The Question is not, "Can they do moral philosophy?"

So apparently some woman in New York is trying to get punitive damages for pain suffered by her dog because of deficient care by the store that sold it to her. Basically the case rests upon convincing the Law to recognize the dog as a Being rather than as Property, although her lawyer has been throwing around the word "soul" in a way that does no one any good. Out of curiosity I checked out the Huffington Post comment thread, and while most of the commenters said things like, "well I'm sympathetic, but c'mon, you can't even prove that humans have souls," one person said something like, "well perhaps animals have souls, but they don't have rights. They have no ability to understand complex moral issues." He then went on to insult animal rights advocates, blah blah blah. Can I just say, this is entirely the wrong way to look at things? Yes, John Rawls' framework makes a lot of use of the fact that the citizens of his desired just society are rational, moral, autonomous beings, which is how he manages to exclude non-human animals. As a matter of political theory the fact that animals cannot communicate is deeply relevant, and probably does mean that we shouldn't even try to give animals political participation rights.

But the entire point of a so-called human right is that you have it not by virtue of any particular characteristic or, you know, virtue, like the ability to understand complex moral concepts, but because you are a human being and you exist. My right not to be murdered does not stem from my ability to participate in a long-term cooperative scheme among rational moral beings treated as free and equal citizens. Rather it stems from the fact that being murdered is pretty much the ultimate evil that can befall me (in both the etymological and modern sense of the word!), and so if we care about my welfare at all then we'll care pretty strongly that I not get murdered. We can see that this is what's going on because we don't withdraw basic rights against violence from people who demonstrate, say, an utter lack of ability to understand complex moral issues. There are many members of the species Homo sapiens who cannot understand such concepts; I think the commenter to whose "arguments" I am responding may be one of them. As Peter Singer has been known to point out, some human beings have neurological impairments that prevent such understanding. We don't say that these people are not beings, do not have rights. They retain a full complement of human rights, because they are still humans.

So what is it, exactly, about humans that makes us so damn special? It clearly is not our ability to do moral philosophy, although that's a useful skill. Perhaps there's some sort of religious philosophy that describes violence against human beings as a "sin," just because, and thereby dodges the question of why it's a bad thing. But I think in general our sense that violence against humans is wrong derives from our understanding that such violence inflicts tremendous suffering on the victim (among others), and that it is therefore almost always a bad thing. And we do tend to express the wicked nature of violence in rights terminology: I do have a right against your shooting me through the heart. I have this right simply because I am a human being who would suffer rather tremendously (infinitely, one might say) if you did so. It comes with a corresponding obligation on you not to shoot me through the heart, again just because it would cause lots of suffering. If you concede that non-human animals can suffer, can feel pain, can feel pleasure, can just plain feel, then what's left of the case against basic animal rights?

Legislating Morality

I saw this argument beginning on a Facebook status of mine, and thought I'd expand my thoughts about it in a little more depth.

I posted a link about a referendum in Switzerland this weekend that would create a national system of explicitly animal-rights prosecutors in the nation. I don't think, from reading the article, that it would change the laws in any way, but it would create positions whose sole responsibility was enforcing those laws. Apparently very few animal-abuse cases make it to court because nobody really cares about prosecuting them, except one guy in Zurich who is the star of the piece. Then Will Bertelsen, a friend of mine, commented on my posted link saying "Legislating morality is always a good idea. Just ask the anti-abortion crowd." Christian Drappi, one of my most frequent online debate sparring partners, said that Will had a good point. But there's a problem with that: if one shouldn't legislate morality, what should one legislate?