Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day
Jason Kuznicki on Aug 22nd 2007
So, let me hear it! Arguments based on some set of rights for some set of animals; arguments based on some set of obligations toward some kinds of property; arguments that some kinds of cruelty are wrong but should not be illegal and arguments that some kinds of cruelty should indeed be matters of law; arguments that it’s appropriate for one level of government to legislate against animal cruelty but not another (e.g. state vs. federal). Requirement: explain what’s libertarian about your claims. Prohibition: Explanations of how the animal cruelty question shows how awful or at least pitiable libertarians are. I have my own somewhat gestational ideas, but I’m really interested in other perspectives. Post in comments or in your own blog with a pointer. Feel free to critique others’ ideas in the spirit of rigor.
The comments to his post aim straight for the heart. We hear about pain-this and affection-that and cuddly-friendly-fuzzy. I demur. I do not believe that animals should be treated as though they have rights, because rights are concept that animals themselves clearly do not respect or even attempt to understand. Below the fold: libertarian justifications, with enough self-righteousness to escape Henley’s prohibition against self-pity.
Let’s start with an area of consensus: Nearly all libertarians will cheerfully restrict the rights of those human beings who initiate the use of force (ie., who violate the rights of others). Animals violate rights all the time, both the actual rights of humans and the supposed rights of other animals. Thus, by the terms of the libertarian non-aggression axiom, using force against animals is legitimate. Force is always legitimate against those who never respect rights.
In other words, if you oblige me to speak the language of natural rights, even though perhaps it’s not the best fit for the situation, I will have to answer that within this language, animals are at best incompetent. At worst they are lifelong remorseless criminals. By libertarian premises, and even if animals otherwise had the moral agency and moral dignity of people, animals would not deserve rights.
Ask yourself: How would we treat a human male who behaved toward other people in the same way that a tomcat behaves toward rodents — or toward the females of his own species? The tomcat should feel lucky that he is usually only confined and castrated. By the logic of individual rights, we’re doing him a favor. Not that this logic necessarily applies, but this would certainly be the result if it did.
The title of this post, taken of course from The Onion, is funny because it is so completely true. When a lion eats a zebra, you can be sure that he never worries about the rights of his prey. Until we see lions teaching themselves to eat tofu, I’m just going to scoff at the whole idea of animal rights: Nature red, in tooth and claw.
The fact that animals clearly aren’t people only makes the case against their rights even stronger, because it raises the possibility of a category error, a possibility we need not consider right now.
However — and this may be a pretty big “however” — it’s also worth noting that libertarians would not permit humans to behave cruelly toward either criminals or the mentally incompetent. There may thus be some grounds for some protection against cruelty, if not for animal rights in general. Yet given just how legally incompetent (and just how criminal) most animals really are, even these restrictions should be fairly modest, I would say.
So here is my final answer, validated by tradition if not by abstract reason: Make animals property. More than that may just be asking too much. Does animal cruelty bother you? That’s great. Now spend your money on buying up the afflicted animals, and on caring for them. But if I want to eat foie gras, and if I buy it with my own money, then that’s my own business, and it’s absolutely none of yours.
I know I won’t make any friends by saying this, but I am afraid that the same also applies if I want to raise dogs to fight one another. I am disgusted by the practice, and I would never watch a dogfight. But I do not think it should be illegal. Once we start making “disgust” and “I wouldn’t do it” into the basis of criminal law, we might as well outlaw sodomy. And Protestantism.
What, you ask, is there to be no punishment for Michael Vick? Of course there is: Even without a formal, legal penalty, Vick is going to face an awfully harsh private penalty, one that already goes far beyond what non-celebrities ever face for animal cruelty. Everyone in the country thinks he’s a total creep now. Even I find his actions repugnant, and I think he had a perfect right to do them. I’d say that’s punishment enough.
Why the law needs to get involved, I really don’t understand. If the law were to act here in any fair or consistent way, it would also be forced to destroy a lot of other uses for animals that we mostly find unobjectionable. For every argument you make against foie gras or dogfighting — both practices of longstanding tradition — someone else can come along an make what’s probably an a fortiori case against industrial farming, which obviously involves more pain to more animals, which is of very recent institution, and which bothers relatively few.
The only consistent way of abolishing the cruelty of dogfighting would also ban modern pig farming. And good luck with that one.
Filed in The Biosphere, The Bookshelf
The public reaction in this case is not based on any consistent belief in animal rights. What we’re seeing is a large number of people expressing hatred of a man because he has black skin. The Vick case is socially acceptable lynching, nothing more.
