The Rights Argument for Regulation

After recently having a lively debate with someone about the ethics of regulating the farm animal industry, I found myself trying to set up my argument formally (in my mind).  So why not share?

(1) Most farm animals live in abysmal conditions and die miserable deaths.

(2) Some regulations do/would offer significant improvement to the lives of farm animals (e.g. regulations that improve the slaughter process; regulations that would abolish sow crates).

(3) Individual animals benefitted by such improvements have a prima facie right to them from people who control their living conditions, irrespective of whether those improvements would save any lives (prima facie means: so long as that right is not outweighed).

Analogy involving people instead of animals:  suppose in a Korean orphanage, the living conditions are awful (tiny beds, horrible food, no affection, etc.) and half that enter wind up dying.   If children have rights, they have a right to better food, bigger beds, etc., even if those improvements won't increase the adoption rate and reduce the death rate.  Likewise, if animals have rights at all, they have a right to reasonable living conditions when humans control their living conditions, even if improvements won't change the basic fact that they're being used and killed for food.

(3) Farm animals' rights to reasonable living conditions (from people who control their living conditions) can be outweighed, if (a) respecting their rights would create a huge increase in demand for animal products, thus significantly increasing the number raised and killed for food or (b) respecting their rights would eliminate a huge decrease that could otherwise be predicted; the rights are not outweighed if these increases/decreases are small.

Analogy involving people instead of animals: suppose we respect the rights of the kids in the orphanage, and that assuages the concern of some would-be adopters, who thus don't adopt.  There's a small increase in children who die in the orphanage.  Or alternatively, imagine that without the improvements, there would have been a decrease in children who would die.  These consequences are surely not a reason to leave the kids in their tiny beds, eating horrible food, and receiving no affection. The kids in the orphanage, we are assuming, have rights!  We could only begin to think of preserving the squalor if improvements would have hugely negative consequences--for example, leading to half as many adoptions, twice as many deaths.  Such is the nature of rights.  Respecting them doesn't always dovetail with maximizing utility.

(4)  Improving the conditions of farm animals won't create a huge increase in demand for animal products, if any increase at all; and improving conditions won't preempt a huge decrease that could otherwise be anticipated.

Discussion: (a) Improving conditions won't generate a huge increase in demand; such an increase presupposes that there are now a large number of people not eating animal products because of the way animals are treated.  But the very small number of vegans and vegetarians says otherwise.  (b) Improving conditions won't preempt a huge decrease that could otherwise be predicted.  All the evidence is that affluence is the main driver of animal product consumption.  When people have more money, they consume more animal products--until some high level of affluence is reached, at which point they taper off a bit.  The tapering of the very affluent might be reduced, with better conditions for farm animals, but that can't be expected to have a major effect on the total level of consumption.

Thus,

(5)   Farm animals have a right to improvements in their living conditions, and that right is not outweighed by considerations having to do with impact on consumption.

Discussion:  This is how rights are understood in other social justice realms.  Because death row prisoners are rights holders, their living conditions must be improved now, even if that could delay the day when the death penalty is abolished, thereby increasing the total number of executions.  Inmates who have a voice in the matter want the better living conditions and release from prison and abolition of the death penalty. It would take heroic self-sacrifice to endue terrible living conditions, for the sake of saving others from it, possibly in the far future.  It ought to be assumed that animals, if they had a voice, wouldn't be more heroic than death row inmates. In fact, they'd be less so, given the greater ability of humans to dedicate themselves to abstract principles, total strangers, and goods in the far future.  Like we say prisoners have a right to better food, bigger cells, and more humane killing methods now,  anyone who believes in animal rights should say the same of pigs, cows, and chickens.

***

Of course, you can also argue for regulations from a utilitarian perspective, but there's nothing especially utilitarian about supporting regulations.   A rights perspective allows it ... no, in fact demands it.

Animal Ethics Links

You might be interested in this Philosophy Bites interview with Gary Francione.  Don't miss the first couple of comments by Spencer Lo, who draws on many passages in Practical Ethics (the latest edition, published in 2011) to argue that Francione misrepresents Singer's position on killing animals. Francione at first writes off Lo as a defender of "corporate welfarists" but (fortunately) settles down and responds at length, later in the thread. I'll leave it to you to ponder whether he responds fairly. (Comments welcome.)

Also interesting: Brian Leiter did a poll on what philosophers eat, and found philosophers remarkably worried about eating animals, even if they do (mostly) eat them. Over half the carnivores said they thought they should be vegetarians (or vegans).  There's lots of great discussion and debate in the comment thread.

Animal Pain

This is a terrifically interesting and well done video responding to the contention that animals can't feel pain.  I'll make some comments below.


1:08 The video starts in a shaky way, speculating that sea mammals may be aware of the feelings of the humans they interact with. Well, maybe. Fortunately that's just the entry point into the main question: do animals feel pain?  Wish I could refer to the narrator by name--don't know who she is.

2:00 Neo-Cartesian philosophers Michael Murray and Willian Lane Craig argue that animals have (a) reactions to stimuli, and (b) pain experiences, but no (c) higher order awareness of pain experiences.  There's nothing bad about pain, in the absence of (c), so there's nothing bad about animal pain.

Comment: It seems obvious the last person you should ask about the existence of animal pain is someone who has a vested interest in the answer being "No, there isn't any."  Theists like William Lane Craig see their whole world view, their whole mission in life, under threat, if animals feel pain, because animal pain creates a terribly difficult instance of the problem of evil.  We need to rebut the theists' arguments directly, but should also laugh at the notion that they're unbiased authorities on animal pain.

Craig says animals don't have a pre-frontal cortex so can't have (c).  He says it's a tremendous comfort to animal owners to know that animals never suffer.  I'm worried about William Lane Craig's dog!  If he really takes his own verbiage seriously, he could reduce his veterinary bills by letting the poor animal have surgery without anesthesia. Fortunately veterinarians, whether theists or not, aren't about to listen to crap (crummy religious animal psychology).

4:30 Great clip showing the influence of people like Murray and Craig. Fella says only humans have pre-frontal cortex.

5:30 It's great the video challenges the scientific claim that animals lack a pre-frontal (or frontal) cortex, but it also needs to challenge the view of animal pain that says self-awareness is needed for animal pain.

7:30 Bruce Hood clears it up--yes, other animals have a pre-frontal (or frontal) cortex.

9:00 More on how animals do have a pre-frontal cortex. When I teach the topic of animal pain to undergraduates, I use the same type of diagram the video does. I agree completely that Craig's intellectual integrity has to be questioned. 

