‘Animal rights’?
I’ve been thinking about rights recently, and one thing which my mind wandered on was the idea of animal rights. The vast majority of people have some concept of animal rights, and wouldn’t desire to hurt an animal, especially a fluffy little kitten, yet few of those people are vegetarians. I am a pacifist and a conscientious objector, and firmly hold that we don’t have the right to kill another human, but why haven’t I tried to apply this to other living things, like animals?
I don’t believe in inflicting pain (torture); we don’t have the right to harm someone else. In order to apply these ethics to animals, we first have to determine what separates the men from the animals, or rather what doesn’t separate them. We know that animals can feel pain, as humans can, so if we say that animals are ’sentient’ as they can feel pain, then they are no different from us. However, we know animals aren’t conscious about themselves philosophically (i.e. they don’t ask themselves “why am I here?”) and don’t show signs of an advanced level of thought like us (such as language), so we could use this as the distinguishing factor and animals would be very different from us.
Personally, I believe the pain factor is the key, and thus we don’t have the right to cause pain to animals. But this is not necessarily the same as killing them for food, for example. It is possible for animals to be killed in a humane way (I don’t know if it applies to all mammals or animals, but I know in humans that breathing inert gases such as argon causes unconsciousness and a painless death, like dying in your sleep), but we still have to address the subject of the right to life. We have only talked about the right to lack of pain; do the same criteria apply to the right to life?
We have already established that animals do not have a higher level of consciousness like ourselves, as has been shown through lack of language, and no similar aspects we class as higher-level thinking (like philosophy). But is this a suitable criterion for the removal of this right? A new-born baby cannot do any of these things, and it is only over time that we establish higher-level consciousness. It is possible that over time due to evolutionary factors an animal could be born that would have the ability to develop higher-level consciousness, and if we killed it as a child it would be wrong. Also, how do we know that an animal might not go on to be the father or mother of such a child? A good criterion in my opinion is “the lack of the ability to develop a higher-level of consciousness”, but how would we go about fulfilling this? I believe the best way to go about it is to only kill the animal after we have established that it doesn’t have any development of a higher consciousness, and after it no longer has the ability to create offspring (as the same case would have to apply here). Furthermore, we should only kill the animal in a humane way that doesn’t cause it pain.
This argument has consequences that branch out very far. What do we do about abortion? An unborn foetus can feel pain (depending on the stage of pregnancy) and is fully capable of developing a higher level of consciousness, but pregnacy may interfere with the mother’s life, or may threaten her life. Just because the child isn’t yet fully developed, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t have an opinion, so whose life do we value greater?. I think that in the future with further advances in biotechnology we would be able to have a seperate supply of meat, grown completely in vitro, which would bypass these ethics. This could also be extended to the abortion issue: instead of aborting a baby, we could remove it from the womb and continue its growth in vitro, and perhaps do the same straight from fertilisation, allowing people to have children without the pain of birth and without interfering with the mother’s life. Ultimately we are omnivores, but with our higher-level consciousness, we will forever be raising ethical debates in an increasingly liberal world.
