Animal Rights and Human Wrongs Essay

Are on that point limits on how chantans bes burn legitimatisely trade non- homo animals? Or lot we treat them just any way we disport? If there ar limits, what be they? Are they sufficiently strong, as som e peop le supp ose, to lead us to be veg etarians and to se riously curtail, if non eliminate, our engagement of non-human animals in scientific experiments designed to bene conform to us? To fully ap preciate this inquire let me contrast it with devil different matchlesss Are there limits on how we give notice legitimately treat rocks? And be there limits on how we chamberpot legitima tely treat other(a) human beings? The an swer to th e first ques tion is pre suma bly no Well, thats not q uite right. in that respect argon som e limits on what w e can le gitimate ly do with or to rocks. If Paula has a coddle rock, then Susan cant justifiably take it away or smash it with a sledge hammer.After all in all it is Paulas rock. Or if there is a rock of unusua l beauty or superfluous human interest say the Old Man of Hoy or Mt. Rushmore it would be inappropriate , and pro bably im mora l, for me to te ar it down , to impair it, or to chisel o ut a sectio n to habit in my ca tapult. These limits though, arise not from any direct bring up for the rocks kinda, they are imposed because of the interests a nd rights of other h uman s. Susan cant take Paulas rock for the alike motive she cant take Paulas eraser it is Paulas and Paula has a right to those things which are hers. And no virtuoso ca n destro y or defa ce items of specia l natural b eauty because by doing so maven is indirectly harming the interests of other valet in them. So there are limits on what we can legitimately do to inanim ate objects, exclusively if whatever limits there are arise from some human concern.1 Not so for our give-and-take of other humans. We suppose that it is inappropriate to treat a human being just any way we wish.I cannot steal another human t hat would be kidnapping. Nor can I sm ash so meon e with a sledgehammer that would be, depending on the outcome, assault, attempted m urder, or murder. And the reason I cannot do these things has nothing to do with what third parties d o or don t want. It has to do with the interest and desires of that item individual. It is misuse for Susan to hit Paula , not beca use oth er peo ple akin Paula or because other people would be offended, but because Paula is a person. Period. Thus, there is a primeval contrast between those objects which we can treat as we please (excep t when limited by the interests of other humans) and those which we canno t. Ordinary rocks fall into the first multitude humans, into the later. Now, what some nonhuman animals? Do they fall into the first or the se cond c amp? Or som ewhe re in between? There are reasons to believe that many animals and certainly the high-order anima ls are more like humans than they are like rocks.Thus, we name reason to b elieve there are constraints on how we can legitimately treat them, regardless of our particular wishes and desires. Or so I shall deliberate. For the moment I will solely note that these are beliefs which most of us already have. That is, most of us presume that it is illegitimate to treat animals just anyway we wish. For exam ple, mo st of us be lieve it is malign to wanto nly kill or torture a higher o rder m amm al. Suppose we discover that some share of our commun ity, say Jones, has a habit of picking up roll up furrow s or cats a nd dec apitating them w ith his hom e-ma de guillo tine 2 or we learn he has invented a machine which draws and quarters them. He uses these machines because he revels in th e anim als harm, b ecaus e he relis hes in the sight of blood or maybe he is a scientist who w ants to stu dy their re action to stress. In this issue we rightly surmise that Jones is immoral. We wouldnt want him to be our pre sident, our friend, our next gate neighbor, or our son-in-law.In short, we all seem to agree that they a re limits on how we can properly treat nonhuman animals, and that these limits arise becau se of the n ature of th e anim als, not m erely because of the de sires of oth er hum ans to see an imals trea ted we ll. That is, such acts are wrong not just now because other humans are bothered by them. We would prize them equa lly wrong if they were secretly done so that no one else in the companionship knew about them. We think they are wrong because of what it does to the animal. On the other hand, we are likewise part of a culture which rather cavalier ly uses a nimals for food, for clothes, for reoceanrch in the development of new drugs, and to determine the safety of phratry products. And many of these u ses req uire inflicting a great d eal of pa in on animals.Record of such uses is readily available in variant academic journals, and chronicled by num erous writers on the topic. 