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Animal Welfare and Animal Rights
Regan - Singer - Ryder
Jud Evans
We observe them as they direct their lances
towards the doctrine that animals were put
on earth for the benefit of humankind. We
will look at the theories and Weltanschauung
of Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Richard Ryder
in their commendable crusades to promote
a more humanistic and empathetic treatment
of animals. The paper will conclude by identifying
which of the theorists represented is nearest
to the author's own position.
As a life-long
vegetarian who has never tasted meat in seventy-two
years, and as a veteran campaigner for animal
rights, the author is somewhat dismayed at
the philosophical and ontological metaethical
naivety, and the divisiveness and concomitant
tensions generated in the public mind as
a result of two of the advocates, namely
Singer and Regan, claiming the existence
of an intrinsic 'value' or natural inhesion
of 'rights 'in animals. For me it detracts
from the reasoning whereby they arrive at
their valuable conclusions, for though the
writer disagrees with the reification of
intrinsicality by which route they arrive
at their conclusions, I agree with many of
their determinations and prescriptions regarding
the treatment of animals.
Such will be the note
on which I begin this essay and such will
be the same spirit with which I finish it.
It has been my personal experience that an
appeal to people's pragmatically enlightened
self- centeredness, incipient anthropocentrism
and natural appreciation of the fruits of
instrumentality can do a better job of attributing
value to flora and fauna than any transcendentalist
fantasy does.
Naturally I include
the higher apes and members of our own human
species in this denial and repudiation of
'intrinsicality' as an entiative 'property,'
'essence' or existential 'condition,' and
I will develop this dialectical remonstrance
later.. But first to address the substance
of the essay question itself, and take a
look at the main protagonists and their contending
ideas.
Peter Singer - Prophet of Sentience
On approaching Singer we encounter the utilitarian
stance which he developed in the sixties,
when appeals to 'rights for all' was de rigour.
His call was for an ethical system that would
no longer be human- centred and specieist,
which believed was just as loathsome as any
other form of discrimination.. Holding to
a consequentialist preoccupation with the
secondary sequellas of actions, he advocated
the maximum pleasure and minimum pain for
the greatest number principle, and was no
doubt influenced by Bentham's thought-provoking
question: 'Can they suffer?'
In practical terms this would mean moral
agents aggregating by means of a 'hedonic
or felicitic calculus' the pain and/or pleasure
quotient across the congeries of participants
in some cross-species community of sentient
moral patients, and establishing laws and
policies based upon the outcome most likely
to increase pleasure and limit pain for the
greatest number of individuates.
Historically the Benthamite formulation referred
specifically to humankind. Singer's seminal
contribution was to elaborate and extend
this anthropocentric humanitarian concern
to include animals. His moral system incorporates
a strict hierarchical infrastructure.
Sentience for him is the mental ability for
basic consciousness - the capacity to feel
or perceive, and to sense pain, not necessarily
incorporating the ability of self-awareness,
with the arbitrators of this property being
the professional zoologists and neurophysicists.
In the resultant zoological pyramid of sentience
and sensibility humans and the great apes
are placed at the top of a stratified gradation,
with the lower animals and insects at the
bottom with the whole structure supported
upon the entablature of his restricted model
of circles considerability. The prognostication
regarding notions of the awareness of others
and joint attention abilities in the higher
apes on which his notions are based is not
encouraging, as Warwick Fox recently pointed
out in a well researched lecture at UCLAN.
[2]
Tom Regan and the Subject of a Life
For the animal welfarist and abolitionist
Regan there must be 'a cessation of the use
of animals in science, a dissolution of animal
agriculture and a total elimination of commercial
and sport hunting and trapping.' [3] For
Regan like Singer and Ryder too the circle
of considerability does not extend to the
environmemt and biosphere, although all three
manifest a respect for the ecology that we
have come to expect from all those that are
active in this field. The qualifying criterion
of being considered inherently worthy, or
to be in possession of the magic ingredient
of having 'intrinsic value' is to be 'the
subject of a life.' This Reganist 'esteem
for life' approach was epitomised by the
Christian doctor Albert Schweitzer and his
spiritualistically derived notions of reverence
for life. Schweitzer has a modern secular
philosophical following. In some ways Tom
Regan is a recipient of the good doctor's
humanitarian inheritance. In stark contrast
to this, Ryder's benchmark is not so much
the nature of an entity's life, but the answer
to a simple question: Can it feel pain?'
