Second, is another related, more "positive" reason to view animals as persons. Although there will undoubtedly be borderline cases, it is clear that at least some animals possess the characteristics that we normally associate with personhood. For example, in The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that theoretical and empirical considerations indicate that at least some animals normal mammals of at least one-year of age possess beliefs, desires, memory, perception, intention, self-consciousness, and a sense of the future.
The attribution of at least several of these mental states reveals that it is perfectly sensible to regard certain nonhumans as psychophysical individuals who "fare well or ill during the course of their life, and the life of some animals is, on balance, experientially better than the life of others.
A common misconception is that animal advocates argue that animals should have the same rights as humans. As far as I am aware, no rights advocate maintains this view.
Moreover, the criticism itself indicates a fundamental confusion about rights theory. This matter of inclusion is to be distinguished from the matter of the scope of any rights that animals may have once we move them from one side to the other.
I have elsewhere used the example of human slavery to illustrate this point. Slaves had no rights of association, slave families were routinely broken up, and slaves could be killed or tortured for what was essentially the pleasure or amusement of slave owners.
Indeed, the move entailed the exclusion of only one sort of exploitation: the institutionalized commoditization of human beings in which their basic right of physical security, the prerequisite for their having rights at all, was violated by others for consequential reasons.
Other considerations governed the scope of rights that these "new" persons may have had. For example, the abolition of human slavery only began, and did not end, a discussion about what additional rights--other than the right not to be slaves--should be accorded to former slaves. Similarly, when we move at least some nonhumans from the "thing" side over to the "person" side, we have said nothing about the scope of rights that they will have.
All we have done--through the inclusion of animals on the "person" side--is to recognize that species alone is an insufficient justification for treating nonhumans as "things. For example, it would be absurd to discuss the rights of animals to drive or to vote or the right of an animal to get a scholarship to attend college. But the inability of nonhumans to adhere to rules of the road, choose intelligently among political rivals, or do calculus are all irrelevant to the basic notion of personhood.
We may very legitimately award a math scholarship to Jane rather than Simon based on Jane's superior mathematical ability. As long as Simon has had a fair opportunity to develop his mathematical abilities, using Jane's "intelligence" as a criterion for determining the distribution of the particular resource in question educational benefits is fair.
But Jane's greater intelligence does not justify Jane treating Simon as her slave or otherwise placing Simon on the "thing" side of the equation. There is, however, one sense in which including animals as members of the class of "persons" is very different from including additional humans within that class.
If we acknowledge that Simon is not a "thing," the protection we have given Simon is at the same time quite significant after all, the basic right to physical security is a prerequisite to all other rights , but also the bare minimum needed to distinguish Simon from being a thing. Saying that Simon is included in the class of persons says nothing about the scope of rights that he may have other than to say that we will protect Simon's right to be a person in that we will at least recognize de jure that Simon's basic right to physical security will be protected from being traded away for consequential reasons.
If, however, we recognize that animals are not "things," that their basic right to physical security cannot be sacrificed merely because we think the consequences justify the sacrifice , then we can no longer justify the institutionalized exploitation of animals for food, experiments, clothing, or entertainment. These forms of institutionalized exploitation necessarily assume that animals are things whose interests are contingent on human desires.
Once we recognize that animals are not "things," we can no longer justify the use of animals in experiments any more than we could justify the use of humans. We have at least de jure ruled out the institutional use of coerced humans in biomedical experiments.
And, although many people will tolerate the payment of low wages to workers, few would similarly tolerate human slavery. A primary result of according personhood status to at least some nonhumans would be to require the abolition of institutionalized animal exploitation.
Once we recognize that animals are no longer "things," then we can no longer treat them as beings whose fundamental interests in their own lives may be sacrificed because we enjoy the taste of meat, or because we enjoy shooting pigeons, or because we enjoy the feel or look of fur or leather.
That is, according personhood status to animals does not mean that we simply get more serious about whether a particular form of slaughter to produce meat is more "humane," or that we take animal interests more seriously in determining whether a particular experiment involving animals is "necessary.
