Wild v Domestic Animals

In response to Brandon - full post here

I think it is perhaps pressing to discern which animals should be marked as under guardianship and those who take care of themselves. It seems that those animals that are domesticated are the ones most in need of paternalistic guidance as they navigate the complicated social realities of living as part of human society.

What I'm worried about is weather this takes away some essential dignity, not to say that we can say pets have a sense of dignity. These are rights bearing animals with consciousnesses and memories so they certainly require being treated with some respect.

I'm not sure if wild animals count as those under guardianship. Our relationship with animals in the wild is much less straightforward than our relationship with our domesticated animals, especially considering our various and sundry failures to positively intervene in the affairs of the larger ecosystem. If anything we have a responsibility to wild animals, but we are not their guardians because they don't need us. They simply need us not to interfere in their natural habitats so they can get on with their lives.'

In short, it seems we have positive duties to those animals we are guardians of (i.e. providing shelter and guidance in human society) and only negative duties to wild animals (i.e. to not utterly destroy their environment or otherwise unreasonably intervene in their lives).

Q&A Ten Question Two

Q: What is it about subjecthood that makes it immoral to own [a subject]?

A: I said in my Q&A that it is immoral to own a being that was a subject of a life (SOALs) because it is immoral to interfere with a SOALs interests. That's sort of hard to defend because we need to figure out what is in an animal's interest. Do most animals have anything more than immediate interests? Does this mean that we can't ever constrain an animal because that animal would presumably always be interested in escaping from those constraints?

There is a difference between conscious interests and psychological and physical interests. The conscious interests of animals aim at satisfying those psychological and physical interests which the conscious mind of the animal might not be equipped to properly provide for, especially if the animal is a member of human society. Thus it is not morally wrong to stop a pig consciously in pursuit of food from walking over a cliff because it's conscious mind is not able to attend to the pigs fundamental interests. Similarly, restraining a dog in the appropriate social situations may be necessary because it relies on it's participation in human society for it's psychological and physiological needs.

Q&A Ten Question One

Q: Is ownership an appropriate model for human relationships to objects?

A: Ownership does not appear to be an appropriate model for human interaction with animals and has related practical, if not moral, pitfalls. As I argued for before, animals cannot be owned as Subjects of a Life, which is the moral difference between them and objects. An object can only have instrumental moral value since the object is not a valuer in itself and thus, if it is to have any moral value at all, that value must be derived from it's instrumental value to a SOAL.

Then the only reason that a the property relationship would be morally inappropriate is if it causes harm to SOALs. We can clearly point out cases where property ownership causes harm to humans, such as the ownership of the means of production by a capitalist class. There is the technical skill and material wealth available to eliminate extreme poverty, but because of ownership there are vast amounts of humans and nonhumans harmed by the mechanisms of an irrational capitalism.

This doesn't invalidate little Johnny's ownership of his teddy bear, and it doesn't give us a clear picture of a post-ownership relationship with objects, but it does point out that the property relationship is in often a morally inappropriate way for a society to structure it's material culture in regards to the creation and distribution of wealth.

'Property' Under the Law

I am convinced of the need to abolish human utilization of animals in the economic sphere. I don't think that animals need to be removed from the human social sphere altogether, but accorded the basic rights they deserve in their interaction with moral-agent humans. Animals are not capable of entering into a contract and therefore any utilization of them in an economic setting is forced labor. Naturally using their very flesh is a violation of their most basic rights.

The tactics of the animal right's movement varies, but Regan is right in pointing out that physical violence against humans is solidly off the table for almost all activists. Civil disobedience is widely supported, especially due to the enormity of animal suffering and the peripheral nature of the movement. Between violence against humans and civil disobedience  an we justify the use of violence against property itself?

In a certain sense, property is an extension of an individual, in a similar way that a persons pinky belongs to them their land belongs to them. 

To limit this discussion to a specific type of case, assume a laboratory owns a dog that will be vivisected and thereby killed in a most brutal way. Assuming a custodian had access to that dog and could 'steal' it without causing any property damage, the law would take this as a type of violence but animal rights ethics could not. It seems that the same logic of civil disobedience applies, while acknowledging the right of the state to enforce existing laws, breaking such a law would not be moraly reprehensible because owning an animal is impossible due to it's nature as a right's bearing being thus nothing was being stolen.

Do non-state actors ever have a valid role to play in protecting rights (especially when the state refuses to do so)?

Faith in Animal Rights

Jamison et al bring up an excellent critique of the structure of the animal rights movement when they make the case that the movement can be a functional secular religion. This critique, while useful in considering the structure of the movement, is a prime example why sociological thought is different from philosophical thought. Like a lot of pieces in it's field the reader can't help but notice the author assumes they are writing from a stance of ideological neutrality (the social 'sciences' rhetorically justifying their existence) and thus can properly talk about deviation from this ideologically neutral world.

