Animal Rights

In 1789, jeremy bentham famously asked, in relation to animals: “The question is not, can they reason, nor, can they talk, but, can they suffer?” Ovid proclaimed in the Metamorphoses, “Oh, what a wicked thing it is … to fatten on the body of another, for one live creature to continue living, through one live creature's death.” John Salt, a philosopher of the early 20th century, first used the term animal rights and propounded many of its core contemporary ideological arguments.

It was not until the 1970s that animal rights crystallized as a political movement based around an ideological belief that animals have moral rights. Animal rights proponents differ from animal welfare advocates, such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which address animal suffering and cruelty, but does not ascribe moral rights to animals.

Animal rights advocates essentially reject the idea that animals are capital goods or property [Page 40]that exist simply for the benefit of humans. Rather, animal rights advocates argue that no ethical basis exists for elevating membership of one particular species over another. Animal rights proponents argue that issues surrounding animal cruelty, animal experimentation, and animal rights to life deserve moral consideration. This must not to be confused with the assumption that animal rights advocates argue that animals are all equal, such as a biocentrist would; rather, that the moral rights of animals must be factored into decision making.

For proponents of animal rights, the capacity of animals to suffer is an essential factor in determining whether animals have interests. Animal rights advocate Peter Singer notes, “Pain is bad…humans are not the only creatures to feel pain or suffering, therefore, when humans take life, the rights of the creature being killed to decide its own fate needs consideration.” Some philosophers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, argue that compassion for animals is in fact related to goodness in human beings, and thus cruelty toward animals indicates a correlative lack of goodness and compassion in humans.

Similarly, the notion of sentience is used as a further basis by some animals rights thinkers to argue for animal liberation or moral consideration in relation to human use of that species. In this case, only species that are considered to possess sentience also possess rights and interests. The notion of sentience is a major factor in ethical debates over whale or seal hunting. Embracing humanity's responsibilities toward animals is sometimes called specieism.

Animal rights arguments are used to justify opposition to animal vivisection, cruelty, sport hunting, medical experimentation, and the use of animal products in cosmetics and clothing, resulting in the proliferation of animal-rights organizations.