equal consideration

So far I have defended equal consideration for animals; another way of saying this is ‘all animals are equal’. This is not a statement that many people will agree with so it needs some fleshing out. I plan to write an essay about it for Tracy’s web page but I thought I’d just make a few comments here.

A few months ago I debated animal rights with a highly educated and intelligent person. At one point I mentioned animal rights absently, my opponent pounced on this and declared "animals don’t have rights, you could give them the right to vote but I don’t think they’d use it". Why does this seem a natural and devestating response? Why does talk of rights lead to talk of voting? Many people don’t have the right to vote, toddlers don’t, and neither do the severely mentally retarded. Do they have rights? Of course! They have the right to life for one, and several others. The rights we have vary according to our interests (not in the 'i'm interested in movies' sense). A baby has no interest in voting because he doesn't know what it is, but does have an interest eating and avoiding abuse.

Animals have different interests from ours, and I’m not sure how much we know about them beyond the fact that they have an interest in avoiding suffering. Accepting the principle of equal consideration is great, but until we have a better understanding of what animals interests are there is much room for disagreement about how we should treat them. I want to give an example that appears to favor human interests over animals but is in fact in line with equal consideration. I would argue that we should not euthanize brain dead humans unless they made it clear in better times that that is what they wanted. But I support the euthanasia of animals in similar circumstances. Why are the cases different? In a society that euthanizes people with advanced Alzheimer's disease without prior consent it might be a cause of considerable distress to people afraid of what will happen to them in later life. So the practice can cause real harm to humans while they are not brain dead, but not to animals, because they can’t understand the relevant concepts.

So all sorts of unequal treatment can be justified under equal consideration, but we still need to consider their interests. I think this is an area where real progress can be made. Discovering animals interests is scientific, so not as vulnerable to ideological bias and apologetic philosophy. So study animals (not by cutting them up), discover their interests, and then we can treat them more justly.