To evaluate Singer's claims about the normative indeterminacy of rights theory, I will identify three separate normative components, or levels, of moral theory, and I will explore the relative normative guidance of the utilitarian and deontological approaches with respect to each component. The first component is what the theory ideally seeks. That is, what state of affairs would the theory want to achieve were all other things equal. The second component provides normative guidance to the individual, on a personal level, in terms of what theory ideally requires.
I will use the term, "micro- level" when dealing with this component of moral theory. The third component addresses incremental change. Do these theories, which propose ideal moral states, have prescriptions for how to effect incremental change in order to achieve the state of affairs for animals that would be required under the ideal state? The inquiry here is whether rights theory provides a prescription for how the individual can help move law and social policy in the direction of the ideal state of affairs the abolition of all institutionalized exploitation in addition to providing more specific and personal normative guidance to the individual the subject of the second component.
I will use the term "macro- level" when dealing with this component of moral theory. An example may help put this in perspective. Assume that my overall goal is to achieve a completely pacifist world in which there is no violence. On the ideal level, my theory requires that there be no or substantially no acts of violence. On a micro-level, this theory may require that I not respond violently to others irrespective of provocation.
On a macro-level, the theory may prescribe that I try to implement the ideal state of affairs a peaceful world through legislation that eliminates various forms of violence such as laws that forbid the manufacture of guns.
These are three very different aspects of moral theory. The first component of moral theory--the ideal level--requires that we ask what the theory envisions as the ideal state that would be achieved if the theory under consideration were accepted.
For Regan, the answer is quite clear; Regan's theory is a theory of abolition, and not regulation, of institutionalized animal exploitation. Regan objects to the treatment of animals exclusively as means to ends; to put the matter in legal terms, Regan objects to the property status of animals that allows all of their interests, including their basic interest in physical security that is a prerequisite to the meaningful recognition of other interests, to be bargained away as long as there is some sort of human "benefit" involved.
This would necessitate complete abolition of those forms of animal exploitation that are dependent upon the status of animals as human property.
These activities would include using animals for food, experiments, product testing, clothing, entertainment, or in any other way that fails to respect the inherent value of the animal. Similarly, rights theory is reasonably clear concerning the "micro" component of moral theory. Just as rights theory condemns the institutionalized exploitation of nonhumans as a matter of social practice, it also condemns at least the direct participation in animal exploitation.
After all, if a person advocates the abolition of human slavery because the institution of slavery is unjust, that person would presumably also conclude that ownership by the individual master of human slaves was also violative of the rights of that owner's slaves since slaves can only be subjected to the institution of slavery by being owned by someone.
Similarly, the individual participates directly in the exploitative institutions by eating meat or dairy products, wearing animals, or using them in experiments.
These institutions cannot exist without individual moral agents who choose to participate directly in the institutionalized exploitation.
Difficult moral questions will remain. It is impossible to avoid participation in institutionalized animal exploitation completely since virtually every aspect of our lives is involved in some way with the institutionalized exploitation of animals.
So, the rights advocate is faced with decisions, for example, as to whether to use drugs that have been tested on animals, just as opponents of human slavery are faced with the decision to travel upon roads in the southern United States, many of which were laid originally with slave labor. But the rejection of institutionalized animal exploitation does resolve many of the moral questions that confront us. If animal rights means anything, it means that, as a society and as individuals, we can no longer countenance the institutionalized killing of animals for food as a matter of individual moral choice, any more than we can justify performing experiments ourselves, or wearing clothing made from animal skins or pelts.
Singer's long-term goal is not the achievement of animal rights, or necessarily even the abolition of all animal exploitation.
Singer's theory of animal liberation requires that we reject speciesism, which would, for example, prevent the use of animals in experiments in those situations in which we would not use humans who had the same interests at stake. But beyond this rejection of species bias, and the use of a theory of act utilitarianism that would treat animal interests seriously, Singer's theory of animal liberation provides little normative guidance concerning issues of animal suffering and the killing of animals.
Neither ideal state will be realized without a profound change in the current state of affairs, and that change is most unlikely to happen overnight. On the level of "ideal" theory, then, both theories describe "utopian" states that are far removed from the world in which we presently live.
On another level, however, Regan's theory provides a rather vivid description of the ideal state of affairs whereas Singer's does not. The clarity of the ideal state is important because that clarity will help to inform a more definite theory about how the individual ought to behave on the micro- and macro-levels of moral decision.
