Definition

Animal rights refers a humans considering many, or all, animals as having a moral value independent, or despite, of the animal’s use by humans.

Discussion

Overview

A crule way one can treat an animals can be a failure of one’s ability to act with excellence and, thus, contrary to the Moral Principle. While this may be considered a moral failure, it is not necessarily breack the Legal Principle.

This moral position is a product of humans having the capacity to empathise with living creatures. It does not come from any claim of self-ownership made by the animals. To have a right typically requires a being to have moral agency which animals lack.

The lack of a claiming rights does not mean peope are correct to disregard the welfare of animals. On the contrary, the agency humans have in their self-ownership allows them to treat animals in an ethical manner.

Similar to the abortion question, the question of animal welfare is to what extent, if at all, animals have a right not to be aggressed against.

Another way to think about it is to ask to what extent the concept of personhood applies, and when protection of the Legal Principle is applicable.

Applying the Legal Principle

Reasonable people may come to different conclusions about the [Legal Principle’s applicability to the intelligent bonobo or chimpanzee, for instance, versus a worm or a one-cell living organism. This is a gray area where there may be no one correct answer.

The circumstances of and intention behind a person causing harm to an animal (whether for necessary life-saving medical research, life-sustaining food in an extreme emergency, sport in the case of hunting, or merely for the preference of eating it) may factor into the analysis on wether there is a breach of a Legal Principle or the Moral Principle.

Letting local communities decide

Local communities and private associations of individuals ay set rules governing the treatment of animals. These rules would likely reflect the totality, or the majority, of the moral positions held by the individual. However, these rules must be implemented through voluntary means rather than political coercion.

This solution is the nature of all controversial matters where reasonable minds disagree.

Allowing local communities to reasonably experiment with navigating these complex issues is the best way to resolve them. Moreover, this approach will ultimately reveal the most effective applications of the Legal Principle.

The ease of moving to, or doing business with, another local community with a different preferred reasonable construction of how the Legal Principle applies in this area is the most efficient way to determine which laws, rules, and regulations are best overall.

A diverse, free, and peaceful world can easily accommodate such reasonable differences of opinion on complex and complicated issues.