And even if you don’t accept that, consider the fact that most anti-Vick commentators consider the life of a dog more valuable than a human.
If you seek to adhere to “the spirit of rigor”, then you should get rid of your last couple paragraphs. There’s no way to equate dog fighting with industrial agriculture - while I personally find both objectionable, only the former indulges in cruelty for the sake of pleasure. It’s simply not true to say that “[t]he only consistent way of abolishing the cruelty of dogfighting would also ban modern pig farming” - dog fighting does not raise dogs for meat, it raises them to kill one another for the enjoyment of people who get pleasure out of sadism. While there are sadistic pig farmers, industrial agriculture seeks to minimise the kind of cruelty that dog fighting depends on.
To claim that animals lack rights simply because they kill or engage in non-consensual sex is silly. Again, most animals who kill do not do so for pleasure, they do so to gain food. They are certainly no worse than murderers (who kill their own kind for pleasure). Yet even if we judged them to be murderers and rapists, that wouldn’t give us the right to make them fight to the death for a few laughs. Even the most vile murderers are protected from torture and “cruel and inhumane punishment”.
Even your argument about property is deeply flawed. You said that “if I buy it with my own money, then that’s my own business, and it’s absolutely none of yours.” It wasn’t that long ago that you could buy people as property in the US. You can still do so in parts of the world. Do you really think that if someone buys another person “with [their] money”, then the way they treat them is “[their] own business, and it’s absolutely none of yours”?
Jason, you’re far too intelligent a person and far too sensible a thinker to come up with as obviously flawed arguments as these.
Skip: The Vick case is to you what you make it. I have found, in my life, the cry of “racist” is most often made by those who are. It is becoming more and more predictable when the race card will be used. It is also becoming more and more absurd. Please stop assuming that any black man caught, tried, and admitting his own guilt has been dealt a poor hand in the race deck, especially when fame is involved.
And… If the life of a dog was more valuable than that of a human he would have gotten death. Had he hanged, electrocuted, and drown dozens of humans he would be a mass murderer, not an NFL star. Think what the commentators would have said about that.
…not to mention the sentence if they were people he killed. I’m sure the words “death penalty” would have been brought up long ago.
I’m not sure how useful libertarian thought is to questions of animal rights / cruelty laws; the issue is primarily one of what protections we afford creatures without moral agency. If the answer is “none” then it’s subject to nothing more than property laws, as in your fairly straight derivation.
But the answer isn’t necessarily “none” - I’d say the fact they don’t have moral agency makes the non-aggression axiom irrelevant. Along the mentally incompetent line, I’m interested if you’d deliver the same punishments to them for their actions as you would the mentally fit - which seems to me required by a flat use of the non-aggression rule. Most framing of lesser punishments for the mentally incompetent are additionally likely to reduce punishment more as moral agency lessens. If you’re not for treating the mentally fit and incompetent alike under the law - and I doubt you are - you need to come up with a way to handle other actors without moral agency.
Of course, there’s a point where a creature is no longer worthy of consideration. The question is where the line is drawn and what properties (pain and suffering are relevant here) we use to draw them. One could drawn the line at humanity by fiat, but the non-aggression rule isn’t going to help there. I think standard libertarian principles are tangential to this question, much like abortion.
As side notes -
This really has nothing to do with racism. Skip, you really think that if a white guy did it people wouldn’t be after his blood? Note that McGwire gets flack just like Bonds whenever he’s in the news (look at the HOF vote); Bonds simply was chasing a bigger record and had more news events - every time he hit a home run (and frequently when he didn’t), the whole “chase” brought the issue up again and again.
The “life of a dog is more valuable” is equally off - if someone ran a human (slave, presumably) fighting ring, complete with rape stand and electrocution, he’d have been stuck in solitary in maximum security for his own protection the moment he got arrested, bail would be impossible, and the fury would unimaginable.
I think the fury is more due to the amount of core news to keep bringing it back up - multiple people involved, lawyering independently; both state and federal investigations; football pre-season; frequent evidence leaks (and significant evidence); and so on keep bringing the issue to the fore again and restarting the discussion.
IanR –
There’s no way to equate dog fighting with industrial agriculture - while I personally find both objectionable, only the former indulges in cruelty for the sake of pleasure.
It is precisely for the sake of pleasure that people eat meat. It’s not necessary at all for the human diet.
I’ll grant you that there is a difference between taking pleasure in a product that always entails massive amounts of suffering, and taking pleasure in massive amounts of suffering for its own sake, but it seems a pretty fine distinction to me.
