Universal Rights For Humans & Non-Humans
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a
variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them
apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are
aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that
fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.
That life includes a variety of biological, individual, and social needs.
The satisfaction of these needs is a source of pleasure, their frustration
or abuse, a source of pain. In these fundamental ways, the nonhuman
animals in labs and on farms, for example, are the same as human beings.
And so it is that the ethics of our dealings with them, and with one
another, must acknowledge the same fundamental moral principles.
At its deepest level, human ethics is based on the independent value of
the individual: The moral worth of any one human being is not to be
measured by how useful that person is in advancing the interest of other
human beings. To treat human beings in ways that do not honor their
independent value is to violate that most basic of human rights: the right
of each person to be treated with respect.
The philosophy of animal rights demands only that logic be respected. For
any argument that plausibly explains the independent value of human beings
implies that other animals have this same value, and have it equally. And
any argument that plausibly explains the right of humans to be treated
with respect, also implies that these other animals have this same right,
and have it equally, too.
It is true, therefore, that women do not exist to serve men, blacks to
serve whites, the poor to serve the rich, or the weak to serve the strong.
The philosophy of animal rights not only accepts these truths, it insists
upon and justifies them.
But this philosophy goes further. By insisting upon and justifying the
independent value and rights of other animals, it gives scientifically
informed and morally impartial reasons for denying that these animals
exist to serve us.
Once this truth is acknowledged, it is easy to understand why the
philosophy of animal rights is uncompromising in its response to each and
every injustice other animals are made to suffer.
It is not larger, cleaner cages that justice demands in the case of
animals used in science, for example, but empty cages: not “traditional”
animal agriculture, but a complete end to all commerce in the flesh of
dead animals; not “more humane” hunting and trapping, but the total
eradication of these barbarous practices.
For when an injustice is absolute, one must oppose it absolutely. It was
not “reformed” slavery that justice demanded, not “re- formed” child
labor, not “reformed” subjugation of women. In each of these cases,
abolition was the only moral answer. Merely to reform injustice is to
prolong injustice.
The philosophy of animal rights demands this same answer– abolition–in
response to the unjust exploitation of other animals. It is not the
details of unjust exploitation that must be changed. It is the unjust
exploitation itself that must be ended, whether on the farm, in the lab,
or among the wild, for example. The philosophy of animal rights asks for
nothing more, but neither will it be satisfied with anything less.
