Animal Rights: Are They Good for People?

ByAsher Meir

From The Jerusalem Post, 2008

  1. Leona Helmsley, a rich widow, left in her will large sums of money for the care of animals. I claimed that it is technically as well as ethically impossible to actually to give by will the money directly to the animals. Technically animals don't have any legal standing. Ethically this technicality reflects the ethical reality that animals are unable to communicate their desires.Therefore, any human judgment regarding their welfare is questionable. In this article we will learn that my point of view is not universally accepted, at least among people.
  1. A prolonged legal battle is going on violentlyin Austria to get a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Pan declared a person, so that he may obtain a court-appointed guardian and hold property in his own name. An Austrian judge ruled earlier this year that apes are not humans, but a group of humans is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights on Pan's behalf. And just a few weeks ago a parliamentary committee in Spain supported a bill that would give rights to great apes[1], making it illegal to deprive them of life and liberty. Thus, it would be illegal to use them in medical experiments or in films or circuses in Spain.
  1. Technically, these provisions don't give animals rights, but rather impose obligations on human beings as is done all over the world. Animal-abuse laws in many countries (though not in Spain) outlaw bullfighting, but that doesn't mean that bulls have rights. However, the rhetoric of the Spanish bill is a rhetoric of rights, and its supporters are vocally approvingan agenda of giving rights to great apes, and ultimately to other species.
  1. There are two main ethical approaches to animal rights: The anthropocentric[2] Kantian view states that cruelty to animals is bad because it cultivates negative character traits in human interactions. The utilitarian[3] approach states that animals are subject to feelings of pleasure and pain just as humans are, even if not at the same level, and therefore their welfare should count in our overall effort to foster well-being.
  1. Today's animal-rights movement is strongly influenced by the utilitarian approach. A leading figure in the movement is the orthodox-utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer of Princeton, who asserts that great apes have the same cognitive level as human children and therefore should be granted comparable rights.
  1. I perceive a philosophical fallacy in the activists' position. They speak in the absolutist rhetoric of rights, yet the support of their approach is utilitarianism-- a philosophy of appropriateness that is ultimately incompatible with rights. So it is inconsistent to use a utilitarian philosophy to grant quasi-human status to animals, and hence to extend them quasi-human rights.
  1. Here is a concrete example of the paradox: Animal-rights activists seek to use animals' capacity for pleasure and pain to protect them from being used in medical experiments. Yet utilitarianism affirms the legitimacy of performing medical experiments even on humans, if the medical benefit obtained from the research outweighs the harm caused to the subject.
  1. Peter Singer, the main philosophical authority behind the animal-rights movement acknowledges this. His proposed standard for animal experimentation is "asking experimenters who use animals if they would be prepared to carry out their experiments on human beings at a similar mental level."
  1. What does this mean for humans? The animal-rights movement has the potential to elevate our ethical sensitivity toward humans, because if we set the bar at a certain level for animals, we will be inclined to raise it even higher for humans. But it also has the potential to degrade our ethical sensitivity toward humans. Making the statement that humans and animals are ethically comparable can legitimize treatment of people that would previously have been acceptable only toward beasts. More frightening, it can promote animal welfare at the expense or neglect of human welfare.
  1. Interestingly, an interpretation of Rabbi Avraham Kook places this dilemma behind the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Abel brought an animal sacrifice which angered Cain, who viewed it as an unethical violation of the animal's right to life. Unfortunately, Cain's concern for animals did not elevate his concern for humans but degraded it, and the result was that while he refused to slaughter animals, he ended up slaughtering his own brother.
  1. I oppose causing needless suffering to animals,butfind the current direction of the animal rights movement extremely worrisome. Philosophical consistency will inevitably lead to either prohibiting valuable medical research on animals or to permitting it among humans without their consent.Animal rights activists also weigh the relative ethical importance of animal and human suffering in a way I consider illogical. At an ethics conference I attended, a "care ethics" advocate took pains to emphasize that she would save her pets from a burning building rather than save a neighbor's baby. (This scandalized an orthodox Kantian also present at the conference.)
  1. The best way to promote animal welfare is to impose clearly defined obligations on people to prevent needless animal suffering, as is done in Israel. Extending the rhetoric or the legal framework of rights to animals will be a mistake and dangerous for people.

הקופים הגדולים[1]

[2]Regarding humans as the central element of the universe.

[3]Utilitarianism is the ethical theory proposed by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.