Anthropocentric Ethics and Animal Rights, Research Paper Example

Animal rights are not only a germane issue for various environmental groups and activist organizations, but have also become a central thematic in contemporary philosophical debates on ethics. Particularly, the notion of animal rights is consistent with broader existential and ethical questions, such as what is the meaning of life, what is the nature of life, and how this life should be treated. As Angus Taylor notes, the rise of animal rights as a topic suggests “a sharply increased interest in society about environmental issues, including our treatment of the other living creatures with whom we share this planet.” (Taylor, 15) Since in the past “few philosophers wrote much about the moral status of (non-human) animals” (Taylor, 15) we can understand this increase in interest in terms of a broader realization that life is not only reducible to the human being – that is to say, there is a desire to avoid anthropocentric conceptions of life based on the centrality of the human. Following this line of thought, standard ethical questions have become extended beyond the scope of the human community. This shift in thinking signifies a certain awareness on the part of philosophers, ethicists and other thinkers that to the extent that the phenomenon of life requires a more radical and diverse concept to explain it, fields such as moral philosophy and ethics must also become more radical when considering the types of beings they discuss within the remit of their discipline. In this regard, animal rights can be understood as an attempt to think the existence of other forms of life in an ethical manner. The following essay will attempt to argue for animal rights precisely according to this idea that concepts such as rights and ethics do not belong exclusively to the human being, but rather are concepts that can be applied to life in general. In order to support this claim, traditional viewpoints on ethics, rights, and their association with the human being shall be presented, viewpoints that culminate in the notion of universal human rights. Afterwards, research will be introduced that suggests why such anthropocentric ethical accounts are fundamentally limited. The essay will conclude by examining how stepping beyond anthropocentric ethics can lead to a new ethical discourse of which animals are a part.

One of the reasons that animal rights have become something of a new phenomenon within ethics is because of the historical exclusion of animals from what was regarded as a discourse pertaining exclusively to human beings. This exclusion, however, is not merely the result of a certain anthropocentrism. The concept of human rights itself is a fairly new notion, possessive of a distinct origin in time and thus indicative of a historical development in ethical thought. Although the academic literature lacks consensus as to what was the first rigorous formulation of human rights, many historians and theorists suggest that this notion is a fairly recent phenomenon that developed according to a gradual amalgamation of diverse lines of inquiry. As John Mahoney writes, “human rights as we understand them today are largely the product of seventeenth- to eighteenth- century Western thought, and as such find no substantial place in ethical or political reflection in Europe before the twelfth century.” (1) Accordingly, human rights as concept can be viewed in terms of the development of various separate trends in thought that are subject to a distinct historical location in time: The nature of such a development suggests that the notion of human rights itself essentially remained the product of a particular discourse, a concept that is tied to various locations, world-views and historical periods. In other words, human rights were not immediately accepted as a universal concept.  It is arguably only until after the horrors of the Second World War that the Untied Nations attempted to make human rights the universal ethos of the world, with its “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In the preamble to the document, the authors certainly suggest such a universal ethos, with the imperative that the “recognition of the inherent dignity of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, (Preamble) an idea that is supported in the opening lines of Article One of the declaration: “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” (1) It is therefore clear from the UN document that what was crucial to their particular presentation of human rights was that human rights must be applicable to all (hence, the universality of human rights), in an effort to combat any relativism or undermining of the idea: the document seeks to establish an absolute ethical foundation for the people of the world in the form of human rights. However, as mentioned above, the notion that human rights are subject to historical development and the product of particular lines of thought clearly demonstrates that such a universality omits the very origin of the concept. As Eva Brems notes, the concept of human rights must be primarily viewed as a purely Western, and therefore, particular concept: “human rights cannot be called universal, simply because they are historically, and hence also conceptually Western.” (8) Accordingly, there are other possible ethical formulations that are possible historically and conceptually: the reduction towards the centrality of human rights as foundation of a world ethics is rather reflective of the notion that “Western influence is still predominant in human rights norm-making and agenda-setting.” (Brems, 8) This view of human rights implies that the latter can ultimately be viewed as a particular social construction, one that is privileged as universal against other possible forms of ethics.

This is not to suggest that the drive towards universal human rights is in some way a complete conceptual error. Certainly, historical realities such as the Second World War required some change in how human relationships are conceived. However, what the particularity of the human rights concepts indicates is that it is possible for human beings to create certain ethical discourses, and accordingly, that there are other ethical paradigms possible. Insofar as human rights are considered historical – i.e., at a certain time they did not exist and only subsequently did they become an apparently defining feature of human life – it is possible to conceive of other plausible future ethical developments, which would thereafter retroactively seem as self-evident as human rights appear to be in the present age. In this regard, the sudden shift to animal rights can be understood as consistent with the realization that other types of ethical organizations of society are possible. Accordingly, the emphasis on human rights, while appearing universal, can also be thought of as introducing a limit in the human conception of life: only human rights are considered in this ethical formulation. However, to the same extent that human rights were once not applicable to all humans, animal rights can be viewed in a similar light. That is to say, if universal human rights are the gesture of conferring fundamental rights to all people, in this context animal rights can be viewed as an important part of the application of rights to all forms of life.

