Josef Bordat – Animals, humans, persons: Problematic implications of Singer’s notion of “animal rights”

Josef Bordat raises two main concerns over Peter Singer’s concept of animal rights: the equalisation of animals and human beings and the separation of human beings into different categories.

Obviously, in the recent ethical debate there are a lot of serious approaches towards so-called “animal rights”. Although it is undisputed that an animal as a creature has a certain sort of “dignity” and therefore an inherent “right” to be protected, it seems quiet doubtful whether this shall lead to “absolute” rights, constituted on the same level as human rights. In the debate one question is, if there should be any exceptions to the protection of the animal’s life for cases, in which animals serve human beings as aliments or for scientific purpose. For instance, following the Christian concept of the human being as “God’s image” and as the “crown of creation” makes it appear justified to permit these exceptions because of the human being’s outstanding position towards animals.

However, animal rights activitists as well as some theorists like the Australian philosopher Peter Singer consider this as “speciesism”. They argue that these exceptions are a sort of “discrimination”, and place it on the same ethical level as the discrimination of blacks in respect to whites (racism) or female in respect to male human beings (sexism), arguing that human beings and animals should be treated equaly if and when they have the same interests, e. g. the interest to be free of harm and pain. Singer clearly marks this out through the example of slapping a horse and a human baby: “[…] if we consider it wrong to inflict that much pain on a baby for no good reason then we must, unless we are speciesists, consider it equally wrong to inflict the same amount of pain on a horse for no good reason.” (p. 52) This utilitarian rationality seems to be logically correct and justified on a first impression.

But, on second view, it gets quite clear that the concept of interest and the equal consideration of human being’s and animal’s interests do contain dangerous implications. These can be used to neglect the human being’s claim to life as a fundamental human right rather than simply to justify the animal’s right of not to be killed, as some of Singer’s remarks on abortion and euthanasia (pp. 126-57) show.

II.

Singer holds, that any different treatment of human beings and animals is unjustified, because it violates the principle of equal consideration of basic interests. As a consequence, Singer does not separate humans from other beings, but persons (beings with the ability to have interests) from “non-persons” (beings without the ability to have interests). In the first group belong “some nonhuman animals” (p. 97) like apes, every human fetus belongs to the second, for “no fetus is a person” (p. 118). This argument leads to the conclusion that “no fetus has the same claim to life as a person” (p. 118). To Singer the likelihood of the incapability of fetuses of less than 18 weeks “of feeling anything at all, since their nervous system appears to be insufficiently developed to function” does mean that “an abortion up to this point terminates an existence that is of no intrinsic value at all” (p. 118). And even late in pregnancy an abortion “should not be taken lightly”, but it “is hard to condemn in a society that slaughters far more developed forms of life for the taste of their flesh” (p. 118). Singer insists that if we do not want to be “speciesists” by any religious or other justification and do not like to turn into vegetarians, we cannot uphold the moral wrongness of abortion.

The problem in this argument lies in the comparison of the actual morally relevant status of a human fetus with that of developed animals on the basis of the concept of interest, leaving out the notion of potentiality. The essential, i. e. the genomic imprinting that constitutes a human being as a being of serious interests (and not only of basic ones that can also be found in animals like the interest of being free of pain) already exists directly after the fertilization. Hence, right from the very beginning of human life we should consider the being as a “potential person”.

On the other hand, Singer’s comparative argumentation could be taken as a justification for killing some human beings. The problem, here, is Singer’s emphasis on the similar actual morally relevant status of some animals (as persons) and that of mentally disabled human beings (as “non-persons”): “Some nonhuman animals appear to be rational and selfconscious beings, conceiving themselves as distinct beings with a past and a future. When this is so, or to the best of our knowledge may be so, the case against killing is strong, as string as the case against killing permanently defective human beings at a similar mental level” (p. 103). The reverse might be: If we kill animals for our benefit we cannot condemn the killing of human beings of the same or of a lower mental level. That, to me, is a very problematic implication leading directly to euthanasia. And this would be the first step on a slippery slope, ending in complete immorallity and making genocide possible on the basis of an ethical reasoning that stems from the debate on animal rights. Singer attempts to deny this alarming risk with some historical and anthropological remarks: “Ancient Greeks regularly killed or exposed infants, but apear to have been at least as scrupolous about taking the lives of their fellow-citizens as medieval Christians or modern Americans. In traditional Eskimo societies it was the custom for a man to kill his elderly parents, but the murder of a normal healthy adult was almost unheard of. If these societies could separate human beings into different categories without transferring their attitudes from one group to another, we with our more sophisticated legal systems and greater medical knowledge should be able to do the same” (p. 157).

Should we? Could we? Are we really able to prevent a situation that gets out of our hands? This is a serious question, particularly in the light of the recent European history, including Nazi Germany’s euthanasia-programme and the holocaust. Although it is undoubtedly wrong to compare the Nazi ideology with Singer’s proposals, still this does not prevent them from being troubling: Who defines the “categories of separation”, who defines their limits and is able to set these boundaries? Who says, one is a “fellow citizen”, who determines, who is “normally healthy”? In one word: Who can guarantee, once the utilitarian way of separation becomes an accepted common practice, that there is no abuse?

III.

To conclude, I am not against the protection of animals. Nevertheless, to ground this effort on a notion of rights that is based on “interests” like Singer does, leads, as I have tried to demonstrate, to undesirable ethical implications. Singer’s concept of animal rights could evoke harm to the unalienable human dignity by, on the one hand, equalising animals and human beings and, on the other hand, by separating human beings “into different categories” (p. 157). Finally, I do not only want to persist on the difference between a human and a non-human being via theological or metaphysical considerations, i. e. by appealing on creation or the concept of the soul as the human being’s rarefaction, consideration that reflect a long Christian tradition. Instead, my intention is to warn that interest-centered and rights-based animal protection undermines the status of human beings very seriously and endangers the principal concern of the human rights doctrine: life – human life. To my mind, that seems to be a too high price.

Further links

The great ape debate

The dangerous philosopher

Special issue: new rights, recent articles
Tags: animal rights, ethics, joseph bordat