11:48 Now we get to the good stuff. With Stuart Firestein we get away from the higher order awareness theory of pain.

13:20 Lori Marino talks about animal self-awareness, so now we're again  taking seriously what Craig says about the nature of pain--that it is bound up with self-awareness. Marino grants self-awareness to dogs, but my impression is that that's a minority view.  She cautions against relying too much on the mirror self-recognition test. Well and good, but that leaves us having to be agnostic about whether many animals have self-awareness. If you think self-awareness is a pre-condition of pain, you're going to wind up being agnostic about pain in many species. We need to hear from animal psychologists and philosophers of mind who think pain does not require self-awareness.  I believe that's the majority view.

16:55 Marino says self-awareness can't be localized. So the anatomy of animal brains just doesn't tell us (as Craig thinks it does) whether animals have it or not. Again, I think if you want to counter skepticism about animal pain, it's not your best bet to grant the contention that self-awareness is required for pain. 

19:40 Guy reads Craig to Marino. She laughs, "It's nonsense."  She thinks pain awareness is not located in the pre-frontal cortex. She says pain reception is sub-cortical. All species have brain systems that are involved in detecting pain.  She rejects idea that pain requires meta-cognition. (Yay!!!)  "There is no evidence for that."  She says fish feel pain.

24:00 Animal joy, empathy, etc. She really wants to press the idea that animals have self-awareness. Maybe yes, maybe no. I think it's much more important to establish the existence of animal pain, and to do that it's important to deny the alleged connection between pain and self-awareness.

28:07 Oh no, Craig believes in an immaterial soul!  Narrator rightly points out that raise the question why it matters whether animals have (pre)frontal cortex.  Does Craig have to rule out that animal pain is seated in animal souls? (Ha!)

28:45  The Cambridge Declaration on animal consciousness (July 12, 2012) All mammals and birds, at the very least, have consciousness.

30:00 Jane Goodall autotuned!  Wow!

Final thought. If I were a desperate theist trying to contend with the existence of animal pain, what would I say?  Well, maybe there's a little something to the idea that mild pain makes life more interesting.  A dog wouldn't enjoy his dinner as much, if he weren't first hungry.  That leaves extreme pain as an unsolved problem, as extreme pain doesn't make life more interesting--it just makes life suck.  If you really, really want to pretend it doesn't exist, I find it more attractive to just say God zaps it away miraculously. At least that way we don't do any pretend science. We let the real science of animal pain be as it is, and then allow that it's suspended whenever God's feeling compassionate toward animals.  Arguably the science-respecting theist ought to prefer that approach.

Thanks to Spencer Lo for sending the video link.

It was a happy cow

I adore Nicholas Kristof, and love the way he's taken up the cause of animals, but his column today does make me wonder if he's ready to think carefully about these things.  The howlers (as English philosophers used to say) are so obvious they're almost funny.

Kristof has a friend named Bob who raises dairy cows in relatively humane conditions, giving them names and calling them his "girls".  What happens, though, when they grow old?  Kristof tells a story about one of Bob's favorite cows, Jolly, that's supposed to reassure us --

When Jolly grew old and unproductive, he traded her to a small family farm in exchange for a ham so she could live out her retirement with dignity.

If only I were teaching Animal Rights this semester, I could have the fun of asking my students what's odd about that sentence.  (Whisper:  the ham, what about the HAM?)

The last paragraph is just as unreflective--

The next time you drink an Organic Valley glass of milk, it may have come from one of Bob's cows. If so, you can bet it was a happy cow. And it has a name.

IT has a name?  Either you can urge people to support farms with named cows or you can refuse to use personal pronouns for animals, but surely you can't do both!  (Aside: I'm mighty puzzled by the convention that animals are to be called "it". Aren't there very plainly male and female animals?)

OK, minor points.  Kristof is a good guy trying to support more humane methods of farming. I applaud him for that.  Gary Francione, predictably enough, doesn't. Here's Prof. Francione excoriating Kristof for his wrong-headed concern.

For Kristof and other welfarists, and this includes just about every large “animal protection” organization in this country, animals are things. They are not nonhuman persons. They are not members of the moral community. It is fine to exploit them as long as we torture them less than they would be tortured in an alternative situation; as long as we send them to slaughter with a name.

Well, that's right. Kristof does not think animals are persons, and that's probably because (if he thinks it through) he would reject the theory that sentience is sufficient for personhood.  It doesn't follow that animals are mere things or that they don't matter at all. They just don't matter in exactly the same way that persons like us matter.

Even if they matter in some intermediate, "somewhere between person and thing" way, there's still the question how we can possibly be justified in taking an animal's life, just for the pleasure we get from eating animal products.  The more I think about that question, the less I find it has any easy answer.   It's one thing if the pleasure in question is a small increment--like the difference between (say) Godiva chocolate and Hershey's. It's another if the difference is quite large--like the difference between eating in a school cafeteria and in a great restaurant.  Sad fact: I think for many people, a vegan diet would be like a lifetime of eating in the cafeteria. 

For someone like Francione, Kristof is a major enemy. He makes it seem like you can reconcile ethics with eating animals, just so long as you make enough humane reforms. This essay from Slate, sent to me by a reader (thank you!), makes clear how intense the fight is between abolitionists and other kinds of animal advocates.

Take, for instance, this year’s annual Animal Rights National Conference, which was held in Alexandria, Va., last month. After an abolitionist petition to ban HSUS from the conference failed, abolitionists tried sponsoring an independent seminar in protest of HSUS’s involvement. The hotel where the conference took place then attempted to shut down the abolitionists’ competing seminar (apparently at the main conference organizers’ behest). It’s this dust-up—not any of the myriad practical strategies of reform discussed during the four-day conference—that has earned the bulk of the attention in animal rights circles.

The rest of the article is well worth reading.

Rat Walks Again

This picture and story captures what's so heart-wrenching about the whole subject of animal experimentation. 

Rats with a spinal cord injury that left their hind legs completely paralyzed learned to walk again on their own after an intensive training course that included electrical stimulation of the brain and the spine, scientists reported on Thursday.

Obviously the rats don't just have this injury, they're injured by the experimenters. An awful thought, but it's easy to substitute an image of a paraplegic walking again for the rat ... and then this seems like a major victory.

