READING GUIDE

Elizabeth Anderson, “Animal Rights and the Values of Non-human Life”

Cyborgs, Animals, Fetuses
Hailey Huget
Summer 2015

Anderson’s aims in this paper:

• Show how the animal rights, animal welfare, and environmental ethics
perspectives are all partially on to something, despite the fact that the three
perspectives often conflict with one another
• Raise some criticisms of the argument from marginal cases (AMC), which both
animal rights and animal welfare advocates often employ
• Criticize contractarians and Kantians who deny non-human animals moral status
altogether
• Articulate a new framework for understanding the various rights non-human
animals have and the responsibilities humans have toward them

The three perspectives:

• Animal welfare perspective (utilitarian): “the fundamental criterion for moral
considerability is sentience, or the capacity to suffer” (277).
o Includes vertebrates, and maybe much further.
o Generates “a claim on moral agents to protect and promote the interests
of those who have it” (277). But, “In accord with utilitarian logic, animals
may be sacrificed to advance total welfare. Animals are fungible, to the
extent that they will experience equivalent welfare levels” (278).
• Animal rights perspective (deontological): “the fundamental criterion for moral
considerability (at least strong enough to ground rights claims) is subjecthood.
To be a subject requires not simply sentience, but the capacity to have
propositional attitudes, emotions, will, and an orientation to oneself and one’s
future” (278).
o Draws line more stringently at pigs, great apes – highly intelligent
mammals.
o “Generates rights not only against the infliction of pain but to the
conditions for integrity of consciousness and activity, including freedom
from boredom, freedom to exercise normal capacities, freedom of
movement, and the right to life” (278)
o “animals with equivalent morally relevant capacities have equal rights,
regardless of species membership” (278). These rights “cannot be
overridden by the aggregate interests of humans or any other beings”
(278)
• Environmental ethics perspective: “the criterion of moral considerability is being
alive, or more generally, a system of life, especially a ‘natural’ one as opposed to
part of the humanmade environment” (278).
 o Morally considerable entities “generate claims to preservation and
health” (278).
o “Environmentalist’s object of concern is typically an aggregate or system:
a species, an ecosystem, the biosphere” (278).
o “Organisms, from this perspective, are fungible, valued for their role in
perpetuating the larger unit, but individually dispensible” (278).

A few ways in which these three views lead to conflicting prescriptions:

• Scientific research on animals: animal welfare perpective can accommodate
scientific research on animals, provided that gains for humans outweigh losses to
animals; Animal rights advocates object to such research, if it involves great apes
or other highly intelligent mammals.
• Ecological concerns: On an environmentalist perspective, feral pigs that are not
native to Hawaii threaten biodiversity there, so might need to come under
population control measures (279). But Animal welfare and animal rights will
disagree with environmentalists on this.

Anderson suggests an alternative approach to understanding claims of all three

perspectives – her own “rational attitude theory of value” (279).
• “I find myself moved by some of the considerations advanced by all three
perspectives. This puts me in a quandary. How can I do justice to the values
upheld by all three, given their conflicts? I shall argue that, while each
perspective has identified a genuine ground of value, none has successfully
identified a valid principle of action that does justice to all the values at stake.
The plurality of values must be acknowledged” (279).
o In other words, Anderson thinks we rationally respond to the value of
animals in three ways that correspond to the three main positions
outlined above.
§ Animal welfare: attitude of sympathy with animal suffering.
“Sympathy takes as its proper object the suffering or disadvantage
of another. All sentient beings are capable of suffering. So it is
always rational to sympathize with a sentient being who is
suffering. Sympathy therefore knows no inherent species
boundary” (291).
§ Animal rights: attitude of respect for animals, “our sense that
their independent perspectives make claims on us that we ought
to heed” (293).
§ Environmentalist: “originates in our wonder at and awe of nature,
conceived as an interconnected system of organisms, as well as in
our admiration for individual animals” (293).
• Once we acknowledge plurality of values, conclusions become more difficult to
draw.
o Perhaps great apes have rights to not be hunted or killed; but even these
rights, if we are to enforce them, need to be considerate of human
populations that survive on this type of animal for food (296).
o Perhaps animal testing isn’t justified for cosmetic/trivial purposes, but
for serious medical purposes it would be.
 o No general right to life for animals – what about Hawaiian feral pigs,
pets, vermin?