To develop this point, we can refer to how changes in ethics have also occurred since the formulation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: the latter is by no means the definitive ethical document of humanity. As Paola Calvari remarks, ethics itself is a dynamic concept, in which “the appearance of new subjects on the social scene is usually accompanied by a questioning of the status quo.” (3) In other words, the appearance of new forms of subjectivity can cause radical changes in society, broadening the conception of who is human and furthermore, the conception of who or what has the right to exist. For example, the very necessity for the UN Declaration indicates that not all humans were treated as subjects, and thus, there was a need to compose the document. Moreover, the point of Cavalieri’s usage of the terms “subjects” is to introduce the idea that subjectivity is not only a human feature. It is the appearances of new potential subjects, such as animals, that force a review of standard ethical discourses. This logic of the possibility of new forms of subjectivity is evidenced in the terminology Cavalieri uses to describe animals: he refers to them as “nonhuman animals”, clearly indicating that humans are also to be considered animals. In other words, the ethical emphasis on human rights, while apparently unifying all humans under a clear ethical imperative, subsequently draws a distinction between two types of animals: human and nonhuman animals. Such a distinction thereby creates another type of societal organization, one which still privileges certain forms of life over others, such that in Cavalieri’s words “nonhuman animals are at the bottom of a pyramid, at the apex of which we have placed ourselves.” (3) Hence, within the horizon of a contemporary ethical thought dominated by the notion of universal human rights, what is operative in this very horizon is a clear anthropocentrism that emphasizes the privileged status of human beings within the world. Cavalieri observes that such hierarchies are symptomatic of traditional human conceptions of ethics: “Aristotle thought that slaves were the tools of their owners, and for a long time humans of Caucasian origin theorized their own superiority to members of other races.” (4) Accordingly, the phenomenon of the hierarchy repeats itself in the universalization of human rights: this universalization of exclusively human life subjugates other forms of life.  Hence, such proclamations are constituted by a gesture of inclusion and exclusion. As Cavalier notes, thinking in terms of such hierarchies “opens the door to the idea that equality cannot go on being solely an internal affair of the species Homo sapiens.” (7)

Hence, one of the ways to introduce the topic of animal rights is precisely through a critique of the anthropocentrism inherent to the universalization of human rights. A crucial feature of such anthropocentrism is to attribute specific qualities to the human being, which are then withheld from other types of living beings. In this regard, science is of pivotal importance insofar as it helps demystify some of the commonly held notions of qualities that belong exclusively to human beings. Cavalieri notes an increased trend in scientific studies of animals that emphasize the subjectivity of animals. This subjectivity is demonstrated in the scientific observation that “nonhuman animals have experiences.” (17) If the idea that animals are possessive of experiences entails that animals are also subjects, this would imply that the anthropocentric view that only humans are subjects is flawed. Moreover, ideas such as Darwin’s thesis “that human language was merely the natural extension of a primitive system of signals similar to those used by other animals” (Cavalieri, 19) helps further break down the barrier between humans and animals. If language – which is often used to separate humans from animals – can be traced back to a root that is common to all animals, this means that language has a clear correlate in animal life. These scientific theories thus underscore the notion that certain human characteristics are also shared by animals and other forms of life; at the same time, apparently unique human characteristics have a clear origin and parallel in nonhuman animals. Such ideas intimate that an anthropocentric viewpoint is untenable because of the very ambiguity of what defines a human as human, and hence, the application of rights to only humans remains subject to this same ambiguity.

A second approach from which to combat such anthropocentrism and introduce the pertinence of animal rights is to emphasize the interconnectivity of life itself. In essence, anthropocentric ethics posit that human beings do not exist in relation to other forms of life, and furthermore, that human beings are not dependent on the earth and the environment for their existence. Such anthropocentrism posits a strict non-relation between the human being and its environment. Certainly, environmental ethics, which favors animal rights, make extensive use of such arguments. Such approaches stress the fact that “the human is an intrinsic part of the natural order….we must consider all life as a part of one interrelated community with a common interest.” (Preece and Chamberlain, 246) These accounts of the human’s relation to other forms of life and the environment are not romanticizations of the situation: they can be viewed as facts of human ontological existence, demonstrated, for example, by various scientific data related to ecosystems. Eugene Hargrove suggests that the subsequent step from such a realization is that ethics should address the benefit of the environment as a whole, what he calls a “life-centered system of environmental ethics.” (96) Hargrove writes that, “from the perspective of a life-centered theory…we are morally bound to protect and to promote “environment’s” good for their sake.” (96) In other words, once there is a realization of a human dependency on the environment coupled with a demystification of qualities that only exist in the human form, our ethical obligations must necessarily shift to acting in ways that are not only good for humanity, but for the good of the entire environment. Such an approach can be viewed as the radical conclusion of an ethical discourse that does not ground its theory in the priority of the human, but rather grounds itself in notions of communal life and existence.

In the above essay, we have attempted to present a case for a revaluation of the animal’s position within ethical discourses, suggesting that animals should be conferred rights. The idea that human rights are a particular historical phenomena helps us understand that the proclaimed universality of such human rights is in reality an obfuscation: documents such as the UN’s declaration of human rights are the result of particular discourses on ethical thoughts. Accordingly, it is possible to imagine other ethical systems. In line with this very possibility, the history of human rights demonstrates the historical tendency to create hierarchies in ethical thought based on anthropocentrism. What animal rights entails is a further deconstruction of such hierarchies. The current primacy given to human rights is a symptom of anthropocentrism: it is through a critical re-thinking of this anthropocentrism that new ethical spaces can be created, spaces that include a location for the animal, and moreover, for both life and existence itself.

Works Cited

Brems, E. (2001). Human Rights: Universality and Diversity. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Cavalieri, P. (2004). The Animal Question: Why Nonhumans Deserve Human Rights. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hargrove, E.C. (1992). The Animal Rights/Environemental Ethics Debate: The  Environmental Perspective. Albany: SUNY Press.

Mahoney, John. (2007). The Challenge of Human Rights: Their Origin, Development and Significance. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Taylor, A. (2003). Animal and Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Preece, R. and Chamberlain, L. (1993).  Animal Welfare and Human Values. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

United Nations. (1948). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Accessed at: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/