Coyne on Evolution and Religion

Jerry Coyne has a new article out on how religiosity gets in the way of Americans accepting evolution.  I'm surprised he continues a pattern of reasoning that was widely criticized over a year ago.  First he dismisses religious scientists as "proof" of religion-science compatibility--

Some argue that the mere existence of religious scientists proves this compatibility, but that is specious. That people can simultaneously hold two conflicting worldviews in their head is evidence not for compatibility but for Walt Whitman’s (1855) solipsistic admission, “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well, then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.).” This argument for science/faith compatibility is like saying that Christianity and adultery are compatible because many Christians are adulterers.

Of course religious scientists aren't proof of compatibility, but you might think they're some evidence. In fact, you would almost have to think so, if, like Coyne, you regarded it as evidence of incompatibility that people lose religion as they develop into elite scientists--

Further evidence for incompatibility comes from the huge disparity in religiosity between scientists and laypeople. While only 6% of the American public describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, 64% of scientists at “elite” American universities fall into these classes (Ecklund 2010; similar results were found by Larson and Witham 1997). This figure is much higher for more accomplished scientists. A survey by Larson and Witham (1998) showed that that 93% of members of the National Academy of Sciences, America’s most elite body of scientists, are agnostics or atheists, with just 7% believing in a personal God. This is almost the exact reverse of figures for the American public as a whole.

This disparity bespeaks a profound disconnect between faith and science. Regardless of whether it reflects the attraction of nonbelievers to science, or the fact that science erodes religious belief—both are undoubtedly true—the incompatibility remains.

Why worry about "proof" in the first passage, and then lower the bar, making the issue "evidence" in the second passage?  With evidence the topic in both passages, both the religious scientists and the formerly religious scientists come out to be some evidence.  But it doesn't seem as if Coyne wants to accept the religious scientists as any evidence at all, since he dismisses them entirely with the Whitman quote and the Christian adultery point.
  
Now, if you've made up your mind that religion and science are logically incompatible (cannot both be all true) on some independent basis, then yes, you can dismiss Francis Collins as compartmentalizing (that's what you've got to think--or something along those lines), and you can think formerly religious scientists are reasoning when science gradually crowds out religion for them.  But in that case, you've got some other basis for thinking religion and science are incompatible. What's really hard to do, if you're being fair and logical, is both dismiss religious scientists as any evidence at all for science-religion compatibility and also use formerly religious scientists as some evidence for science-religion incompatibility. 

Now maybe, maybe, there could be special reasons for the different treatment.  Maybe you've got evidence of compartmentalizing in the religious scientists.  They may actually utter the words of Whitman's poem themselves!  Maybe you've got evidence of reasoning in the formerly religious scientists--you've caught them going from premises about science to negative conclusions about religion.  But barring special evidence of that sort, if you think scientists losing religion count as some evidence for incompatibility, you have to think scientists not losing religion count as some evidence for compatibility. Right?  Right!

Religion for Atheists

When Alain De Botton gets done building his temple for atheists, I'd like to be appointed the music director.  Let's definitely have a lot of Bjork.  Why?   Because her music creates the sort of experience religious people get to have, and De Botton thinks the godless should have as well.  Or perhaps more like it -- a successor experience. Something grand, emotional, and full of wonder, but without the worshipful part.  I'm just a bit obseessed with Bjork!  This is from the album Homogenic --

Ethics minus religion = thin gruel?

Didn't see this until now -- "Room for Debate" at the New York Times, with Rhys Southan weighing in interestingly (as usual).

Elsewhere in vegan-world, Gary Francione has an interesting, long essay about moral realism and "new atheism".  It bothers him, as it does me, that new atheists often accept the following equation:  ETHICS minus RELIGION = THIN GRUEL.  In academic ethics, that equation is usually rejected. Generally, new atheists think giving up God makes a much bigger difference to everything than it really does.  A prime example of the "huge difference" view (perhaps we should talk about "huge difference atheism" rather than "new atheism") is Alex Rosenberg's book The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, which I'm reviewing in an upcoming issue of Free Inquiry. This is HD Atheism cubed.  My 2,000 word review, reduced to one word, would be "no".  More on that when the review comes out.

Martha Nussbaum on Religious Intolerance

She talks about her latest book The New Religious Intolerance here.  I think she goes too far in the direction of "can't we all just get along?"  What she says about martyrdom made me especially queasy.  People who let themselves be killed during the Holocaust, in solidarity with Jews, have no connection with suicide bombers who blow up other people in the service of "jihad".  And no, we don't have as much reason to worry about orthodox Jews as we have to worry about fundamentalist Muslims.  Nonetheless, an interesting interview, and the book is probably good reading too.

Coyne v. Haidt

I thought it was not so nice of Jerry Coyne to dismiss Jonathan Haidt as "a bit of a woo-ish self-help guru". In fact, both unnice and not reality-based. Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis is extremely interesting and well-written, and no less valuable because it does have a self-help element (I use it in a course I teach). And that's saying nothing about his extensive and influential research on morality and disgust.  Haidt is a mere "faitheist" (he is an atheist) in Coyne's eyes because he's not a religion-hater.  Outrageous! But Haidt turns out to be above the fray.  He responds to the substance of Coyne's post in this long and interesting comment.  (My extra-curricular reading list is getting horribly long.  Mooney and Haidt and E. O. Wilson's new book.)

Zoopolis (3)

Final post. This is the book that everyone in animal ethics ought to be talking about, and no doubt will be talking about in the fullness of time. You need to read it, if you're interested in the moral status of animals. 

The plot, if you haven't been reading my posts on the book:  Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that all animals have basic rights, but that they also have further rights, depending on which of three categories they fall into.  The very original suggestion of the book is that the crucial categories are political, not merely moral. Animal companions are entitled to full citizenship within their "home" country.  Wild animals should be treated like separate and sovereign nations.  Then there are "liminal" animals who depend on humans, but aren't in a cooperative, mutual relationship with them. They're the resident aliens, akin to migrant workers. They're entitled to denizenship, but not citizenship.

Are they serious? Do they think dogs should be citizens, or are they just a bit like citizens?  Should we regard Grizzly Bear Nation as really another nation, or just analogous to Cherokee Nation (for example)?  Are rats really resident aliens, or is this just a metaphor?  The authors opt for "really" in all these cases. I think this is where the book is most vulnerable.  They have a very detailed and perceptive discussion of the human side of each parallel--human citizenship, sovereignty, and denizenship are discussed with great detail and subtlety.  They also discuss animals, and the animal-human relationship, in enormous and fascinating detail. What's not so convincingly defended is the idea that the categories are more than metaphorical--that they're literally a good fit.