3 plainly for the reviewer who might be unfamiliar with them, let me briefly describe 2 ship canal in which we use animals ways which inflict substantial torture on them. Anima ls who are raise for food are obviously raised with the express purpose of making a profit for the husbandman. Nothing surprising. that the implications of this are direct and obvious and deleterious to the an imals. There are two ways for a farmer to increase her profit. One is to get higher prices for her goods, the other is to spend less producing those goods. Since there is a limit on how a great deal people will pay for meat, there is substantial financia l pressu re to dec rease th e expe nse of p roducin g the m eat.This under standa bly leads to over-crowding after all the more animals a farmer can get into a smaller space, the less it costs to break the meat. There are similar pressures to restrict the animals movement. The less the animals move, the less they eat, thereof decreasing the farmers expense. For instance, farmers w ho raise chickens are inclined to plant them in small battery cages. They are commonly kept 8 to ten to a space smaller than a newspaper page. unable(p) to walk around or so far stretch their wings much less build a nest the birds be come pitiful a nd attac k one a nother .4 The average person seems equally unfamiliar with the extensive use of animals in laboratory experim ents.Ma ny of thes e are of o nly mo derate significan ce 5 most of the them involve extensive inconvenience on animals. For instance, N.J. Carlson gave hig h voltag e electric shocks to sixteen d ogs an d found that the h igh-sho ck grou p acqu ired an xiety faster. Or researchers in Texas constructed a pneumatically driven piston to overreach an anvil into the skulls of thirteen monkeys. When it didnt immediately produce concussions, the researchers increased the capability of the piston until it produced cardiac damage, hemorrhages and brain dama ge. 6 Or researchers at Harvard placed baby mice and ba b y rats into cages with starving expectant male rats. The adults ate them. The researchers conclusion hunger is an all-important(prenominal) drive in animals.(That, of course, is some thing we are sho cked to learn we would have never kno wn this situation otherwise). T HE O PTIONS Now, how d o we sq uare o ur abso luting revu lsion at ou r hypoth etical Jones with his animal guillotine, and our rather blithe acceptance of the intervention of animals on the farm and in the scientific and co mme rcial labo ratories? It is not imm ediately recognize tha t we can . What is clear, it seems, it that we have three options, three alternative beliefs about our treatment of anim als. Thes e are 1) If we are repulsed by Jones treatment of stray animals, we are simply being inappr opriately or unduly squeamish or sympathetic. We should have no aversion to killing, torturin g, or usin g anim als in any way w e pleas e, unles s, of course, that anima l is some one els es prop erty, that is, he r pet.2) There are reasons why we should treat non-human animals better than we treat rocks nonetheless, there are also reasons why we can use non-huma n anim als in ways we could never legitimately use humans. 3) We should be treating non-human animals more like we currently treat humans. Many of our accepted ways of using animals are, in fact, virtuously objectionable. The first position, it seems, is altogether untenable. No sensible person , I think, is uncoerced to adop t a position which s ays that to rturing a nimals for fun is completely acceptable no one is willing to say that Jones is a fit mem ber of so ciety. This b elief, it seem s, is virtually unshakable.Most of you understood dead well what I meant when I describe d Jone ss behavior as torture. But this claim would be nonsense if we impression there were no moral limits on how we could treat animals.7 So we are left with the la tter option s. And, of course, which one we choose, will have a dramatic impact o n the lives of humans and of other animals. One incumbent clarification to say that animals should be treated more like humans is not to say that they should be treated on the dot like humans. For instance, we privation not consider giving animals the right to vote, the right to free ghostlike expression, or the right of free speech. As far as I can ascertain, most an imals do nt have the obligatory capabilities to exercise these rights. However, the uniform is true of very young children and of se verely slow down adults.That is why they dont have these rights either the y want the requisite capacities. Nonetheless, the mere fact that some adult humans are not given the right to vote does n ot mea n it is legitimate to have them for lunch or to test bleach in their eyes. So why assume it is so for animals? W HY ANIMALS SHOULDNT SUFFER use up LESS PAIN Until now I have been trying to happen upon our own deeply held convictions about restriction s on the prope r treatme nt of anim als. Now it is high measure to try to offer a supportive defense of our ordinary understa nding a defense which will have regular(a) more radical implications that we might have supposed. That is, I want to argue for option three above I want to a rgue tha t there are rather strin gent lim its on wh at it is morally permis sible to do to anima ls. More s pecifically ,I wish to argue that we should all b ecom e vege tarians a nd that w e shou ld dram atically curtail, if not eliminate, our use of laboratory animals. Though there are numerous arguments which can be offered in this rega rd, I want to defend one particular claim that we should not inflict need less ail on anim als. Before I go on I should sack it clear what I mean by needless bruise. The point can be made most clear by use of an analogy. logical argument the following cases 1) I love child my daughters arm with a needle for no apparent reason (though we neednt assume I derive any sadistic pleasure from it). 