Pros and Cons - Debbie Newman, Ben Woolgar 2014

Animal rights
Section A. Philosophy/political theory

There are numerous debates about animal rights, ranging from vegetarianism, to the testing of cosmetics or medicines, to laws against animal cruelty in bullfighting. However, many of them share a common and underlying question: what rights, if any, do animals have? It is important to note that denying animal rights does not necessarily equate to saying that unrestrained cruelty to animals is acceptable; rather, it is the denial that they have the particularly strong moral weight afforded by rights. What a right is constitutes a difficult question, and partly one which the debate will inevitably focus on; that said, both teams must be careful to be precise about exactly what having certain rights would entail, rather than using the concept loosely.

Pros

[1] Although animals cannot verbally express their choices, they do form deep and lasting bonds with each other — relatively complex emotions such as grief, affection and joy. To argue that animals are simple beings not worthy of rights aimed to protect their well-being is a deep misunderstanding of their rich emotional life.

[2] Rights are not only granted to beings that contribute to society. They are deeper and more universal than that. For instance, people with severe disabilities, young children and visiting foreigners do not contribute to the state or society that gives and protects rights, but we still afford them certain protections. Similarly, we do not harm individuals who would not be able to protest that harm, such as people with mental disabilities, or patients in a coma. On those grounds, animals, who are not part of social life and do not uphold civic duties, should not be excluded from having rights.

[3] One of the reasons for granting rights is the desire to protect sentient beings from cruel and unnecessary pain. Pain is a universally acknowledged bad state of being which we all seek to avoid. Animal pain, as experience, is no different from human pain. The ability to feel pain, however, varies according to the development of the nervous system of the sentient being. Granting rights can be perfectly compatible with that notion. To see this, consider that almost no one thinks that fish and seafood should have the same rights as mammals or birds; that is because their nervous systems are far less developed, so they simply do not feel pain in the same way. However, granting rights can be perfectly compatible with the level of potential pain experience and the rights necessary for protection from unnecessary pain.

Cons

[1] A core function of having a right is to be allowed to make autonomous choices, and to have those choices respected. When we say we have a right to ’free speech’, what we really mean is that we can choose what we say and we cannot be forced to say something else. The choices we make define our individuality, and allow us to shape our own lives. Animals do not have the capacity to make choices; they are beings driven by basic urges, and do not have any level of reflective capacity to decide how to live their lives. It would simply be utterly pointless to give animals rights.

[2] Animals do not share in the network of duties and responsibilities that give people rights. Rights are, after all, a human construct, and depend on others observing them; for that reason, to get rights, you must put something into the system that gives you those rights, and that requires contributions to society in the form of taxes, voting and so on. Animals do none of that, so cannot expect to benefit from it. It is simply misguided to think that the way in which we should relate ourselves to animals is to grant them rights in the same way as we grant rights to humans.

[3] Some say that what is relevant is not whether an animal can reason, but whether it can suffer. Whatever the case, animals do not feel pain in the same way as humans; their nervous systems are less developed, and so their pain counts for less than ours. That is particularly important given that animal rights are usually sacrificed to do some good for humans; for instance, to test potentially life-saving medicines. The pain we inflict on an animal through animal testing, for example, is far less devastating to a life than the pain we seek to cure in a human being’s life. The animal’s pain is ’worth it’. If granting rights to animals means we can no longer test medication on them, we are not weighing up harms and benefits in the right way.

Possible motions

This House would repeal all laws protecting animals.

This House believes that animal rights are a myth.

This House would not eat meat.

Related topics

Animal experimentation and vivisection, banning of

Blood sports, abolition of

Vegetarianism

Zoos, abolition of