Applied Ethics: Animal Rights

• Notes on the Applied Ethics Readings: Animal Rights

"Duties Towards Animals” – Immanuel Kant

• Human beings have no direct duties toward animals because animals lack self-consciousness and cannot be ends-in-themselves.
• Duties toward animals are indirect duties toward humanity.
• Treatment of animals reveals and expresses the treatment of other human beings.
• Cruelty to animals hardens people in their dealings with other people.
• A person's heart can be judged by their treatment of animals.
• An owner should reward a dog who has loyally served them, and treat it kindly even when it is old and can no longer serve.
• Shooting a dog out of convenience degrades and desecrates one's own humanity, even though it does not violate any direct duties towards the dog.
• Cruelty toward animals eventually results in cruelty towards other human beings.
• Treating animals cruelly is immoral, because it disrespects and violates our own humanity.

“All Animals are Equal” – Peter Singer

• The basic principle of equality should be extended to other species.
• Animals should not have all the same rights as human beings, such as the right to vote, because they are incapable of understanding what voting is.
• Treating different groups equally involves giving the members of each group equal consideration.
• Equality of consideration is prescriptive rather than descriptive.
• Extending equality of consideration to another group involves giving the needs and interests of the members of that group the same level of consideration as their own needs and interests.
• Equality of consideration applies to animals as well, because the capacity to suffer is a necessary condition for the possibility of having any interests at all
• Besides the capacity to suffer, any criterion for determining which interests should be considered and which should not be considered would be purely arbitrary and unjustifiable.
• Believing that the interests of animals are inferior to, and less worthy of consideration, than the interests of their species is a mistake similar to those made by racists and sexists and is referred to as speciesism.
• Human consumption of animal flesh exemplifies speciesism, as does the common practice of experimenting on animals.

"Animal Rights and Wrongs” – Roger Scruton

• Animals lack rationality and self-consciousness and cannot be considered persons.
• Treating animals as persons would not benefit them in any way, and would harm them.
• Being a person involves existing within a moral community in which members are expected and required to respect the rights of other persons, and necessitates having specific duties and obligations.
• Animals have no comprehension of rights, duties, and obligations.
• Morality which really attributed rights to animals constitutes a gross and callous abuse of them.
• Although animals have no rights or duties, humans still have duties and responsibilities toward them.
• There is more to morality than the avoidance of suffering, and living by that standard leads to avoiding life, adventure, and sinking into cringing morbidity.
• The moral dimensions of interactions with animals are complex.
• The responsibilities of pet owners toward their pets are more extensive than their responsibilities to other animals, even those that are the same species as their pets.
• It is not just permissible, but positively right, to eat those animals whose comforts depend on humans doing so.
• Types of experimentation are unethical regardless of the positive consequences they have for human beings or for animals and appeals to virtue ethics to guide and inform moral analysis. However, some types of experiments must never be done to animals because such suffering can only be inflicted by a callous person.
• Scruton recognizes the need to conduct such experiments in order to facilitate scientific progress, but believes the fact that scientific progress requires cruel animal experiments indicates a moral flaw deep within scientific progress.