For example, it seems like no more than a metaphor to say that people are engaged in "ethnic cleansing" when they exterminate rats (liminal animals).  I can sort of see the connection between rats and squirrels and resident aliens -- it's not so off base that I'm utterly baffled.  But still ... Ethnic cleansing, literally? When rats are removed from a basement, they become refugees, they say.  Or do they just become like refugees? To get from "like refugees" to "refugees" seems to require some pretty heavy-duty anthropomorphizing.

There's lots of anthropomorphizing in this book, as much as I hate making that tired charge. For example, when they're making their case for wild animal sovereignty, the authors frequently talk about animal "communities".  We are to respect the autonomy of elephants in the way European colonizers should have respected the autonomy of first peoples.  But "community" is a bit loaded.  A human community conceives itself as a community and aims to preserve itself as a community.  A herd of elephants, or school of fish, of flock of flamingos--these are all cohesive groups, to be sure. But are they really "communities", exactly?  Are they communities in the sense that would be needed to conceptualize the duty to respect elephant autonomy just as we conceptualize the duty to respect native American autonomy?

The very long discussion of animals fit for citizenship is rather anthromorphic too.  When we have rules prohibiting companion animals in restaurants, that's demeaning to the animals, they say, like it's demeaning keeping blacks out of restaurants.  It makes dogs second class when they have to be tied up outside.  Sort of!  But exactly?  In a discussion of sterilizing dogs, they talk about animals wanting to have families. Do dogs ever really want to have families--if you use that phrase literally? Do dogs even have families, in the sense that people have families?  Sure, they reproduce.  But do they have families?

The are lots and lots of examples like this.  My sense is that the authors have achieved a very high degree of clarity and precision, in their account of our duties to animals. Once we see elephants as members of Elephant Nation, we much better understand what we should and shouldn't do. Once rats are thought of as being like migrant workers, our duties toward them are much clarified.  If dogs are citizens, that tells us a great deal about how we must treat them.  But this is a bit like the maneuver of pro-lifers. Instead of having an ethics for what a fetus really is (an intermediate entity that truly is in a grey zone), they say a fetus is straightforwardly a person, from conception onwards. Then the ethics of abortion becomes a whole lot more manageable. But (ahem) who really thinks a fetus is a person?  I wonder if anyone really does, in their heart of hearts.  Likewise, everything will be much clearer if we can convince ourselves that whales comprise Whale Nation, or that our cats are fellow citizens.

Regardless of my worries, I really enjoyed this book. It's extremely well written and carefully argued, and stuffed with fascinating observations about humans, animals, and the relations between them.  Another reason I enjoyed it is that it felt a bit like science fiction--as I read, I was able to imagine a completely different world from ours, one in which animals are seen as fellow citizens, resident aliens, and "foreigners".  Dream novel:  Margaret Atwood reads Zoopolis and creates a fictional world like that.  Question: is it a utopia or a dystopia?  Would it be all to the good to alter reality in this way, or in some ways bad?

I'll just end with an excerpt which I found lovely and insightful--

Zoopolis (2) - Animal Citizens

This morning's New York Times has two horrifying stories about the treatment of animals -- one about horse racing in America, and the other about dog-dumping in Puerto Rico.  In the US, the report says, 24 horses die in horse races every week, mostly as a result of the use of pain medication to mask injuries.  In Puerto Rico, there's a place called Dead Dog Beach, where people abandon surplus puppies.  Nice.  Against that background, it feels a little academic to dive into a discussion of whether domesticated animals should be granted citizenship.  This is the kind of thing people argue about furiously, but only in vegan restaurants.

Speaking of which, there is a really good new vegan restaurant in Dallas--the V Spot, on Henderson, just east of The Pearl Cup. This is the type of vegan restaurant it's really hard to find -- elegant and upscale, and with no faux meat or tofu to be seen.  The wild mushroom risotto is excellent, and the chocolate cake is to-die-for!  Expect a few bumps in the service, though.  This is a new restaurant, and they were inundated with guests when we went on a Friday night.  As a result, they kept running out of things.  Go with a flexible attitude, and I bet you will like it.

Anyhow.  Citizenship for animals.  Good idea?

***

Donaldson & Kymlicka argue that all sentient animals, everywhere, have negative rights.  They may not be eaten or worn or used in medical experiments.  As far as that goes, they are in the same camp as the ur-animal-rights philosopher Tom Regan, "abolitionist" Gary Francione, and other ARTists (animal rights theorists).

As I said in my last post, I'm skeptical about applying this sort of very strong rights talk to animals.  It presupposes that the whole foundation of strong rights (or "inviolability", as D&K put it) is a very minimal subjective point of view -- being a someone, as opposed to a something. I think that's implausible, and rights are not actually intrinsic, but "constructed" out of much more varied and heterogeneous materials than simple subjectivity.  NB:  we have lots of strong reasons to take animals seriously, even if we don't go along with heavy-duty rights talk.

But never mind.  Suppose that all sentient animals do have strong negative rights.  D&K argue that we must go much further.  The domesticated animals of the US should be granted citizenship here, and the domesticated animals of Canada should be granted citizenship there, etc.  Other animals, wild (lions, deer) and semi-wild (rats, squirrels) just have negative rights, and aren't entitled to citizenship.  They put the citizenship view forward as a competitor to the abolitionist view that the relationship between humans and domesticated animals is irredeemable.  The "enemy" in this book is the view that it would be best for domesticated animals to go extinct, and for a chasm to separate humans from the rest of animals, living independent, dignified lives "out there" beyond us.

Animal citizenship would benefit animals in lots of ways. For example, dogs would have much more  freedom of movement.  Which brings me back to the V Spot.  Throughout our meal, we could hear a dog barking behind the restaurant.  After dinner, we saw the dog was tethered to a short leash attached to a rail.  This restriction of animal movement keeps animals second class and less visible, say the authors. In France, they claim, you see dogs in restaurants all the time, and there's no public health disaster as a result. Greater freedom of movement would also involve changes in these kinds of restrictions, abolishing leash laws, additional dog parks, etc..

Another difference is that domesticated animals would receive whatever government-mandated medical care exists in the country where they are citizens.  I take it the idea is that if there's national health care, it would have a veterinary wing. If there's mandatory health insurance, as under Obama's new health care system, somehow animals would have to receive health insurance too. In natural disasters, emergency workers would rescue domesticated animals along with people.  There wouldn't be any prioritizing of human victims.

The idea is not that animals would get to vote, via human proxies (or some such), but that there would be human representatives for animal interests, who would exercise their right to have input into public affairs for them.

