1. Animal Rights Arguments Julia Kirby Consulting author: Holly L

2. When is this important?  THW Ban medical testing on all animals, certain animals  THW assign right X to animal X (assign basic rights of freedom to chimps and dolphins)  THW Abolish animal rights legislation

3. Opposing animal rights  Deny their moral framework  You can just be very pragmatic (don’t care if monkeys are suffering as long as cancer research is being done)  We won evolution, etc.

4. Why are people different?  If you can establish the grounds for granting a right then you can say that people uniquely have that or animals share it as well  Eg: capacity for pain, consciousness, ability to communicate, sophisticated social relations, etc.  Ex. We would assign to chimpanzees freedom from captivity and experimentation because we can prove that they feel sadness and loneliness in the same way humans do  there is the same harm

5. Pain  Animals can feel pain  Can animals be conscious of pain or is this a physical impulse like you might see in a plant?  All we can judge by is their behavioural responses – we can’t know if they have the same mental processes of pain as we do

6. Pain II  “animals feel pain”  Same nerves, same brain chemistry response, behaviour – we can do scientific tests that can tell us as much as we can ever know about other human beings  If we discount it because we don’t “know their minds” we can also discount other people feeling pain for the same reason

7. Pain is Bad  It is a universal harm that pain be felt in this way  You can choose to apply a utilitarian calculus to this if you want – either on balance it’s ok if the animal suffers because of x benefit, or this suffering is of so great a magnitude that it is never justified

8. Speciesism  Speciesism involves the assignment of different values, rights, or special consideration to individuals solely on the basis of their species membership. – wikipediaspecies  You can assert that it is morally wrong to harm animals similar to how it is morally wrong to harm other human beings – simple genetic differences are not good grounds for this distinction

9. humanism  Any criteria that you can identify for giving rights to humans always has an exception  Eg ‘ability to understand the right’ does not apply to people in comas, babies, people with serious mental disabilities  Justifications for things like racism come from this kind of ‘quantitative’ criteria (historically bs like brain size)

10. humanism  If you want to defend it, you can use the ‘risk’ and empathy argument  People who do meet the criteria understand that they might one day be in a coma or were once babies etc., so feel that these rights should be extended to those kind of exceptions  No one will wake up a dolphin (probably)  The harm in having no criteria is losing the meaning or value of the right

11. Practical arguments  Most of these fall on the side of no animal rights  Easy ones: medical testing and the horrible consequences for humanity of not being able to test drugs on animals  Talk about penicillin, etc, and that artificial methods are not yet well developed or effective enough

12. Practical arguments  Evolutionary justifications: humans won evolution and built or civilization on the use of animals, and should continue to do so – have no overriding moral obligation

13. Practical arguments  A good one FOR animal rights is Empathy  People empathize with animals naturally (we think they’re cute, it’s instinctive to a lot of people not to harm them)  This is not a coincidence  Harming animals normalizes violence – this is bad for people and society. (first sign of a serial killer is that they start killing animals)

14. Practical arguments  It would be bad and sad for people who empathize with animals to see them mistreated – we aspire to a more caring society over all and this is an important step in developing those kind of standards  Harming the person in a coma may also have practical advantages but this doesn’t justify it – we also feel bad

15. Conclusion  Establish a framework for when we assign rights and why  Criteria like ability and awareness