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Animal Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 1976

Jan Narveson
Jan Narveson*
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
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Extract

What do we owe to the lower animals, if anything? The issues raised by this question are among the most fascinating and fundamental in ethical theory. They provide a real watershed for the moral philosopher and, on perhaps the most widely professed view, a trenchant test of consistency in ethical practice. Among the virtues of these two challenging books is that they make painfully clear that there has been a paucity of clear and plausible argument in support of the nearly universal tendency of humans to eat animal flesh, and to visit varying degrees of pain, discomfort, and unfreedom on the animals in question in the process.

When we are asked why it is all right to do this, given our strong belief that it is not all right for us to eat other humans, we tend to give answers that won't readily wash. We may say, for example, that animals are stupid; but we don't think it all right to eat stupid people, including people less apparently competent than many of the higher animals. Or we may say things that are patently untrue, such as that the other animals don't really feel pain anyway.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 161 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

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References

1 Regan, Tom and Singer, Peter eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1976)Google Scholar. Singer, Peter Animal Liberation (Random House, New York, 1975).Google Scholar Otherwise unidentified page references are to the appropriate book of these two.

2 Experiments have been done (involving no suffering to animals!) in which chimpanzees showed evidence of self-awareness. Nothing I have said is intended to imply that these properties are unique to the human species, or more importantly that they are not matters of degree.

3 How this universalization operates, and from precisely what aspects of our prudential reasoning, is a matter of dispute. Writers such as R. M. Hare (freedom and Reason, ch. 7, for instance) and myself (Morality and Utility, ch. ix) have argued that universalization leads to utilitarianism, for we take it that units of utility are all that matter, prudentially, and that universalization imposes the requirement that all units of utility, no matter whose, be accounted of equal value. Rawls has argued (A Theory of Justice, Sec. 6) that utilitarianism involves an illegitimate extension of the principle of rational choice for one man, “conflating all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator. Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.” (p. 27) It is at issue whether the conflation is illegitimate, but that utilitarianism does it, at the fundamental level, may be agreed. Nor does it follow that the distinction of persons is not taken seriously. The distinction could have drastic effects on utilities: so much, indeed, is just what I am in effect arguing in the text, and elsewhere.

4 I am here voicing a common reaction, I believe. This reaction, it may be noted, suggests that we find it obvious that animals are rational, if in limited ways. We would do well to ponder this.

5 I have had something of a go at the very tricky questions involved in applying utilitarianism to these issues in my” Aesthetics, Charity, Utility, and Distributive Justice”, The Monist, October 1972.

6 It should be noted that Gauthier regards his exploration of individual utility maximization as a reduction ad absurdum, not a substantiation. Quite the reverse is true of Kalin.

7 I am grateful to my colleague Lawrence Haworth for useful discussion and suggestions concerning many of these issues.