It is easy to identify the practices to which Regan objects given that his target is the institutionalized exploitation of animals. To the extent that there is any lack of clarity, Regan's overall prescription that we stop using animals exclusively as means to human ends, and that we recognize that some animals are subjects-of-a-life, would eliminate the overwhelming portion of what Regan regards as activity that violates the rights of animals. There may, of course, be some "hard cases," but under Regan's theory, institutionalized animal exploitation can never be justified irrespective of consequences, just as human slavery is rejected as morally repulsive by most people, irrespective of any beneficial consequences that would occur were we to enslave humans.
Singer's utilitarian theory is different from traditional animal welfare in that Singer regards the long-term goal as animal "liberation," which is Singer's shorthand for a state of affairs that would accord equal consideration to the equal interest of animals. So, in this sense, Singer's long-term goal is arguably more progressive than the traditional welfarist approach as long as everyone agrees how to describe competing interests, and also agrees how to weigh those interests in light of the assessment of consequences--and agreement about such matters is not easy to achieve.
But Singer's theory is similar to animal welfare because it requires that we balance the interests of humans against the interests of animals under circumstances that threaten to compromise the assessment of animal interests in any event. There are at least six aspects of Singer's theory that portend great normative uncertainty at any level of application. For present purposes, however, I am concerned primarily with the ideal and micro-levels of moral theory.
It is my view that certain aspects of Singer's theory render his view at the ideal level to be far more unclear than that offered by Regan. I stress that the purpose of this discussion is not to present and analyze critiques of utilitarianism in general, or even Singer's utilitarian theory of animal liberation in particular.
Rather, I am responding to Singer's claim that rights theory is incapable of providing concrete normative guidance relative to the supposed clarity that Singer claims for his view over rights theory. First, as I mentioned above, Singer's utilitarian theory requires some sort of empirical description of the consequences of acts. But it is often difficult to predict these consequences under the best of circumstances. For example, Singer's long-term goal is to ensure that equal human and nonhuman interests receive equal consideration in a balancing process that is as free of speciesism as is possible.
Even if animal interests were taken seriously, as they would be in Singer's ideal framework, assessments of consequences of actions--especially actions that purport to effect systemic changes, such as legislation--are very difficult to assess before or after the fact.
Second, Singer's theory requires that we make inter-species comparisons of pain and suffering. That is, in order to maintain that the equal interests of animals and humans ought to be treated equally, Singer's theory needs some notion of how we can measure however imprecisely inter-species experience.
For example, he observes correctly that a slap that would cause virtually no pain to a horse may very well cause considerable pain to a human infant. Third, and related to the problem of inter-species comparisons of pain and suffering, is Singer's analytic framework.
Although the framework requires that we reject speciesism, Singer acknowledges that species differences may very well affect our assessment of these various interests. For example, no one as far as I know maintains that because of differences in the type of intelligence that exists between a human and a dog, scholarships for higher education ought to be given to dogs. Singer asks an important additional question - "What sort of beings should we include in the sum of interests?
Singer rejects this assumption. Why should humans be valued more than animals? What is the intellectual basis for experimenting on animals rather than a person in a persistent vegetative state? Singer argues that humans have no inherent right to better treatment than animals - instead their ability to suffer and their rationality need to be evaluated. A dolphin or a chimpanzee may be more rational and be able to suffer more than a newborn baby.
Beings that have rationality or self-consciousness are more important than mere sentient beings. If you had to choose to save a child or a dog, you should save the higher "person" - the child. For Singer, not all persons are humans, and some humans are definitely not persons.
An adult chimpanzee can exhibit more self-consciousness, more personhood, than a newborn human infant. If the choice was between saving a newborn baby who had no family and a mature chimpanzee and could only save one of them, the chimp should be saved. The same problem affects consumer votes about all sorts of things, from vivisection, to greenhouse gas emissions, to recycling.
Even if most people are persuaded about the unnecessary badness of some state of the world, that is often insufficient to determine what they should do about it as individuals. Utilitarianism is supposed to be concerned with good achievements, not good intentions. The fact is that becoming a vegetarian may make you feel better, but it won't save any animals directly. It is not the utilitarian thing to do.
