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On the Rights of Non-Persons
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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Do non-persons have moral rights? I will suppose this question can best be answered by inquiring whether some animals and/or environmental objects have moral rights, for if any non-persons are possessors of rights, animals and/or environmental objects are the most plausible candidates. As so interpreted, this question has received an extraordinary amount of recent attention from philosophers. Arguments have been offered and defended; rebuttals have appeared in print. Yet, so far as I am aware, no one has presented a clear and accurate statement of what turns on the issue of whether non-persons have moral rights. In the absence of such a statement, philosophers are likely to be at sea in determining on which side of the controversy their initial sympathies lie. In this paper it is my central concern to help clarify what turns on the issue of whether non-persons are possessors of moral rights, rather than to argue decisively for one position or the other.
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References
1 Joel, Feinberg: “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations,” in William T., Blackstone ed.: Philosophy and Environmental Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1974), p. 43.Google Scholar
2 H.J., McCloskey: “Rights,” Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1965), p. 121.Google Scholar
3 Some philosophers, Tooley among them, distinguish between persons and human beings in that the former, but not the latter, necessarily possess one or more rights. On this interpretation, the question whether animals and/or environ– mental objects possess rights is equivalent to the question whether they are persons. In this paper, I do not distinguish between human beings and persons.
4 Tooley, Michael: “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs,” 2 (1971-2), p. 37.Google Scholar
5 Oftentimes such arguments conclude with a conditional: If there are any moral rights possessed by all human beings, then at least some animals possess such rights also. The relevance of this conclusion for the thesis that some non-persons possess rights depends upon whether the antecedent of the conditional is true.
6 See Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. R. Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886).
7 See, e.g., the collection of historical treatments of the rights of non-persons in Tom, Regan and Peter, Singer eds.: Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Prentice-Hall, 1976).Google Scholar Note especially Rickaby, Joseph: “Of the So-called Rights of Animals,” p. 179, and Ritchie, D. G.: “Why Animals Do Not Have Rights,” p. 181.
Of course, if someone claimed to simply intuit that animals have rights, my second strategy would not be viable. My approach makes the assumption that statements about rights should be treated as conclusions, and not as premisses of arguments.
8 John, Rodman: “The Liberation of Nature?”, Inquiry, 20 (1978), p. 83, 88.Google Scholar
9 See William, Aiken: “The Right to be Saved from Starvation,” in William, Aiken and Hugh, La Follette eds.: World Hunger and Moral Obligation (Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 85.Google Scholar
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16 ld. at 95.
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18 ld. at 28.
19 ld. at 7.
20 ld. at 92.
21 ld. at 38.
22 ld. at 45, note 12.
23 ld. at 70.
24 ld. at 70-72.
25 Singer, Peter: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Random House, 1975)Google Scholar. See especially pp. 17-24.
26 Bentham seems to have held such a position. See The Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chap. XVII, Sec. IV, Note 1.
27 Until we are clear about how rights function in their paradigm application (i.e., to persons), we can hardly be expected to appreciate what is at stake in controversies about attributing rights to non-persons. If moral rights function as “trumps” to override utilitarian considerations, the consequences of attributing rights to non-persons will be drastic indeed. See Dworkin, Ronald: Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar and the sketchy remarks about “Utilitarianism for animals, Kantianism for people” in Nozick, Robert: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).Google Scholar