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The problem with saying animals have “rights” is that they cannot be said to have corresponding obligations. If my cat bites me, can I enforce my own right against the presumable breach of its own obligation? Legal theory disagrees.
Lawyers are familiar with Holfield’s analysis of rights. It is the most acceptable analysis of a right in the intelligentsia. In strict legal theory, a right is not a right if it cannot be justified by corresponding obligation. At best, it is a privilege.
This is why jurisprudence is important. Laws have perspectives; perspectives justified by reason; reason that ensues from human behaviour condensed into every day life. Otherwise, laws won’t be laws. They will be conjectures at worst and suggestions at best.
You have a right to life because you have a legal obligation not to kill another person. If you’re permitted to kill, you certainly cannot have a right not to; not in any constitutional democracy at least. You get a privilege at best.
This is why animal rights is a problematic legal concept. Animals have no legal obligation because sociologically, the object of any law must understand why it is not only reasonable, but also enforceable.
This makes me wonder; what legal theory exactly justifies animal rights in certain parts of the world, to the extent that a man can be punished, as having violated an animal’s “right” when technically, there was no such right in the first place?
This generation is toxic. We have blurred too many lines. A cat is no less a cat because it is loved. Cruelty towards animals is a moral issue except its cruelty of a nature that threatens the existence an overall species. We humans can be weird.
The strongest counter argument is that even children and disabled people have rights too, they’re just as defenseless as animals. But these class of people have justified special protection simply because they belong to the human race. And this is crucial.
The human race is the only race without which the world disintegrates. So to protect this race, children have to grow. Consequently, they have to be protected as children. The disabled can be transformed. Either ways, humans are more utilitarian.
Human dignity (which justifies our rights) is inextricably linked to certain qualities only humans possess which grow out of and reside in a shared public world defined by largely common ideas of virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong.
To justify animal rights even for our closest sisters in the kingdom — chimps and bonobos — they would have to do nothing less than stand up, with a sense of self-worth and justice, prove their intrinsic moral worth and insist that the world recognizes their dignity.
If they cannot do this, they’d have to at least show a capacity to grow into that understanding, something that puts human children higher in the hierarchy. Anything short of this is an expression of human self-deception.