Of course, individuals can still try to "do their part," and it is true that if lots of people act in the appropriate way the right aggregate consequences may be realised just as if lots of voters choose for Scottish independence it will come true. So it is quite rational for Singer to try to persuade lots of people to boycott meat, even if his utilitarian argument to the reader is flawed or disingenuous.
But it would be irrational for the reader - or even Singer himself - to be motivated to stop eating meat by the belief that that choice would make any difference to the quantity of animal suffering in the world. One would have to reach for some other moral justification that does not rely on such a tight link between means and ends - such as an account of duties in which one does the right thing because it is the right thing to do, not because it will make the world better.
Or virtue ethics, in which one tries to be a good person rather than to optimise the state of the world. A properly utilitarian argument should recommend effective rather than merely well-intentioned actions. And I should say that Singer himself mentions various actions beyond consumer voting, including political mobilisation for reform of animal welfare laws and proselytising for the vegetarian lifestyle.
These are ways for individuals to actually affect the outcomes of collective action problems, primarily because they allow those who care most about an issue to have more influence over it.
What is strange is that Singer declares that "these methods are not enough" and instead puts so much emphasis on the ineffective method of consumer voting. Indeed, this disinterest in political and institutional action is a general feature of Singer's rather individualistic approach to applied ethics, also apparent in his analysis of charitable giving.
The utilitarian calculus developed by Bentham - his famous "Greatest Happiness Principle" - counts both the pain and the pleasure of each individual and then ranks different possible states of the world in terms of the sum total of pleasure minus pain they contain. Singer maintains the hedonic focus of Bentham but makes a major - and, I think, misguided - change by asserting that the only thing we should count is suffering. Although he identifies the moral status of animals with their capacity for suffering and enjoyment, the actual principle he repeatedly advances only concerns the minimisation of suffering:.
The trouble with this is that if one only looks at pain, one gets a very distorted view of quality of life and a poor guide to action, rather as one would expect of a cost-benefit mode of analysis that disdains the consideration of benefits.
Imagine you have to choose between saving person A or person B it's a thought experiment - probably something to do with trolleys. You are in a position to know that person A will have 10 units of suffering in his life, equivalent perhaps to chronic arthritis for the last few years of his life. But he will also go on to have a million units of pleasure, one thousand times more than any individual has ever enjoyed before.
Person B on the other hand will only experience 5 units of suffering and no pleasure whatsoever. According to the principle of minimising suffering, person B will have the better life and you should save him. That doesn't seem a very compelling version of utilitarianism to me.
Let us play the reductio ad absurdum game one more time. Even if we were to succeed in eliminating the livestock industry as Singer hopes, this should be only the start if we take our obligation to minimise suffering seriously. For the world would still be drenched in the suffering of wild animals - their hunger, fear, cold, injuries, parasites and so on.
By Singer's logic we should presumably try to eliminate that, too. Singer claims that this would constitute playing God, and is beyond humanity's capacities. But I think it is something we would actually be rather good at. After all, we have already saved numerous species from suffering - such as the Dodo. In contrast, a Benthamite utilitarian argument would be concerned less with the elimination of suffering than with the maximization of net pleasure in the world. It may well be that this is what Singer actually has in mind.
But it isn't the argument he gives in his multiply revised book - and remember that I'm trying here to assess Singer's official argument, as opposed to his rhetorical effectiveness in advancing the animal liberation cause.
If Singer had addressed the positive side of hedonism, it might have made his task more difficult. For the Benthamite account sees sentient beings as capable of contributing to the world's sum of pleasure as well as of pain, and this might open up alternatives in the reader's mind to Singer's proposal of bringing an end to factory farming practices through vegetarianism.
If no one ate meat anymore, livestock animals would be eliminated and so would all that potential pleasure. From a Benthamite perspective, the legislator's concern should be to increase the pleasure and decrease the unnecessary discomfort of livestock animals - which, unlike that of wild animals, is under our control - not to eliminate their existence.
For example, if drugs or genetic manipulations could be developed that kept chickens feeling happy while crowded on top of each other, hedonic utility would be maximised. In that case, one might even reverse Singer's argument for a consumer boycott of meat and say that we would actually be doing our moral duty by continuing to eat animals.