To claim that animals lack rights simply because they kill or engage in non-consensual sex is silly. Again, most animals who kill do not do so for pleasure, they do so to gain food. They are certainly no worse than murderers (who kill their own kind for pleasure). Yet even if we judged them to be murderers and rapists, that wouldn’t give us the right to make them fight to the death for a few laughs.
A couple of responses. First, very few murderers kill for pleasure. Most of them kill out of a misplaced sense of justice, or of retribution for some wrong that they perceive. Only the very most depraved of humans kill purely for pleasure, and they are depraved by virtue of understanding our shared moral code, and then ignoring it.
Second, I fear that you’ve misunderstood my argument. I’m not saying that animals all stand guilty of particular crimes, and that their current state just happens to be the appropriate punishment. No, I’m saying that they are clearly and obviously incapable of participating in a society where things like crime and punishment make any ethical sense. Therefore they have no rights.
As to the analogy between foie gras and slavery, it only follows if we ascribe to a goose the same moral status we would ascribe to a person. By offering it, you beg the question we are discussing.
Very interesting post Jason, but it seems to me that the arguments ultimately boil down to humans have rights and animals don’t, period. Your ‘big however’ concerning criminals and the mentally incompetent, or toddlers for that matter, seems very relevant. I’m further confounded by, “and even if animals otherwise had the moral agency and moral dignity of people, animals would not deserve rights”, as the question of whether any living thing has these rights seems to come down to whether they’ve been prejudged to be ‘remorseless lifelong criminals’, a label that is debatable for some animals, and whether they do or can respect or understand rights.
Is it because toddlers and psychopaths have the potential to respect and understand rights that justifies granting that they possess rights also? Since there are humans that cannot and do not respect and understand rights, like animals, and keeping in mind that although all animals are remorseless there are plenty who do not do anything ‘criminal’, what is the justification for accepting that psychopaths have rights but caterpillars do not? I’ll admit that the answer to my question may have to do with the ‘category error’ possibility you mentioned.
“How would we treat a human male who behaved toward other people in the same way that a tomcat behaves toward rodents?”
How would we treat a human male who behaved towards other people in the same way that a homeowner behaves towards rodents?
How would we treat a human male who behaved towards other people in the way that a rancher behaves towards cattle?
In other words, denying rights to animals because individuals in one species mistreat individuals of another species seems like an ill-fit analogy. I’m all for eating animals and exploiting them, but that particular analogy doesn’t seem like the correct argument. It is true, of course, that animals give little regard towards members of their own species, too.
While animals do not have the same moral status as humans (and I would describe this as self-evident despite the fact that some disagree), it does not follow that they have the same moral status as rocks. Barring consideration of some divine inspiration, the difference between animals and humans is one of degrees. In many ways animals seem to respond like we do because, in many ways, they are like us.
Of course, this observation does not resolve the question of that moral status. If it is natural for dogs to fight, it is difficult to articulate a basis for prohibition. (That said, I know little about the sport.) I find it repulsive and suspect that it is morally degrading to the fans, but I would say the same about any number of legal activities.
[...] More On Criminalizing Dog Fighting Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty reaches the same conclusion I did in these posts (though he says it much better): If anyone wants to cruelly kill their own animal, that ought to be their own business. Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized [...]
[...] Jason Kuznicki offers a sweeping anti- case I don’t think I buy, but with the best title yet. [...]
Dave L –
[I]t seems to me that the arguments ultimately boil down to humans have rights and animals don’t, period. Your ‘big however’ concerning criminals and the mentally incompetent, or toddlers for that matter, seems very relevant.
It is relevant in one sense only: We avoid cruelty toward criminals and the incompetent. We do not, however, presume that they have any further rights.
Yet the degree to which cruelty is avoided varies, even among humans. We give toddlers every benefit of the doubt; we isolate murderers and restrict them in ways that would be obviously wrong for a toddler. Likewise there are probably degrees here for animals, too, and these questions of degree are likely different for different people. Industrial pig farming honestly doesn’t bother me much. Industrial chimpanzee farming just might.
I’m further confounded by, “and even if animals otherwise had the moral agency and moral dignity of people, animals would not deserve rights”, as the question of whether any living thing has these rights seems to come down to whether they’ve been prejudged to be ‘remorseless lifelong criminals’, a label that is debatable for some animals, and whether they do or can respect or understand rights.