So much nonsense. There is certainly a desire for transcendental feeling in human beings, which is expressed by religion and various secular ideologies, but throughout the authors seek to rhetorically invalidate these religions and ideologies without dealing with those religion/ideologies contents. Very much like how early anthropologists catalogued the various practices of foreign cultures without bothering to ask the members what any of it meant from their perspective, let alone considering they may have valid and pertinent views.

That all being said, it did make me think about how the move from believing that suffering was bad, and then acting on that by becoming a vegetarian/vegan is something of a mystic process  a transcendental movement that may lack essential logical justification. The average person on the street would say something is good or bad for arbitrary reasons, whereas the non-relativist philosopher must justify that there is an objective way to determine if an action or thing is good or bad.

Do We Need a Law?

In response to Sebastian's 'Companion Animals and the Law?'

I totally agree that we need to change the way we as a culture interact with our domestic animals. It is morally improper to 'own' an animal, and that concept of ownership of animals needs to change legally and culturally.

I wonder if regulation is the wrong approach. Certainly the state should play an active role in convincing people to change their opinions on nonhuman animals, but could we bring about the changes needed in our interaction with nonhuman animals without regulation. 

The world isn't perfect, and some cases will fall through the cracks, but it seems to me that the largest issue confronting domestic animal's rights is our refusal to acknowledge their rights. Societies acknowledgement of animals rights needs to be our first priority

Animal Humiliation

In response to Patrick Kelly's post found here.

The question of animal humiliation is an interesting one. At least in the case of humans it seems that humiliation is some sort of mechanism for social cohesion. Humiliation functions to stop a certain norm or taboo from being disregarded, because the very real pain of humiliation would result as a consequence. Probably one the the reasons the taboo on nudity in our society has been maintained is because of the potential for humiliation.

A pervasive assumption is that animals have no dignity and therefore cannot be shamed or humiliated.  This makes some degree of sense considering many animals are not social creatures like humans and thus had no need to evolve a mechanism of shame. I don't think this is true though.

Consider that a cat, unlike a dog, will not learn tricks because it doesn't see treats as a reward great enough for it's effort. Maybe this betrays a sense of dignity being weighed against reward. Also it may be hard for us to detect dignity in other animals because so many of the behaviors we associate with it are cultural or species specific.

Of course I'm just conjecturing, but if animals do have a sense of dignity being impinged upon by their display at zoos and aquariums we can chalk up another negative in the whole affair.

A Right to Liberty?

Some animal rights theorists contend that animals have a basic right to liberty that is being abridged by their confinement in zoos and aquariums. If we accept that the basic right afforded to animals in possession of rights is that they have the right to pursue their own interests without human interference, it seems like the animal rights advocates have it right.

On the other hand there are many animals who's interests are in staying in a confined environment. Reptiles seem to have better lives confined in a zoo than in the wild. Of course the reptile in question cannot make this judgement for themselves. If an animal cannot even conceptualize freedom how do we know if it would want it?

The easiest solution (or stop gap measure), because we cannot ask the nonhuman in question, is to see what is in their welfare. If a polar bear will go insane in a small enclosure at a zoo, it is not moral to keep that bear enclosed, unless it has no means of life in any other environment. Similarly, if a snake does better in an enclosure and will not suffer any trauma, it seems to be fine to keep it enclosed.

We must be very careful to approach this individual by individual nonhuman animal. One of the follies of our current conceptualization of animals is our tenancy to grant overriding value to their species. We would not ever treat an individual human's moral value as subordinate to the instrumental value of such an abstract concept, and it does disservice to all the rights-bearing individual non-human animals existent to not treat them as full individuals.

Useful Distinctions

In response to M. Gaudet - original post here

As much as I feel that the human/nonhuman animal semantic distinction assumes a very high level of separation, the difference is not so microscopic, especially relative to the average scope of human life and discourse, that we can practically ditch our use of these terms. I understand that no one is seriously advocating eliminating these distinctions in language, but that seems to be the only linguistic solution in sight for eliminating the largely nonexistent difference between humans and other animals. We could also attempt to invent and popularize alternative terms describing humans as a category of animal but largely not a distinct category.

I wonder if a deeper issue may be that humans are evolved to view other animals as hugely different from our own species. Such a psychic distance would give us the advantage of more efficiently exploiting non-humans for our gain.

Without such a radical change in language, we can only fight the latent idea of difference in the words 'human' and 'animal' by stimulating the natural human capacity for empathy that allows us to view other beings as morally relevant conscious others.