Mylan Engel Jr.: Do Animals Have Rights 5/7

Professor Mylan Engel Jr., PhD, Philosopher, Northern Illinois University, USA

Do Animals Have Rights, and Does It Matter if They Don't? (Part 5 of 7)

7 June 2006, University of Heidelberg

The question "Do animals have rights?" is an important one because, if they do have rights (including a right to life), then killing them for food, fur coats, or medical experiments violates their rights, just as killing humans for any of these reasons would violate those humans' rights. Unfortunately, framing the animal ethics debate exclusively in terms of animal rights can be misleading, because it can lead people to assume that the entire issue of the ethical treatment of animals turns on the question of whether or not they have rights. A corollary of this assumption runs as follows: If animals have rights (as Tom Regan and Joel Feinberg argue), then much of our current treatment of animals is profoundly wrong; but if they don't have rights (as Carl Cohen and Alan White argue), then most of our current treatment of animals raises no significant moral issues at all. To explain why this assumption and its corollary are mistaken, I lay out the case for animal rights and then consider what follows vis-á-vis the ethical treatment of animals if the case for animal rights collapses. In the course of doing so, I defend the following two theses: (1) That the case for animal rights is as compelling as the case for human rights, and (2) that even if the case for animal rights collapses, there are still compelling moral reasons - reasons which you yourself accept - for thinking that most of our current treatment of farmed animals and laboratory animals is profoundly morally wrong.

http://www.vorlesungen-tierrechte.de
http://www.rainerebert.de

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