Well, even herbivores ignore the rights of humans. Cows cannot possibly be made to understand what we mean by the concept of “rights.” If you had a neighbor who always ate your flowers and defecated on your lawn, you would probably seek legal penalties for him. I’d say you would have every right to do so. If your neighbor did these things not out of malice, but out of some debility, then confining him may actually make more sense. The same argument applies, but to an even greater degree, for animals, because we give humans more of the benefit of the doubt.
Also, about the “remorseless lifelong criminals” tag — I knew I’d catch heat for that one — It only applies if we assume that predators and prey both should enjoy rights. Once we assume this very simple, very egalitarian principle, then we immediately find that animal predators are by nature evil. They live to violate the rights of others.
This is a ridiculous conclusion, ergo, I don’t think animal rights is a tenable concept.
Is it because toddlers and psychopaths have the potential to respect and understand rights that justifies granting that they possess rights also? Since there are humans that cannot and do not respect and understand rights, like animals, and keeping in mind that although all animals are remorseless there are plenty who do not do anything ‘criminal’, what is the justification for accepting that psychopaths have rights but caterpillars do not? I’ll admit that the answer to my question may have to do with the ‘category error’ possibility you mentioned.
Likening human psychopaths and caterpillars may well be a category error, yes. But I wanted to try to turn the question around a bit, since usually discussions of animal rights focus solely on arguing about the proper categories: Bentham’s suggestion that animals and humans belong together because both suffer equally carries a lot of weight, after all. So I just wanted to grant the premise for a moment, and assume that animals do have rights. What happens then?
Well, with rights come obligations, namely to respect the rights of others. It is overwhelmingly obvious that animals don’t do this. Thus, if we proceed on the premise of animal rights, we land right away in the absurd conclusion that animals should be held criminally accountable. I found this a new enough argument to make a blog post about it. At least, I’d never heard it before. (The fact that I’m finding it a hard argument to convey successfully also tells me the same thing, so I’m actually pretty excited about it.)
Chuck –
You write, “denying rights to animals because individuals in one species mistreat individuals of another species seems like an ill-fit analogy.”
In a world where all animals are assumed to have rights, then it is wrong for a human to kill a zebra. We would certainly agree on this, I think.
But shouldn’t it be equally wrong for a lion to kill a zebra? How is it that lions get all the rights of humans, and then some that go beyond our own? Because animals are allowed to violate the rights of other animals, animal rights ultimately means giving animals more rights than humans. It means making humans second-class citizens. Yet humans are the only animals who can even understand rights as a concept. We are slaves to our moral sense, which tells us not to violate the rights of others. And we are slaves also to those who have no moral sense at all. This can’t be correct.
“So I just wanted to grant the premise for a moment, and assume that animals do have rights. What happens then?
Well, with rights come obligations, namely to respect the rights of others. It is overwhelmingly obvious that animals don’t do this.”
Agreed, but it seems that there’s a leap from there to treating them as ‘property’. I’m having trouble reconciling the statement,
“libertarians would not permit humans to behave cruelly toward either criminals or the mentally incompetent” with what I’m interpreting to be the idea that nearly all animal cruelty is permissible, or at least that we would allow more cruelty to an animal than any human. I’m assuming that libertarians would say that all humans have some rights, regardless of their ability to meet the corresponding obligations. It seems that some mentally ill or brain-damaged people and animals are in the same boat though as far as inability to respect the rights of others or even comprehend rights. To turn it around, on what basis does a libertarian permit cruelty to an animal and not to the very mentally ill. Why couldn’t we give animals some of the rights we afford the mentally ill (like to not be forced to combat each other)?
[...] And, as I already pointed out, what about Protestants? Time was, Catholics and Protestants not only disagreed with one another about theology, but they also passed laws against one another. And why? Because the thought of one’s Protestant neighbor going to Hell was found mentally upsetting to Catholics. And vice versa. [...]
Jesus. I just said exactly the same thing as you, in completely different words.
Freaky.
Hi Jason: Food (whether cruelty-free or not ) for thought! I want to make sure I understand this part:
This seems like an astonishingly sweeping restatement and expansion of the non-aggression principle and what I think all libertarians agree is the bedrock right of self-defense. For one thing, your statement seems to lack the remotest insistence on proportionality. Taken on its face, it means I have license to use literally any degree or kind of force against someone who is not a rights respecter. If I see a guy whom I know is a shoplifter on the street, I can shoot him. Or torture him. Or force him to fight a vandal to the death. If a kid is always “shitting on my lawn,” I can cut off his leg. I can, indeed, torture “unlawful enemy combatants.” It would seem to justify the Objectivist Center’s position that, since Iraqis had not overthrown Saddam Hussein, and Saddam Hussein had launched two aggressive wars, Iraqi civilians have no rights not to be killed, the laws of war notwithstanding.
