Animal rights

[3] Many animal rights advocates oppose assigning moral value and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone.

In parallel to the debate about moral rights, North American law schools now often teach animal law,[7] and several legal scholars, such as Steven M. Wise and Gary L. Francione, support extending basic legal rights and personhood to nonhuman animals.

Some animal-rights academics support this because it would break the species barrier, but others oppose it because it predicates moral value on mental complexity rather than sentience alone.

[8] As of November 2019[update], 29 countries had enacted bans on hominoid experimentation; Argentina granted captive orangutans basic human rights in 2014.

[13] Another argument, associated with the utilitarian tradition, maintains that animals may be used as resources so long as there is no unnecessary suffering;[14] animals may have some moral standing, but any interests they have may be overridden in cases of comparatively greater gains to aggregate welfare made possible by their use, though what counts as "necessary" suffering or a legitimate sacrifice of interests can vary considerably.

[citation needed] Major religious traditions, chiefly Indian or Dharmic religions, opposed animal cruelty.

[32] One of the most important sanctions of the Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths is the concept of ahimsa, or refraining from the destruction of life.

The Qur'an contains many references to animals, detailing that they have souls, form communities, communicate with God, and worship Him in their own way.

[42] Nussbaum (2004) writes that utilitarianism, starting with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, has contributed more to the recognition of the moral status of animals than any other ethical theory.

[43] The utilitarian philosopher most associated with animal rights is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University.

In his interactions with scientists, he was often asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" evidence that they could feel pain.

Animals for Regan have "intrinsic value" as subjects-of-a-life, and cannot be regarded as a means to an end, a view that places him firmly in the abolitionist camp.

[51] He argues that all normal mammals of at least one year of age would qualify: ... individuals are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and logically independently of their being the object of anyone else's interests.

In the original position, individuals choose principles of justice (what kind of society to form, and how primary social goods will be distributed), unaware of their individual characteristics—their race, sex, class, or intelligence, whether they are able-bodied or disabled, rich or poor—and therefore unaware of which role they will assume in the society they are about to form.

[42] The idea is that, operating behind the veil of ignorance, they will choose a social contract in which there is basic fairness and justice for them no matter the position they occupy.

[42] American philosopher Timothy Garry has proposed an approach that deems nonhuman animals worthy of prima facie rights.

[59] The anti-vivisection movement in the 19th and early 20th century in England and the United States was largely run by women, including Frances Power Cobbe, Anna Kingsford, Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Caroline Earle White (1833–1916).

In the Netherlands, Marianne Thieme and Esther Ouwehand were elected to parliament in 2006 representing the Parliamentary group for Animals.

[59] Lori Gruen writes that women and animals serve the same symbolic function in a patriarchal society: both are "the used"; the dominated, submissive "Other".

Animal liberation challenges large sectors of the capitalist economy by assailing corporate agriculture and pharmaceutical companies and their suppliers.

Animals have no beliefs, because a belief state requires the ability to hold a second-order belief—a belief about the belief—which he argues requires language: "If someone were to say, e.g. 'The cat believes that the door is locked,' then that person is holding, as I see it, that the cat holds the declarative sentence 'The door is locked' to be true; and I can see no reason whatever for crediting the cat or any other creature which lacks language, including human infants, with entertaining declarative sentences.

[71] Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit debated the issue of animal rights in 2001 with Peter Singer.

"[72] Singer challenges this by arguing that formerly unequal rights for gays, women, and certain races were justified using the same set of intuitions.

Posner replies that equality in civil rights did not occur because of ethical arguments, but because facts mounted that there were no morally significant differences between humans based on race, sex, or sexual orientation that would support inequality.

The world of animals is non-judgmental, filled with dogs who return our affection almost no matter what we do to them, and cats who pretend to be affectionate when, in fact, they care only about themselves.

They derive their radical moral conclusions from a vacuous utilitarianism that counts the pain and pleasure of all living things as equally significant and that ignores just about everything that has been said in our philosophical tradition about the real distinction between persons and animals.

According to a 2000 paper by Harold Herzog and Lorna Dorr, previous academic surveys of attitudes toward animal rights tended to have small sample sizes and non-representative groups.

[76][77] A 1996 study suggested that factors that may partially explain this discrepancy include attitudes towards feminism and science, scientific literacy, and the presence of a greater emphasis on "nurturance or compassion" among women.

[79] A 2016 study found that support for animal testing may not be based on cogent philosophical rationales and that more open debate is warranted.

The findings extended previous research, such as a 1992 study that found that 48% of animal rights activists were atheists or agnostic.