2) I am a physician and I inoculate her against typhoid. What differentiates these cases? In both I prick her arm in both (let us presume) I inflict similar amounts of pain. Yet we consider the latter not only ju stifiable, bu t perhaps obligato ry the former we consider sadistic. Why? Because it inflicts unne cessar y pain. M y daug hter doe s not in any way good from it.Thus, unnecessary pain is that which is inflicted on a sentient ( tonicity) brute when it is not for the good of that particular creature. The latter is necessary pain it is pain which the creature suffers for her own good. There are two main premises in my argument. The first is the factual claim that anima ls do, in fact, detect pa in. The chip is the claim that the potential of animal suffering severe ly limits what we can justifiably do to them, it constrains the way we can legitima tely use them. That an imals fee l pain That anima ls do feel p ain see ms rela tively unc ontrove rsial. It is a belief we all share. As I noted earlier we couldnt even make sense of torturing an animal if we assumed it was incapa ble of feeling pain. Nor could we understand being repulsed at Joness use of stray anima ls unless we popular opinion the animals suffered at Joness hands. If Jones collected abandoned tin cans and cut them to pieces w ith his guillo tine, we m ight think J ones te rribly odd, bu t not imm oral. But more can be said.We have more than adequate behavioural evidence that anima ls feel pain and that they can suffer. Most of us have seen a dog which has been struck by a car, though not killed instantaneously. The dog convulses, bleed, and yelps. Less drastically, most of us have, at some time or another, stepped on a cats tail or a dogs paw and ha ve witne ssed the anima ls reaction . The reaction, unsurprisingly, is like our own reaction in similar cases. If soul steps on my hand, I w ill likely name and attempt to move my hand. But we ne ednt res t the case on beh avioral e videnc e thoug h it does seem to m e to be more than sufficient. We should also note that we share important anatomical structures with higher o rder an imals. A human beings central nervous center is remarkably similar to that of a chimpanzee, dog, pig, and even a rat.That is not to say the brains are exactly alike they arent. The rational cortex in human beings is more highly de velope d than in most mamm als (though not noticeably so wh en analyze d with a dolphin or a Great Ap e) but the cortex is the location of our higher brain fun ctions, for e xamp le, the sea t of thoug ht, speech, etc. However, the areas of the brain which neurophysiologist identity as the pain centers are virtua lly identica l betwee n hum an and non-h uman anima ls. Accord ing to evolutionary biology this is exactly w hat we should expec t. The pa in centers worke d well in enhancing the survival of lower species, so they were altered only slightly in succeeding evolutionary stages. H igher br ain fu nc tions, how ever, are condu chive to survival, and thus, have led to more dramatic advances in cerebral development. precondition all this, it seems undeniable that many animals do feel pain. That they feel pain is morally relevant So what? someone might ask. Even if animals do feel p ain, why should that limit or at to the lowest degree se riously restrict our treatment of them? Why cant we heretofore use them for our purposes, whatever those purposes happen to be? Lets identification number the question around for a moment and ask why we think we should be able to use them for our purposes, given that they are capable of suffering? After all, we are staunc hly opposed to inflicting unnecessary pain on human beings. If animals can also feel pain, why shouldnt we have the same reluctance to inflicting needless pain on them? A crucial principle of ethics is that we should treat like cases alike. Th at is, we sh ould treat two cases the same unless there is some general and re levant reason which justifies the distinction in treatment. Thus, two students who perform equally well in the same class should get the same grade two who perform rather differently should receive different grades. By the same token, if two creatures feel pain and it is improper to inflict needless pain on one of them , it would likewise be improper to inflict needless pain on the othe r. But the argumen t has pro gresse d too qu ickly.This a rgum ent wo rks only if the reason it is wrong to inflict need less pain on the one creature is that it feels pain. If there is some other reason so me rea son wh ich could differentia te hum an from non-h uman anim als then we would not be able to infer that it is illegitim ate to inflict needless pain on animals. Hence, if someone wishes to show that it is not wrong to inflict needless pain on animals, then she must identify some relevant struggle between human and non-huma n animals, some differenc e which justifies this d ifference in tr eatm ent. And, of course , this is just wh at mos t defend ers of ou r presen t treatme nt of anim als are inclined to do. Tho ugh pe ople on ce rega rded a nimals as non-sentient creatures as mere automata that is no longer so.