There’s Animals and Animals and Animals and Animals and Animals and Animals - Yes, Lord!
(posted by Jim Henley)
Following up on FreeDem’s animal-rights entry, a couple links and some stuff I’ve said before below the cut, but the Big Thing we need to revisit when I get spare mindshare is the complex question of property rights. Meantime:
Robert Nozick on animal rights.
“Equitable Self-Ownership for Animals,” by David Favre.
Now, a little stuff I’ve said before:
The libertarian arguments against animal rights I’ve seen, most of which stem from the tradition of Rand and/or Rothbard, engage in twin, massive cheats: They make the species the basis of determining human rights, but the kingdom the basis of determining animal rights. They want to enjoin against cruelty to babies and the mentally disabled, so they conjure penumbras and emanations from the capacity of other humans to engage in “moral reason.” They want to permit cruelty to all animals, which they justify by treating all nonhuman species, from dogs to amoeba, as a single class. But if the species is the appropriate level at which to assign human rights, the species may well be the appropriate level to assign (discover?) animal rights. The second cheat from this embryo is, they assign human rights on the basis of the best humans capable of, while denying animal rights based on, in human terms, the “worst” animals are capable of. See Tibor Machen and Jason Kuznicki for examples.
I would add to that last passage about what “animals are capable of,” the following now: We have no evidence that animals engage in what Rand and Rothbard like to call “moral reason.” We don’t have definitive evidence that they don’t, mind you, but that’s as may be. We do know that most members of many species of animals are capable of reciprocity: avoiding mutual violence in many cases and using the minimum amount of violence that will establish stable status relationships in others. Back at the beginning of the year I quoted a wonderful passage from Frank Norris’s turn-of-the-(last)-century novel, McTeague, about two supposedly vicious, hostile dogs avoiding a fight, to the disappointment of their human voyeurs.
The “moral reason” argument for disregarding the ethical claims of reciprocating animals seems like a cheap trick: “Sure you’re doing the right thing - eschewing aggression - but for the wrong reasons! Boo-yah!”
Of course, the weird thing about grounding animal rights in reciprocity is that it gives humans the least license to eat peaceable herbivores and the most to consume our tough, stringy fellow predators.
If we can catch them.
June 12th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Good points. Another big cheat I see is the complete and total ignorance of the diversity of mental/intellectual capabilities in certain species of animals. As you say, there is the capability of reciprocity. But I’d go so far to say that there are grounds to argue that some species of animals do engage in “moral reason”–or at least a very confusing situation with no clear conclusion either for or against the existence of “moral reason.”
Tangentially, would libertarians be unwilling to make an individual argument for rights because they wouldn’t know who to trust to make the determination?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
We have no evidence that animals engage in what Rand and Rothbard like to call “moral reason.”
I’m not so sure about that, although the evidence is anecdotal. I remember a story philosopher and animal trainer Vicki Hearne tells in her book, Adam’s Task, about Fritz, a Doberman police dog, whose handler, Phil Beem, was a “bad-assed cop.” As Hearne tells it:
“One night, Officer Beem stopped a young black woman for jaywalking and started clubbing her with his nightstick, for the sheer fun of it as near as anyone could make out. (There were witnesses.) Fritz attacked–not the woman, but his policeman partner, and took his club away from him emphatically.
“Now Fritz was not only by nature a good dog, he was well trained and had a keenly developed sense of what his job entailed, what did and did not belong in this particular little dog-human culture. Sitting by while people got beat up for no reason was not part of his job, it simply didn’t belong…. He simply knew his job, had his own command of the law in a wide sense of “law” and was putting his world back in order.”
Elsewhere she describes Fritz’s action as “a clear case of a dog giving himself the moral law.” It seems to me, as one who knows a little about the training of protection dogs, and the nature of the relationship between them and their handler, that Occam’s Razor demands the recognition of a case of moral reasoning here.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Dave, that’s a fascinating anecdote. Thanks for passing it along. Dogs definitely seem animated by a strong sense of “proper order.” Just what the dimensionality of “proper” is is an interesting question.
July 10th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
fun farm animal facts…
You must put a lot of work into blogging this much!…