Anderson’s alternative approach involves, in part, rejecting standard arguments in

favor of animal rights and animal welfare, like the argument from marginal cases
(AMC).
• Problem 1 with AMC: ignores species membership, which Anderson thinks is
morally relevant
o She says that there is some evidence that chimps, parrots can be taught a
language. She uses this fact to perform a reductio ad absurdum argument
on the AMC: “If AMC is right in deriving moral rights from individual
capacities, then chimps and parrots have a moral right to be taught a
language” (281). But these species “do not need to learn a language and
are not harmed if they are not taught one” (281).
• Problem 2: “the animal dignity of humans is essentially tied to their human
species membership, conceived hierarchically in relation to nonhuman animals
and independently of the capacities of the individual whose dignity is at stake.
There is no way to place animals on an equal footing in this system of meaning”
(282).
o Idea is that humans have an “animal dignity” (282); involves being
bathed, clothed, washed properly, even if particular human is demented,
has Alzheimer’s, etc
o If Alzheimer’s patient were to be found naked, eating from a bowl like a
dog, people would decry that “she is being treated like an animal” (282).
o Doesn’t mean that animals don’t have a right to dignity. Just that our
dignity is conceived of as having a higher status than theirs.
o The interests protected by an animal’s right to dignity “are unintelligible
apart from a system of meanings in which humans qua human have a
status – a form of dignity—higher than animals, even with respect to
features they share with animals. This moral hierarchy implicit in this
system is not designed to deny nonhuman animals moral standing. For
the meanings in question endow animals with their own species-specific
dignity. An animal’s interest in dignity exists only in relation to human
beings” (283).

Anderson argues against contractualist/Kantian challenges to animal standing.

Suggests that AMC is not promising way of arguing against these challenges (ref.
to previous arguments).
• What is contractualism/contractarianism? The Kant-inspired idea that the only
entities who should receive moral rights and privileges are those who can actively
contribute to the moral community. So animals, infants, fetuses, perhaps even
young children would not have rights on strict contractarian conceptions of
morality.
• Anderson argues that animals are, in fact, capable of entering into reciprocal
relations with humans (286). Gives examples of dog ownership and horseback
riding.
 o With more capabilities, animals acquire more rights – only house-trained
dog gets ‘freedom of the house.’
o Anderson concludes that “the connection between having rights and the
capacity to engage in a mutual accommodation of interests, to adapt one’s
behavior in response to these claims, corrections, and commands of
others.” Furthermore, this “holds the key to understanding why
reciprocity is so important to rights” instead of “reason”/”autonomous
reflection on the validity of claims” (287).
o She argues against idea that we can or should respect the rights of
creatures “incapable of reciprocity” (288). Results in intolerable conditions
for moral agents.
§ In strong animal rights sense, rats and mice are subjects – so they
would have a right to life. “It follows we violate their rights by
exterminating them or expelling them from our homes” (288).
For Anderson, this ignores the implications of granting rights to
vermin --- creatures who behave in ways hostile to human
interests

So what kind of rights, if any, do animals have for Anderson?

• She says “individual animals living in the wild do not have a moral right to our
direct protection and provision, even if they need it to survive. Nor do individual
animals in the wild have a right to our assistance to protect them against animal
predation” (283).
• Why is this? “An essential commitment of any society is the collective provision
of goods to its members.” So any human and any animal that is part of human
society (dogs, companion animals, horses, farm animals, research animals) gets
rights to positive provision.
• Conditions for being a bearer of rights:
§ Peace must be possible between animal and those supposed to be
bound by rights claims (protection from wanton cruelty). Places
parasites and pests on the other side of non-rights bearers.
§ One must actually be incorporated into human society. Places wild
animals on the non-status bearing side of the rights divide.
§ Life with humans is necessary to the animal. Includes domesticated,
zoo, lab animals. (Huge question re: factory farms here).
§ Also some wild animals have claims against being incorporated
into human society: if such incorporation would be bad for it.