Table of contents |
2 Animal rights in law 3 Animal rights in philosophy 4 Quotes 5 Further reading 6 External links |
While many advocates of animal rights do support rights for animals in the strict philosophical or legal sense, the term primarily is used for the notion that animals should not be killed for food, imprisoned, experimented upon, or used in entertainment or sports.
Although Singer is said to be one of the ideological founders of today's animal rights movement, his philosophical approach to an animal's moral status is not based on the concept of rights, but on the principle of equal consideration of interests. His book, Animal Liberation, argues that humans grant moral consideration to other humans not on the basis of intelligence (in the instance of children, or the mentally disabled), on ability to moralize (criminals and the insane), or on any other attribute that is inherently human, but rather on their ability to experience suffering. As animals also experience suffering, he argues, excluding animals from such consideration is a form of discrimination he calls 'speciesism'.
Tom Regan (The Case for Animal Rights), on the other side, claims that non-human animals that are so-called "subjects-of-a-life" are bearers of rights like humans, although not necessarily of the same degree. This means that animals in this class have "inherent value" as individuals, and cannot merely be considered as means for an end. This is also called a "direct duty" view on the moral status of non-human animals. According to Regan we should abolish the breeding of animals for food, animal experimentation and commercial hunting.
These two figures serve to illustrate the main differences within the animal rights movement. While Singer is primarily concerned with improving treatment of animals and accepts that, at least in some hypothetical scenarios, animals could be legitimately used for further (human or non-human) ends, Regan relies on the strict "Kantian" idea that animals are persons and ought never to be sacrificed as mere means. Yet, despite these theoretical discrepancies, both Singer and Regan mostly agree about what to do in practice: for instance, they both concur in that the adoption of a vegan diet and the abolition of nearly all forms of animal experimentation are ethically mandatory.
Gary Francione's work (Animals, Property, and the Law, et.al.) is based on the premise that the main obstacle towards a society where animal rights are recognized is the legal status of animals as property. Francione claims that there presently is no proper animal rights movement in the United States, but only an animal-welfarist movement, and that any such movement which does not advocate the abolishment of the property status of animals is misguided, logically inconsistant and doomed to never acheiving its stated goal of improving the condition of animals. Francione says that a society which regards dogs and cats as family members yet kills cows, chickens, pigs, etc. for food exhibits "moral schizophrenia".
See also: Animal rights group, veganism, vegetarianism, anti-vivisection, ahimsa, Animal Liberation Front, imitation meat, in vitro meat, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals