on them if we can accomplish the same result using alternative methods
  • in vitro experimentation
  • computer simulation However:
  • It would be a serious error to suppose that alternative techniques could soon be used in most research now using live animal subjects. No other methods now on the horizon (or perhaps ever to be available) can fully replace the testing of a drug, a procedure, or a vaccine, in live organisms.
• Regulations requires for all drugs to be tested on animals beforehand before human beings are exposed to them

Reduction

• Medical investigations putting human subjects at some risk are numerous and greatly varied. -The risks run in such experiments are usually unavoidable
• You should not decrease with experiments on animals, to avoid when feasible the use of humans as experimental subjects

Consistency

• Inconsistency is observed between profession and practice of many who oppose research on animals.
• It shows a coherent position rejecting the use of animals in medical research imposes costs so high as to be intolerable even to the critics themselves.
• So long as death and discomfort do not substantially differ in the two contexts, the consistent objector:
• must not only refrain from all eating of animals
• but also protest as vehemently against others eating them as against others experimenting on them.
• Anesthetics and thoughtful animal husbandry render the level of actual animal distress generally lower than that in the abattoir.
• Is is impossible to not wear clothing

Animal Equality: Addressing Speciesism in Practice

• All Animals Are Equal addresses the serious objective and idea of "The Rights of Animals"
• This book advocates for change in attitudes toward, and treatment of, animals
• It aims to remove the species barrier implemented and inflicted by human beings.
• A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes by Thomas Taylor was written as a satirical piece to discredit arguments for women's rights

Language and the capacity for pain

• Influential philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein maintains that we cannot meaningfully attribute states of consciousness to beings without language
  • Author states: "To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity"
  • The author states that signals are used to convey pain, fear, anger, love, joy, surprise, sexual arousal, and many other emotional states are not specific to our own species
• There is no good reason to deny that animals feel pain
• There is no justification that animals feel less pain than humans