The phenomenological experience of pain is an evolved feature of most vertebrate species, and perhaps at least some others, presumably because it informs individuals of physical injury in time for them to do something about it and this makes survival more likely. It was not a religious household, but Singer repudiated even the barest minimum of religious sentiment in his early teens and refused to be bar mitzvahed.
But what is legitimate for Singer is just plain murder for other people. The doctor who delivered me, and who did the damage, told my parents I probably would not survive. He told them it would be better not to hope - I would be better off dead. And if I did survive, they would have no chance of happiness. If you talk to other disabled people, you'll soon find that what the doctor told my parents was not exactly a strange scenario. My parents were in a minority and they did not listen to him.
But the normal role for parents is that they go along with whatever the doctor says. This is the one thing that Singer never addresses. It is never presented to parents as a choice - kill the kid or don't kill the kid.
Parents would never make that decision. The doctors frame it as an act of compassion. But Singer would have had Drake murdered. Yet it is surely flying in the face of reality to deny that, on average, this is so," he says in a key passage in Practical Ethics. Infanticide, Singer argues, is nothing new. In Ancient Greece, disabled infants were routinely killed by being exposed on hillsides, a practice approved by both Plato and Aristotle.
For Singer, society is already practising a form of selective infanticide by promoting pre-natal screenings. The primary aim of amniocentesis is to detect abnormal foetuses, those with Down's Syndrome, and kill them. Few are morally outraged.
Maybe if their parents had the choice they would not be here. But they could also be standing outside pre-natal testing centres saying the same thing. Ninety per cent of women over 35 have pre-natal testing, and of those who are told their foetuses have Down's Syndrome or spina bifida, 95 per cent will terminate the pregnancy. There is a widely shared view that it's better not to have a child with those conditions," he says. Is Singer just stating out loud what we all think but are too afraid to speak?
There is one more moral sum that the philosopher asks us to make. Singer was not urging Americans to be more compassionate or charitable to the starving poor. Emotion plays no part in his calculus. People say to me, 'This is naive, you demanding such an absurd level of altruism.
Do you really expect anyone to do this? We ought to see it as a deficiency, not to see that what you are spending on luxuries is a matter of life and death for someone else. And not only to see that but to do something about it. But even raising the suggestion that the American Dream might not be such a great moral idea was a delightful piece of heresy. And I am sure that people closer to the bottom in Britain are happier than their American counterparts, because at least they are getting health cover and other benefits.
Singer is not some nutty professor, but he can be gratuitously offensive. In the first edition of Practical Ethics, he frequently used the term "defective infant". As his Christian critic, Jacqueline Laing, noted, "defective" is a term normally used to describe commodities, products, as in "the control panel on the cooker was defective".
To describe any human being in such a manner was at best insensitive and at worst exposed a highly prejudicial attitude to the status of disabled individuals. Singer revised his language in later editions, but "disability" is never morally neutral. The able-bodied world, including most members of the medical professions, recoils from disability and views it from a wholly negative perspective.
In Britain, in the 80s and 90s, cardiac surgeons routinely discriminated against Down's Syndrome children, denying them life-saving heart operations - the Down's Syndrome Association believes they still do.
Deafness is often viewed, wholly falsely, as some kind of mental impairment. Given this pervasive social prejudice, how able are the abled-bodied to judge the quality of life of a disabled infant? Not Dead Yet's arguments against Singer have been echoed by his fellow Princeton academic Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence, who is critical of Singer for promoting an ideology that justifies the elimination of those society considers undesirable.
And that ideology always sounds good to those who stand to benefit. The disabled - who some able-bodied people find it revolting to be near - are very ripe for an ideology that would justify getting rid of them. For George, Singer's rejection of the notion of rights and the moral inviolability of individual humans leads not towards intellectual clarification but towards a moral morass.
The decision to kill your own child by refusing medical treatment, is the gravest moral decision anyone could ever make. But making the right to life of an individual homo sapiens who is not a person contingent on the preferences of other homo sapiens who are persons doesn't necessarily make the moral decision any easier. Singer talks about the parents and their doctors deciding if the child should die. But what happens when the parents do not agree? How do you decide then?
What is the framework and boundaries for such a decision-making process? What if the doctors do not agree with the parents? How can anyone predict the exact prospects of a child's life on the empirical data available in the first week of their life?
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