Is that really what you mean to say? Is proportionality optional? Is necessity - I can kill you if and only if I can’t defend my life from you any other way - just a suggestion? I have a hard time believing that’s your actual position, but I want to make sure.
Is that really what you mean to say?
No.
I do mean to say, though, that rights should be proportional to an entity’s respect for the rights of others, that punishment is appropriate when an agent has the capacity to respect rights and does not, and that a determination of incompetence means that the concept of rights does not apply. (If an entity were incompetent and yet had rights, it would have authority to do even things that rights-having entities do not. This would be an absurdity, I think.)
Also, I had thought it was the ARI that took the very anti-Iraqi civilian position, but in any case, this would be the correct position if and only if the war itself was a compelled act of self-defense on our part. Since it was not, the conclusion is unjustified. All of which makes fighting a war in Iraq that much more morally problematic.
Admittedly, I have only briefly read through these comments, but regardless, I’d like to raise a few points.
I do not believe that animals should be treated as though they have rights, because rights are concept that animals themselves clearly do not respect or even attempt to understand
What I’m curious about is how this allows us to treat animals as we please. If we turn the question of rights on its head for a moment, I’ll ask why must we exploit them at all? You yourself alluded to the idea that the industrial agriculture argument is rendered moot as it is naught more than for reasons of pleasure, tradition, and convenience.
The standard ‘mentally incompetent’ argument has been passed around a few times, and I’m wondering as to how it can be dismissed so easily. For what reasons do we not exploit the severely handicapped, or young children also for that matter? Are they not the same reasons that we should not exploit nonhuman animals? Or, are these reasons invalid as some nonhumans do what they need to do to survive? Unlike us humans, who basically love to get warm and fuzzy with both antiquated tradition and the might-makes-right logic.
Beyond this, why don’t we have a moral obligation to treat nonhumans as something other than property? When was the last time a cow - a herbivore - caused grievous bodily harm? And if such offence is taken to a cow defecating on your lawn, then it might be a bright idea to stop breeding cows en masse in the first place.
Yes, I’m rambling incoherently, but I truly fail to understand the rationale.
Why is this matter even debatable? Because nonhumans don’t have the intellectual capacity, or natural capacity (although the animals humans consume are by and large herbivore, a great many other animals are obviously omnivorous or carnivorous) to act in a fashion that we deem ethical, we are allowed to breed, torture, exploit, and kill them as if they were no more than inanimate objects for the sole purposes of pleasure, convenience and tradition? That moral obligation we impose upon ourselves to care and protect children can be swept under the rug?
To err on the side of compassion is so remarkably challenging isn’t it?
[...] 2. The libertarian arguments against animal rights I’ve seen, most of which stem from the tradition of Rand and/or Rothbard, engage in twin, massive cheats: They make the species the basis of determining human rights, but the kingdom the basis of determining animal rights. They want to enjoin against cruelty to babies and the mentally disabled, so they conjure penumbras and emanations from the capacity of other humans to engage in “moral reason.” They want to permit cruelty to all animals, which they justify by treating all nonhuman species, from dogs to amoeba, as a single class. But if the species is the appropriate level at which to assign human rights, the species may well be the appropriate level to assign (discover?) animal rights. The second cheat from this embryo is, they assign human rights on the basis of the best humans capable of, while denying animal rights based on, in human terms, the “worst” animals are capable of. See Tibor Machen and Jason Kuznicki for examples. [...]
[...] Blog neighbor Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty wrote while I was vacationing on the Mr Vick/dog-fighting kerfuffle and animal “rights”: Why the law needs to get involved, I really don’t understand. If the law were to act here in any fair or consistent way, it would also be forced to destroy a lot of other uses for animals that we mostly find unobjectionable. For every argument you make against foie gras or dogfighting — both practices of longstanding tradition — someone else can come along an make what’s probably an a fortiori case against industrial farming, which obviously involves more pain to more animals, which is of very recent institution, and which bothers relatively few. [...]
[...] I know I’ve dissed animal rights before. But this is still amazing, and potentially the wave of the future: Victimless Leather is grown out of immortalised cell lines which [are] cultured and form a living layer of tissue supported by a biodegradable polymer matrix in a form of miniature stitch-less coat like shape… [...]
[...] rights based on, in human terms, the “worst” animals are capable of. See Tibor Machen and Jason Kuznicki for [...]