 ***
One could take some of these items out of the "animal citizen" package and implement them, probably with wide public support. But what about the whole package--the idea that domesticated animals ought to be reclassified as full and equal citizens?  A less sympathetic reader will find this book comical, I think.  Talking about chicken citizens and cow citizens (they do talk this way) will just seem ludicrous.  I find it not so much ludicrous as deeply unrealistic.  But ... why?

Here's one worry I have:  any society can only incorporate so many dependent, non-contributing citizens.  We certainly incorporate dependent children as citizens, but down the line, we gain independent, contributing citizens as a result.  The better care we give to children as children, the more independent and contributing they are, later on.

D&K practically insure that their animal citizens will be non-contributing by placing major limits on their being put to work or used for resources.  Here they're talking about whether dogs and donkeys could be put to work in a place they call "Sheepville"--

We would need safeguards in place to ensure dogs or donkeys were not exploited in Sheepville.  For example, only dogs and donkeys who enjoy the work, and who enjoy the company of sheep (and of other working dogs and donkeys), would be considered. These animals would need to have the option of other activities (staying in bed, hanging out with humans, or sticking to a pasture with their own species, etc.) as a way of assessing their preference for guarding the sheep. And in any case, the hours of work would need to be strictly limited so the donkey or dog didn't feel that they were always on call.  With all these provisos in place, we an imagine that a life involving a limited number of hours of guard duty could be a deeply satisfying life--offering variety, the satisfactions of directed activity, and plenty of social contacts.

Animal citizens have to be pampered to this degree because we have only two real choices: pampering them and exploiting them.  There's no way to tell a dog he has to earn a living, help him make his own career choices, and encourage him to rationally come to terms with the fact that it can be pretty miserable and dull to work a 40-hour week.  If exploitation is ruled out, then we are talking about adding largely non-contributing citizens to the rolls.

Now, for people with dogs, of course dogs do contribute--they are wonderful companions, and people with pets happily take care of them. The question is whether other citizens, who don't get the benefit of this companionship, ought to have the amount of responsibility for animals that comes with elevating then to citizen status. Dogs and cats contribute little or nothing to them.

The inevitable interjection from D&K will be something about people with severe disabilities.  They can be virtually non-contributing too, but no one doubts they should be citizens, and that the public should collectively accommodate and provide for them.  The thing is, though, that people with severe disabilities are the parents, children, siblings, future selves, and past selves, of human citizens.  To draw an analogy between people with disabilities and animals, you've got to think none of these relationships make any moral difference. Most people think they do.

***

Despite these misgivings, I think this this book is thoughtful, clear, original, and interesting. It's a must read for anyone who "does" animal ethics, and would make a great reading in a course on animal rights.  It's a great question whether we just have obligations to animals, or they also have full-blown rights; and if they do have rights, whether it makes sense to elevate some animals to full citizenship.  Two more chapters to go--on wild and semi-wild animals.

NYT: Why is it ethical to eat meat?

The New York Times is running a contest for people who think they have the answer, with a "veritable murderer's row of judges" assessing the submissions, including Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. What fun, and this should be interesting, but did all five judges have to be men?  There are lots of appropriate women who could have been on that panel, including (dare I say?) me!

Zoopolis (1)

It's been a while since I've read anything on animal ethics that's new and different, but Zoopolis, the new book by Sue Donaldson and political philosopher Will Kymlicka, is new and different -- and well worth reading.  I'm going to "live blog" the book a bit, as in: write about it as I continue to read it (I'm about 1/3 of the way through).

Zoopolis is a work in the rights tradition of thought about animals--the tradition that says animals have the type of inviolability ordinarily assigned just to human beings. Animals are not just morally considerable. It's not enough to say their interests deserve equal consideration.  According to ART (animal rights theory), they are not to be sacrificed even if that would be for the general good. All this is really the starting point of the book, though the authors do devote a chapter to supporting the claim that animals have robust rights.

The main point of the book is that fully characterizing the rights of animals requires putting them in the same political categories we use for human beings.  When people step off a plane in some country (their example), they are treated very differently depending on whether they're citizens of that country, or citizens of a different sovereign country, or resident aliens. D&K propose that domesticated animals like dogs and cats have rights based on their being our fellow citizens.  Wild animals have rights based on their being like citizens of a different sovereign country.  And "liminal" animals (like rats and squirrels) have rights based on being akin to resident aliens. (What rights?  I don't know yet--that's the topic of the chapters I haven't gotten to.)

The authors are parting company here with abolitionist author Gary Francione, who argues that domesticated animals are in a condition of slavery, and would go extinct in an ethically ideal world.  D&K criticize him for not recognizing that domestication is partly a result of animal agency.  Animals like wolves gravitated toward our world for what it offered them.  They naturally evolved toward dependency and neoteny.  Those are not inherently bad things, and not inconsistent with living a good life--D&K argue.  They complain that Francione sees indignity in dependency, thereby also denigrating people who are dependent on others due to a disability.  Furthermore, they point out that "liminal" animals are dependent on us too, without our deliberate intervention.  So a full account of animal rights needs to be a nuanced account of the animals among us, and should not idealize a complete separation between humans and animals "out there," flourishing apart from us.

**

All the stuff on domesticated animals in this book is interesting and very persuasively argued, but let's back up.  As much as the authors want the reader to buy into basic rights for animals, and move on to their topic of political categories, I can't help but focus on step one.  The first chapter is a very useful statement of the case for animal rights, which starts by making it clear what's at stake.  The issue is not just whether animals "count," or they're morally considerable, or their equal interests should receive equal consideration. The AR theorist says something much stronger: that animals are inviolable--their good cannot be dispensed with even if doing so would be for the general good.  Rights are precisely protections against that sort of subordination to the general good.

It is a huge deal to grant that anyone has rights, in this sense of a shield that makes the individual inviolable.  One individual's rights put limits on the behavior of everyone else. These could be limits that are life-changing or even life-costing.  Because of these enormous ramifications, I find it striking -- in fact, amazing -- how little it takes for an individual to have rights, on D&K's view.  All it takes, they say, is selfhood. Here's one way they put it --

"...[W]e believe that respecting inviolability is, first and foremost, a process of intersubjective recognition -- that is, the first question is simply whether there is a 'subject' there, whether there is 'someone home'. This process of intersubjective recognition precedes any attempt to enumerate his or her capacities or interests. Once we know there is someone home, we know we are dealing with a vulnerable self, a being with subjective experience whose life can go better or worse as experienced from the inside. And so we know we should respect their inviolable rights, even before we know their variable capacities such as intelligence or moral agency."