In a breathtaking leap of metaphysical imagination
and ontological ingenuousness Regan enthymemically
attributes properties and abilities of self-interest
to animals which they prudently harness in
the maintenance of their entiative continuance,
a crude abuse of personification and anthropomorphisation
which would have put my old English master
into an epileptic fit, for in itself the
notion implies a human-style cognizance of
a putative 'futurity.'
Fox pertinently observes: [4]
'To say that living things have an interest
of some kind or on some level in maintaining
their own existence, is to suggest that they
actually "strive," "aim,"
or "desire" (or some such equivalent)
to maintain their own existence.'
 Richard Ryder and Painience
At this third juncture in our explorative
review of animal welfare ideas we turn to
the grizzled old campaigner of Animal Rights
himself - British psychologist and coiner
of the name 'Specieism' itself - Richard
Ryder, who created the neologism 1970 because
of the bad name which had attached itself
to 'rights,' incorporating a negative implication
in Britain entailing imagery of the work-shy
and scroungers and 'the world owes me a living'
brigade. Ryder prudently opted to call his
brand of moral opposition to animal cruelty
'painism,' because it underscored any individual's
susceptibility to suffering. [6] Ryder explains
his adoption of 'painism' thus:
'If we are similar psychologically and physically
then why not morally? If we share these to
a degree, with other animals, then the morality
that flows from this will also be similar.'
ibid.
In the same talk Ryder makes it clear that
a Singerian utilitarian-style 'aggregation'
is out:
'But the aggregation of the pains and benefits
of many individuals I consider to be meaningless.
Pain, in its broadest sense is what matters
morally; it underlies all other moral criteria.
Our prime concern should be for the individual
who suffers most.' ibid.
Contrasts and Comparisons
Components of each contrastive approach have
much merit, and they share a common pioneering
anti-specieist outlook, but we still need
to examine the good points in each system
and offset them against the drawbacks. Nobody
can doubt the importance of Singer's ideas
regarding the necessity of radical change
in the way animals are perceived and treated.
In many cases the maximum pleasure/minimum
pain formula works well. Triage is a utilitarian-like
system used by emergency personnel to allocate
restricted medical assistance so as to treat
the maximum number of patients according
to a utilitarian style model, but there is
always a tendency to select an extreme counter-intuitive
examples [ like Callicott's sociopath and
the baby example ] when any theory is being
hostilely criticised. Compared to the advantages
of his system, the underlying shortcoming
of his brand of utilitarianism lies in its
almost Kantian inflexibility . We can compare
this Singerian rigidity with the very strict
but more pragmatic and more flexible approach
of Ryder in these matters.
Regan's zealotry is of another type - the
abrupt abolition of huge swathes of age-old
traditions human agrarian society and animal
husbandry. Likewise with Singer, there seems
to be no room for tractability and compromise
when the confrontation looms with disgrunted
farmers and egg-producers. In Singer's brave
new world, the non-specieist fireman won't
think twice when faced with the decision
of whom to rescue first from a burning building
- a healthy young Chimp or a human in a state
of coma from which she is unlikely to recover.
The chimpanzee is carried to safety first.
As with Regan and Ryder - painless death
is acceptable, but Singer goes further, in
that for him it is quite permissible to painlessly
terminate the lives of certain types of physically
and mentally disabled people. In a Singerian
world one would think twice about going in
hospital for a simple operation, for one's
body might be cannibalised whilst one was
under anathestic and its organs re-distributed
around the ward to ensure the survival of
the 'deserving majority.'
