79. "Animal Rights"

"When you tell me I should treat animals in a humane way I have a pretty clear idea of what you mean. If I have doubts I can ask you. But when you tell me I should give them rights I have no clear idea, and I don't think it will do any good to ask you. Nobody seems to have a clear idea of what 'rights' means when applied to animals."

I am talking to Peter Singer, who once again has called for inclusion of animals "within the sphere of beings with rights" (NYRB, 10-13-11). I am doing so after reviewing my every source on the meaning of "rights." There are natural rights and legal rights and social rights and ethical rights, which break down into claim rights and liberty rights and negative rights and positive rights and economic rights and cultural rights and a few others. It's the most complicated subject you ever saw.

Reading more of Singer I construct his response: "You're letting the broad view obscure the narrow point. If animals have legal rights there will be a penalty for not treating them humanely. Fewer animals will be abused. You can't count on a change in human behavior without a penalty."

That's clear. And its implications are clear. The penalty of disapproval — by my society or (maybe) my own conscience — is not enough. You can't trust that disapproval or see it working. Not the way you can with the government that fines you.

The realism in that makes its humanity convincing, but I think I make Singer's aim too narrow. He certainly wants all of society to disapprove of cruelty to animals. And in that aim he obviously intends his word "rights" to do more than it does in a law book, just as he intended "liberation" in his first book title (Animal Liberation) to do more than it does in a pet-care book. Like any good orator speaking in a good cause he's taking advantage of whatever attraction his words have gained.

For me that move ends the clarity. I'm thrown into the noisiest of controversies. "Animals can't enter into a social contract. They can't make moral choices. They don't recognize obligations and responsibilities. You can't make any contract with them, much less a social contract." It appears, indeed, that with animals you can't have any of the reciprocal relationships within which our term "rights" has gotten its meaning. The concepts don't fit.

So what's the attraction in that word? It's good as oratory — salesmanship, spin. Like "liberation" it has (or had) a lot of pull with educated audiences. And that's good to have in a cause as good as this one, obtaining a penalty for the mistreatment of animals. The question is, Is it worth throwing the whole subject into conceptual disorder?

What would keep order? Using terms that fit the order we already have in our legal system. In that system, animals don't have rights; humans have constraints. Could you get what you want for animals simply by constraining humans, in the law's customary language?

Maybe you could. I think you could. But could you sell it that way? That's another question.