As soon as "we know we are dealing with a vulnerable self" we also "know we should respect their inviolable rights."  Self, therefore inviolable rights.  It's incredibly simple. And of course, this secures animal rights, since we do experience intersubjective recognition with animals.

Setting aside the question of animals, does this "self --> rights" story really make sense?  Take the classic situation rights are supposed to resolve.  Five people need organ transplants.  Another person, Frank, walks into the hospital at just the right time.  Can we dismantle him and distribute his organs, to save five?  Here's the situation, as D&K see it--

Alice 
Bob
Carol
Dan 
Ellen  
Frank (SELF)

We look at Frank, intuit a subject, a self, and so realize we must respect his inviolable rights.  We can't remove his organs to save Alice, Bob, Carol, Dan, and Ellen. The problem is that the real situation is this--

Alice (SELF) 
Bob (SELF) 
Carol (SELF) 
Dan (SELF) 
Ellen (SELF)  
Frank (SELF)

All the potential beneficiaries of the transplant are selves too.  I don't see how it can be the selfhood of Frank, all on its own, that reveals to us that we must grant him an inviolable right, thereby forcing us (effectively) to side with him against the other five. Doesn't the selfhood of the others also make a bid for our concern?  If we really focus intently on selfhood and set aside all our preconceptions about what's permissible here, couldn't the selfhood of Alice give her a competing right--for example, a right to equal consideration of her interests?

The personhood account of rights is the only alternative D&K consider. This view is also supposed to account for why Frank can't be dismantled, but bars at least most animals from having rights. I'm not questioning the selfhood view because I support the personhood view. In fact, it strikes me as being just as hopeless.  The personhood of Frank makes a bid for our concern, tempting us to say he has rights and should be considered inviolable, but the personhood of the others makes a competing bid as well--again, maybe they all have a right to equal consideration of their interests.

Alice (PERSON) 
Bob (PERSON) 
Carol (PERSON) 
Dan (PERSON) 
Ellen (PERSON)   
Frank (PERSON) 

So -- why does Frank have rights, and do animals have them too?  I don't find the book's answer promising.  Nevertheless, even if rights are actually nonsense upon stilts, and nobody has them ... or humans have them but animals don't ... animals are still morally considerable, and I find it plausible that the exact sort of consideration they're owed depends on the categories D&K proposes.  So I will keep reading. Stay tuned for more on the guts of the book -- the views on animal citizenship, etc.

Universal Veganism?

A student in my Animal Rights class asked me several years ago whether I thought humanity would ever be 100% vegan.  Over the years, I've found myself thinking about this, but thinking about it in evolving ways.  One of the reasons my thoughts are in flux is that I've added a course on Environmental Ethics to my repertory.  This makes me focus less on the micro-level, and more on the macro-level.

On the micro-level, you focus on one person deciding between an all-plant diet and a part-animal diet.  The all-plant diet will nourish them, but they find the part-animal diet tastier.  Can they justify the harm they impose on animals in terms of the taste-delta, so to speak?  No, it seems clear they cannot.  Next issue: will all humans ever recognize this fact and switch over to an all-plant diet?  The issue seems entirely about self-involvement vs. altruism.  Are we good enough to all become vegans?  The more optimistic among us say Yes.  The less optimistic say No.

But now start on the macro-level, and think about oceans.  71% of earth is covered with ocean, and seafood provides 20% of animal protein, world wide -- 50% in some countries.  In a vegan world, the ocean simply stops being used as source of nutrition.  Land gets wasted too. Only 10% of the earth's land surface is arable--used to grow for crops.  26% of the land surface is used as grazing land.  Most of that grazing land is not convertible to cropland, so if animals weren't being raised on it, it would simply be lost to food production.  The total lost to food production: about 79% of the planet's surface.

Now, a vegan earth is also a planet where the cropland is used more efficiently. As it is, a third of cropland is used to feed confined animals (the ones not on grazing land).  So the cropland will feed far more people, in a vegan world.  Maybe -- I'm not sure -- everyone will still get fed. But by not consuming animals raised on grazing land or living in oceans, a vegan world leaves a great deal of the earth's surface unused for food--the oceans plus all the grazing land that couldn't be used to grow crops.  To make up for this, there has to be lots of importing-exporting, and lots of local people stop being self-sufficient food producers.

It seems to me there's got to be some law of biology or economics (er ... what is it?) that says no to this.  It just can't be that a species decides that a vast amount of its habitat is off limits, as far as obtaining food is concerned. Now, we don't want to make the mistake of thinking "natural, therefore good," or anything so crude, but there are some aspects to nature that just aren't going to be transcended, no matter what. For example, people will keep having sex and reproducing.  And more to the point, they will keep spreading out all over the globe, using every acre of it for food production.

I know what someone's going to say. If we're inevitably going to use every acre for food production, would it be OK to use every acre of Manhattan for food production? May we round up New Yorkers, and turn them into hamburgers?  Well, no. And we're not going to eat chunks of the Grand Canyon either.  But -- perhaps you still see the point.  Manhattan is tiny.  We can pass up Manhattan Burgers, but can we really let 79% of the earth be non-food territory?

Things look very different when you switch from the micro-level to the macro-level.  On the micro-level, the person who eats meat seems to prioritize their taste-delta over the well-being of animals. Selfish jerk!  But now think about humanity collectively, on the macro-level.  We use the whole earth for food production, which must mean we eat other animals. It's not a matter of selfish pursuit of pleasure, but of the basic laws of biology and economics.  The pleasure people get from eating meat isn't an ultimate end, looking at in the grand scheme of things, but actually nature's way of getting them to obey those basic laws.

A vegan world violates the very most basic laws of biology and economics, whereas an omnivorous world does not.  So--to hell with worrying about the treatment of "food" animals? No, no, no.  It's just a starting point to recognize that we're not heading for a vegan world. There's a lot that's wrong with our omnivorous world.  We use every bit of the earth for food (fine) but over-use it (not fine).  We use resources inefficiently.  That's particularly so with respect to the confined animal sector.  Confined animals are fed through the inefficient use of valuable cropland.  That makes no economic sense. These operations also pollute air, water, and land.  There are also issues about the over-use of grazing land--too many animals means too much methane--a greenhouse gas. Finally, and very importantly, there are issues about the horrifying cruelty of these operations.