A madman attacks a baby - what do we do?
Kill the sociopath or let him kill the neonate?
That is only the beginning of this roll-call
of counter-intuitivity, for our whole existence
would be dominated by this constant utilitarian
introspection and decision-making as to an
entity's rung on the ladder of psycho-physicality,
together with the unceasing aggregating of
individuals and groups in unending juxtapositioning
of social scenarios and inter-species judgemental
conundrums. My belief is that a Singerian
world would be a Huxlian dystopia - a cold,
frightening world of cold pragmatism, and
ruthless utilitarian efficiency. Should our
felix domesticus be deprived of the pleasure
of killing mus musculus, or should a kitchen-floor
drama be left to bloodily resolve itself
in the manner of the world of natural predation
outside, in which for both Singer and Regan
animals would be left alone to: 'Carve out
their own destiny,' as Regan puts it?
Another feature of Singerian utilitarianism
is the so-called 'negative utilitarianism.'
which requires us to promote the least amount
of evil or harm, or to prevent the greatest
amount of harm for the greatest number. The
focus here is on minimising pain rather than
maximising pleasure for animals. As with
Singer, for Regan painless killing is acceptable,
and indeed and discounting pain by placing
less emphasis on providing pleasure is the
name of the game. Whilst for Ryder the pain
of the individual is paramount, transacting
the agony of one individual against that
of another is valid act.
Conclusion
I am by far attracted to Ryder, the man who
confessed that he coined the term Specieism
partly to avoid having to use the word "rights,"
whose more worldly approach appears to me
to be altogether more pragmatic and sensible,
and potentially productive for the success
of the movement mainly because it encapsulates
the genuine aspirations of the utilitarian
and rights positions without invoking their
orphic claims to some mysterious myth of
intrinsicality of 'rights' or 'value' as
being metaphysically 'resident' in animals,
as an a priori state of grace of which it
is only a matter of time before we more cognisant
members of the higher species become respectfully
aware. 'Intrinsicality' is plainly instrumentality
tricked out in metaphysical masquerade, for
the attriibution of instrinsic properties
to another entity, is merely a recognition
on behalf of the attributant that the simple
presence of the attributee is cognitively
or physically pleasurable.
As Ryder points out:
'I believed, first, that people too often
spoke of "rights" [7] as if they
had some independent existence - this seemed
irrational to me. The essential qualification
for rights is, therefore, Painience - the
capacity to suffer pain or distress of any
sort.'
As for me, though many thinkers still persist
in clinging to the general belief that intrinsic
value is itself so obvious that it lets them
go immediately to the question of what can
or should be described as having intrinsic
value, there is a growing understanding and
unanimity of respect for our environment
and other species which can flourish without
the need to accept the dubious claims of
the intrinsic value of animals.
That which is important is not by which philosophical
journey or the itinerary by which we arrive
at our reformist conclusions, but the need
to arrive and change the personal praxis
of our people and the shape of the public
policies wereby we interact with the animals
which need our protection. I have no doubt
that gradually there will be a convergence
between the pragmatic wing of animal rights
and the metaphysical approach, for whether
animal worth and value and rights be intrinsically
present or extrinsically attributed history
is certainly on the side of the animals as
well as the angels.
References
[1] en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Speciesism
2] Fox Warwick. 'Mindreading,' Joint Attention,
Language and Harm: Cognitive Capacities and
Moral Obligations. Lecture. UCLAN. 03.11.2005.
[3] Tom Regan. The Case for Animal Rights.
[4] Fox, Warwick. A Critical Overview of
Environmental Ethics. World Futures 46 (1996)
1-21.
[5] Op cit 36. quoting Singer's 'Practical
Ethics.' 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press
1993, p. 279.
[6] Ryder, Richard. DARWINISM, ALTRUISM AND
PAINIENCE - In a Talk presented to Animals,
People & the Environment 19.06.1999 http://www.ivu.org/ape/talks/ryder/ryder.htm
[7] op cit.
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