Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Various proponents of animal rights—for example, H. J. McCloskey— maintain that while brute animals (henceforth ‘animals’) cannot have; moral rights they can have legal rights. Indeed, McCloskey himself goes so far as to maintain that even inanimate objects are able to have legal rights.1 And why should not inanimate objects be able to? After f all, for there to be a legal right is anything more required than that whatever agency is empowered to issue legal rights simply legislate or proclaim that so-and-so has that legal right?
1 See H. J., McCloskey, Ecological Ethics and Politics (Rowan and Littlefield, Totowa, New Jersey, 1983), 62–63.Google Scholar
2 See my ‘Philosophical Nonsense’, Metaphilosophy 3, No. 3 (July 1972), 238–243.Google Scholar
3 McCloskey, op. cit., 62–63.