Home » Mind & Soul » Libertarian Philosophy » Deconstructing animal rights in an age of progress

Deconstructing animal rights in an age of progress

© Francois Tremblay

The notion of "animal rights" is a common notion used by environmentalists to force an artificial conflict between human rights and nature.

To understand this, we need to clearly define what rights are, and how they apply. A right can be defined as

a principle defining and sanctioning an individual's freedom of action in a social context. The principle of rights contains within it the recognition of all valid rights possessed by any rational agent, thus there is never any conflict between the valid rights of different people--there can be no 'right' to violate the rights of another.

Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights", Virtue of Selfishness

The question then arises, how do we justify the existence and nature of rights ? This is especially crucial because our debate turns around the criteria for their possession. To understand the scope of a concept, we need to understand its justification.

Two main arguments have been proposed by Objectivists to derive rights. The first one is a direct derivation from ethics. We can state it in this way :

1. Life is the ethical standard of value. We must seek to survive and flourish.
2. The role of social institutions is to further valid ethical aims.
3. The fundamental role of social institutions is to protect individual lives against force.

The fact that human beings enter in this reasoning is because they possess values (which implies volition), and are a part of society (which implies trade, in a loose sense). A non-volitional being does not hold any conscious values to be protected, and a being that is not part of society is not under the provision of social institutions.

The second argument comes from Leonard Peikoff in O:PAR and can be simply expressed as such :

1. The primacy of reason is valid.
2. The exercise of reason requires a lack of coercion.
3. A rational society must ban coercion.

Here, rights are not the pivotal point but rather coercion. The criteria for being part of this line of reasoning is to be able to exercise reason, and trade (which is implied by the notion of coercion). An irrational being has no reason to protect, and a non-trading being is not part of society.

A rational faculty cannot exist without volition. Therefore we may conclude this examination by pointing out that both lines of reasoning demand volition and trade as necessary prerequisites. Since animals have neither of these capacities, the notion of "animal rights" must be considered contradictory.

It is interesting to note that our arguments center around rationality and society. The notion of "animal rights" could only exist in a modern society, where individuals can lose touch with the requirements of human life. It seems many statist arguments are fueled by an "ivory tower" mentality : for instance, when they rant against industrialization for being "alienating", when their only alternative is to return to harsh, year-long farm work.