If you think we're heading for a vegan world, you'll think it's trivial, and even retrograde, to bring about small reforms, like two on the horizon right now:

Federal legislation introduced - bigger cages for laying hens
McDonalds ending use of gestational crates

But we're not.  So we should be for these reforms and support the organizations working for them.  I keep hearing Wayne Pacelle of HSUS on the radio, and think he's the cat's pajamas. If you're abolitionist Gary Francione, you hate the guy, because he's making life incrementally better for animals, while leading everyone a little further away from a vegan world. But I think we're not heading to a vegan world, period. It's not a question of human selfishness, but a simple matter of biology and economics. We just can't let that much of the earth's surface be labelled "not for food."

Do animals have inherent value?

I haven't read it yet, but this post by Rhys Southan on whether animals have inherent value looks interesting.

Also on my things-to-read list:  "Expected Utility, Contributory Causation, and Vegetarianism" (Gaverick Matheny).  You can find it here.

Animal Ethics Comes Home

For the past 6 weeks or so, we've been struggling with one of our cats' health  - he vomits about once a day, eats little, hides under beds. He's lost a lot of weight, and this is clearly life-threatening.  We started with blood tests and x-rays, which didn't identify the problem. Then our vet put him on the steroid prednisone, which helped a lot for a few weeks, but the problems came back. Next question was whether to use ultrasound to diagnose the problem, at a cost of ...$Alot. 

Throughout all of this, all the issues of my book about animals have become real life issues.  I'm glad to say that I don't find the perspective of the book academic or useless. I do (emphatically) think it's important not to be a speciesist about our cat--we are not going to dismiss this illness because our cat is "just an animal."  At the same time, our response should be "appropriate." If we would obviously spend  $Alot to diagnose a problem in one of our children, that doesn't immediately tell us what to do for our cat.  Loss of life for our cat is not morally equivalent to loss of life for our children.  If you think that's speciesist, you (with all due respect) don't understand the term. 

If the cat's demise isn't the same as a child's demise, it's not nothing, either. I don't buy the idea that individual animals are replaceable, or that painless killing of one animal can be canceled out by creating or saving the life of another. I can't make up for my cat dying by rushing from the morgue to the animal shelter, and rescuing a different cat.  There is a certain cold logic to letting him die, and donating $Alot to the shelter to save 10, but no.  When we adopt an animal, we make him or her like a family member, and I think we have to stay the course.  We can't suddenly shift from being this-cat-fanciers to being every-cat-fanciers.

Everything gets even more complicated considering that we have children who are deeply attached to the cat.  (We adopted him and his brother as kittens nine years ago.) Whatever we do teaches them a lesson about how we regard animals, but also about "the virtues".  Are we committed and faithful, or are we fair-weather friends?  On the other hand, are we extravagant and wasteful, or are we logical and reasonable?

Sigh!  So, we did spend the money for ultrasound, and the vet found a region of intestine that suggests maybe (but not certainly) lymphoma. However, when he aspirated some cells and sent them to the pathologist, that diagnosis was not confirmed.  Now we face a new dilemma.  To definitively diagnose the problem will require surgery that costs another $Alot.  If he has one kind of lymphoma--the one the vet suspects--the prognosis is very bad. If another, it's not quite as bad. Medicine night keep him going for a few years. There are other possibilities with better prognoses.

We thought about this for several days, and by the end of the thinking phase, the cat had lost more weight.  When push comes to shove, we don't have it in us to watch him slowly die, and then "mercifully" accelerate the process at the very end.

So--surgery's tomorrow.  If you believe in The Cat Goddess, don't hesitate to petition her for a happy outcome.

Fat Monkeys

Quick last violation of "Saturday only" blogging rule.  For people who think or teach or write about animal rights, this story about obesity research using monkeys and baboons makes perfect fodder for discussion.  Don't miss it!

Trees and Chimpanzees

My paper on the great apes is nearing completion...and boy I wish I had more black and white views about this. It would make things easier if I thought chimpanzees had basic rights just like ours, and for that reason, could never be used in biomedical research. Without thinking of them that way, it's difficult to make the case that chimpanzees should be completely off limits, no matter what. Not just when people are doing hideously cruel experiments, or when they're doing pointless, badly designed experiments, or when they're violating the relevant animal welfare guidelines, but permanently, totally, no matter what. How do you argue for that?

It sounds shallow, but I think there's a lot of force to the argument that we simply value chimpanzees in a special way. They're our nearest non-human relatives, they have minds fairly similar to ours, and they reveal interesting things about human origins. Given all that, we want them to be living free lives of their own in the wild, and we're repelled by the thought of chimpanzees (so much like us!) being inoculated with our diseases, repeatedly biopsied, isolated part of the time...and treated as tools for human benefit.

The research advocate will now let out a loud cry. "But what about the people who won't be saved from serious diseases (hepatitis C is the main one studied using chimpanzees), if the NIH is forced to retire its whole chimpanzee population?!" What possible answer can be given to that? Maybe it's not so hard. There are lots of things we will not do to advance medicine. We won't sell off the National Gallery's art collection, for example. We won't offer Dubai the copy of the Declaration of Independence that sits in Washington.

To change the subject slightly...I read somewhere (does this ring a bell with anyone?) that the regal trees that line many French roads predictably distract drivers with their shadows and cause accidents. You could chop them down and save some number of lives every year. But no, losing the trees is not something we're prepared to do to save lives.

When we declare art, the original Declaration, and trees off limits, nobody feels like any one-to-one comparison is being made. It's not "people or art" or "people or documents" or "people or trees." We value people, we value trees...and never the twain shall meet. Surely we can spare chimpanzees in like fashion. It's not a matter of chimpanzees and people becoming equals, any more than we have to think people and trees are equals, when we leave the trees alone.

NB: I don't think chimpanzees are exactly like trees, paintings, or documents. Not even close, because we have direct obligations to them, and not to trees, paintings, or documents. It's interesting, though, that if you leave that out of the picture, you may actually get the strongest possible argument for ending experimentation on the great apes.

My paper is going to center on a real world drama that just recently got resolved.  200 chimpanzees living in Alamogordo, New Mexico, had been requested by the San Antonio National Primate Facility, to be used in Hepatitis C research (they are already using about 160).  The 200 had been saved from the notorious labs of the Coulston Foundation, which the USDA charged with numerous animal welfare violations in the 80s and 90s.  They live in a federal sanctuary, built just for them on the Holloman Air Force base in Alamogordo.  After ten years of retirement, they were going to be sent back to active duty as "medical models."  Governor Bill Richardson protested, Jane Goodall and the Humane Society protested, lots of animal rights organizations protested...and last week the NIH changed  its mind.  The 200 will remain in Alamogordo while the National Academy of Sciences studies the matter for two years.

