From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 08:37:04 MST
> http://www2.utep.edu/~best/ethics.htm
Continuing to muse on this, I felt that the argument for animal 'rights'
fell apart when it noted that:
"When a lion kills a yuppie jogger, the lion is not to blame and it has done
nothing wrong because its life is not governed by self-reflexive ethics;
indeed, yuppies have no business jogging in lion territory; when a hunter
kills a lion, however, the hunter has knowingly, unnecessarily, and wrongly
taken a life, killing an animal for sport and pleasure, for purely trivial
reasons."
I'm a bit disturbed by the way it implies culpability on the part of the
part of the jogger, rather than just foolishness ('kills a sixteen year old
jogger' would have given the sentence a rather different complexion), but
the main point is that the lion is indeed not to blame; it cannot honour a
right to life and observe the duties inherent in that right. It cannot
observe any social contract (I consider the problem being that the author
treats 'rights' as a purely ethical concept, where I see it as also being a
political concept). Given that the author argues that regarding ourselves as
stewards is insufficient against a full promise of rights, it seems to be
problematic that he notes "Animals are bearers of moral status and rights,
and often live in complex social systems of mutual aid, but they are not
moral subjects with explicit ethics; we owe things to animals that they can
never owe to us. For better or worse, we are the shepherds of this planet
and it is time that our responsibility to life becomes commensurate with our
power to change it." From his own argument, this is arguing for two things
simultaneously.
The crunch comes at this point; that if rights must be symmetric (i.e.
balanced by the duty to observe them oneself rather than have them
bequeathed to one) then "Fetuses, infants, comatose patients, some elderly
people, and the severely retarded would have no claim to rights." The thing
is, I'm wondering what the problem here is. None of those groups do have a
complete claim to rights (those that they do enjoy typically being perhaps
better described as a set of obligations the state and society are bound to
honour rather than a set of rights that can be demanded) - and what claim
they have is founded on a judgement of what social capability they will
either attain or possibly regain. A comatose patient may conceivably recover
and become a moral subject once more - a lion will never do so. The foetus
has no rights at all (not in the UK anyway, to the best of my knowledge).
Children are probably more problematic - the age at which a 'child' was
deemed capable of social commitment used to be 21, then 18, and now moving
towards 16 and younger. In other words, I would be tempted to say that those
groups do not have a claim to rights in the fullest sense, though this
possibly just reflects confusion as to the myriads of ways in which we use
the term 'rights.'
Thoughts?
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