It's interesting how the narrative here makes all the difference.  Nobody's having a fit about the 160 chimpanzees already being used for biomedical research in San Antonio.  What captures attention is the drama of the Alamogordo animals being snatched out of a safe haven.  They escaped research, only to be sent back? Now that's intolerable.  

Well, I'm not immune to a good story. It is intolerable.  I'm glad the Alamogordo 200 aren't being shipped to San Antonio.  But now the NAS has to put an end to the problems of all the rest.  At this point only the US and Gabon (Gabon?!) still support experimentation on chimpanzees. The UK stopped it in 1997, and the whole EU last year. It's time for the US to catch up with the rest of the world.

It's a wrench to change, to make an explicit sacrifice of potential discoveries. But once we've changed, I don't think the loss will be noticeable.  We don't experiment on people, and never notice the research advances we've forfeited.  Those advances are just...absent, not there. That's what it will be like if we stop invasive research on chimpanzees.

The Same Differences Argument

My mission over the winter break is to finish a paper I'm writing on using the great apes in medical experiments.  The paper will appear in a forthcoming book about debates in bioethics, and I've agreed to argue the "no" side.  That's certainly my intuition, but what's the best way to make the case?  The "no" view has to deal with pressure from both sides.  Research advocates will want to know how we can allow more people to die from AIDS, cancer, and other diseases, if we can prevent these deaths by doing research on chimpanzees.   Animal advocates will want to know why the great apes should be singled out for protection.  Isn't exempting the most human of animals a bit like freeing the whitest of slaves?  So...interesting project, lots to chew on!

One of the arguments I'm going to make is that the case for protection should not rely on what you might call the "Same Differences Argument."  This argument proceeds from the observation that the same differences that separate humans and animals also separate one human from another.  For example, there are just about the same differences between normal humans and chimpanzees as there are between normal humans and impaired elderly people.  If the differences among humans don't stop them from having the same basic rights, then how can the same differences between humans and chimpanzees make for a difference in basic rights?  (This is usually called the argument from marginal cases, but I hate that "marginal cases" talk, and the "same differences argument" is actually a little broader.  It doesn't have to focus on humans and animals "at the margins," though I'll be doing so here.)

I talk about the same differences argument in Animalkind and I've discussed it before here, but I keep on thinking about it.  It's certainly worth a lot of thought.  On the face of it, our attitudes are inconsistent.  We think intra-human differences are immaterial; they're no bar to equality.  But then we think intra-species differences are a big deal, and a complete bar to equality.  Not only does this seem inconsistent, but it seems like the inconsistency must be due to anti-animal prejudice, or "speciesism."

In fact, I think the SDA is a sleight of hand.  The same sort of argument could be used to show things that are ludicrous, which shows there's got to be something wrong with it.  Take, for example, the right to vote.  Both normal adults and impaired elderly people have the right to vote, despite the differences between them.  Elderly Bob might have no idea what the election is about, but still has the right to enter the voting booth.  He may fill in the circles at random, but that's his right.   So the differences between normal adults and impaired elderly people don't stop them from having the same right to vote.  The same differences distinguish normal adults from Chuck the Chimp.  He too has no idea what the election is about, and might fill in the circles at random.  Surely we will have gone wrong somewhere if we conclude that Chuck has the right to vote. It's not inconsistent, and not speciesist, to say he doesn't.

But why isn't it inconsistent or speciesist? Here's how I think this works.  Rights are "multiply realizable."  In other words, a right doesn't always have exactly the same basis.  The primary basis for the right to vote is a certain set of interests and abilities that are possessed by normal adults.  They have a stake in the running of the country, and they have the ability to rationally reflect on who would be the best leaders, which would be the best policies, etc.  But that's not the only basis, and Elderly Bob doesn't have his right to vote on that basis. He has his right to vote on the basis that there would be all sorts of negative repercussions if intelligence tests were administered to people as they age.  This is because of the way younger people would anticipate the testing, and because of the unreliability of the tests, and the way the system might be abused, etc.  So Elderly Bob's right is based on a a very complicated "big" set of facts, not on the abilities that reside in his own head.

Now, what about Chuck the Chimp?  He doesn't have a right to vote on the narrow basis that normal adults do, because he lacks the relevant abilities.  But he also doesn't have a right to vote on the basis that Elderly Bob does. In short, it takes looking "under the hood" at the multiple bases for rights to see why it makes perfectly good sense for individuals as similar as Chuck the Chimp and Elderly Bob to have different rights.  There's nothing speciesist or inconsistent about saying they differ in their rights.

Now, going back to the original argument, which is supposed to establish only the very most basic rights for animals (like a right to life), the same sort of analysis may apply.  The very most basic rights of normal adults have a basis in certain abilities--fairly sophisticated ones like being aware of yourself and having a notion of your own "good."  But there may be a secondary basis for the same rights that accounts for another group having it--say, babies. There can be a tertiary basis that accounts for yet another group having the right--e.g., the elderly impaired.  There can be a whatever-ary basis that accounts for yet another group having the right.   If all of that is correct, then between-human differences in abilities may not generate differences of rights, because the alternative bases are present in various humans; while between-species differences in abilities do generate differences, because both the relevant abilities and the alternative bases are absent.

That is a perfectly coherent possibility, and if it's true, we'd be able to assert that animals have no rights without being guilty of inconsistency or speciesism.  Obviously, the devil is in the details. You can pretty quickly see the primary and the secondary basis of the right to vote, and how Elderly Bob is enfranchised, but not Chuck the Chimp.  There's nothing speciesist or inconsistent going on there.  But is the primary basis for the right to life really that sophisticated?  And what about the secondary or tertiary (etc.) bases that generate the most basic rights in Elderly Bob and babies (etc.) but not in Chuck the chimp?  What are they?

I think they are "big" facts about the whole human community, and how human earlier selves care about their later selves, and about how humans think about and care about friends and family,  and about how humans imagine themselves in the each others' shoes, etc.  Granted, that's sketchy, but what I find very clear is that rights don't emanate from individual abilities, and just individual abilities.  For the "same differences argument" to go through, they would have to. So the argument is no good. 

Bottom line: I'm not going to make a rights argument why the great apes should be protected.  Stay tuned (in coming weeks) for more on the argument I'm actually making.

12/31 (12:05 pm) -- I made a few changes for clarity soon after posting this.