Review of Carl Cohen and Tom Regan, The Animal Rights Debate. Lanham, M.d.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, 336 pp. (indexed). ISBN 0-8476-9662-6, US $65.00 (Hb); ISBN 0-8476-9663-4, US $19.95 (Pb).
Nathan Nobis, The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2002, vol. 36, Issue 4, pp. 579-583.
[This version is slightly revised from the published version; there was some awkwardness in the some of the sentences which I have tried to eliminate here]
The Animal Rights Debate is structured as a debate. In the first round, Carl Cohen argues that animals do not and cannot have rights, while Tom Regan argues that they do. In the second round, Cohen and Regan respond to each other. The book would make an ideal main text in a seminar on animals, ethics, and science for advanced undergraduate or graduate students in philosophy, biological sciences, experimental psychology, or the health-professions, including veterinary sciences. Ideally, the book would be supplemented with readings on other influential perspectives on the moral status of animals, especially non-rights-based approaches, and the epistemological and historical controversies surrounding animal-based medical research.
Cohen and Regan give highest regard to moral rights. Rights are construed as "valid" moral claims that must always be respected, in contrast to "interests" that need not always be respected. Both endorse Robert Nozick’s picture of rights as invisible "No Trespassing” signs and hold that individual rights override collective interests, no matter the consequences for the overall good. Both are decidedly anti-utilitarian.
The primary question addressed is whether animals have “the right not to be used like inanimate tools to advance human interests . . . no matter how important we think those human interests to be” (p. 22). Cohen and Regan agree that if animals have this right, then all uses of animals in the food industry, medical and scientific experimentation, and the clothing and fashion industry, as well as other industries and practices that essentially involve harming animals, are morally unjustified and ought to stop. Regan argues that animals do have rights and so abolitionism is morally obligatory. Cohen argues that people who believe animals have rights are “dangerously mistaken” (p. 5).
Cohen uses two general strategies to argue that animals do not have rights. First, he claims: “To say of a pig or a rabbit that it has rights is to confuse categories, to apply to its world a moral category that can have content only in the human moral world” (p. 30). Animals do not have rights because there “is no morality for them; animals do no moral wrong,” and the “concepts of wrong, and of right, are totally foreign” (p. 31). Of course, the fact that animals lack the concept of rights does not show that they lack rights (or lack the property of having rights), since animals lacking the concept of, e.g., 'being furry' doesn't show that they are not furry: in general, lacking a concept does not entail lacking the related property. Cohen holds that, since animals cannot engage in moral deliberation, formulate and act on moral principles, and be autonomous moral agents who are members of moral communities, they cannot have rights. Cohen does not explain how these capacities ground human rights in general and make it wrong to kill an innocent person to advance the interests of others. Is it wrong to kill Sally because she can deliberate and act autonomously on moral principles? If this is the explanation, it is a highly doubtful one. Regan rightly criticizes Cohen for not explaining what justifies claims to rights, what it is about humans that makes them have rights.
Many human beings lack the moral and psychological capacities that Cohen claims are necessary for having rights. Yet most of us think it would be wrong to perform painful experiments on such individuals and kill them, even if doing so would greatly advance our interests. Since some human beings who lack such capacities have rights, such capacities are not necessary for rights possession. For Cohen to deny rights to animals is arbitrary, a case of not treating beings with equal capacities as equals. It is discrimination on the basis of species alone.
Cohen replies that objections like this “miss the point badly” because human infants, the senile, and the severely mentally disabled “have rights because they are human” (p. 37). He says that, “The critical distinction is one of kind” (p. 37). Earlier Cohen held that the kind relevant to rights possession was psychological and moral: roughly, moral agency. Now he says that the relevant kind is biological, not psychological. No adequate justification is given for this switch and why sentient humans beings who lack psychological and moral capacities have rights, yet animals do not. Cohen’s reply to this objection is highly problematic, and his first argument that animals do not have rights is unsuccessful. Appeals to thinkers ranging from Thomas and Augustine to Marx and Lenin, as to “immediate” and “certain” intuitions, do little to defend his view either (p. 32-34).
Cohen’s second strategy to persuade the reader that animals do not have rights is rhetorically and empirically suspect. His sole focus is on the use of animals in medical research and product testing. He says very little about the morality of animal use in any other industry or arena. Cohen repeatedly asks whether the reader thinks that human beings are morally justified in benefiting from animal research. He says that if readers think this, they must “reject the premise [that animals have rights] from which these fanatical convictions flow [that animals morally ought not be used in research]” (p. 25). He also says that, “we will want to know how the adoption of [Regan’s] principles will affect our lives” in order to evaluate Regan’s arguments that animals have rights (p. 241).
Parallel strategies surely were used to determine if minority groups of all kinds have rights. Slave owners might have argued as follows:
“Think about the benefits we slave owners receive from exploiting our slaves. Surely we are morally justified in this. Think about what we would lose if slaves had rights. Once we see how our lives would change if we accepted that they had rights, it is clear that slaves cannot have rights.”
Whether a being has rights cannot be decided by appeal to self-interest.
Cohen’s question for the reader also presupposes that most medical advances, both past and present, “could not have been achieved without the use of laboratory animals” (p. 12). Cohen devotes nearly half his ten chapters to defending this and similar claims, including the claim that, compared to animal-based research, human-based clinical, in-vitro, and epidemiological research, autopsies, and computer and mathematical modeling will probably always be scientifically inferior for understanding and curing human disease. These claims are highly controversial, however. Groups of health care professionals such as The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (pcrm.org), Americans For Medical Advancement (curedisease.com), and The Medical Research Modernization Committee (mrmcmed.org) advocate different conclusions, as Regan notes. Medical historians, and even researchers who use animals, have made many claims that directly contradict Cohen’s claims about the human utility of animal use in research. These are well documented in Ray Greek and Jean Greek’s Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Cost of Experiments on Animals. Hugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks argue in a series of papers leading to their book, Brute Science: Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation, that the animal research paradigm is inconsistent with evolutionary theory. Evolution implies that animals are not, contrary to Cohen’s suggestion, “humans with fur”, and so experimental results from non-human species cannot reliably be extended to us (p. 75). Empirical evidence supports this theoretical insight.
Cohen does not seriously address the scientific objections to the utility of using non-humans to understand human diseases. He does not address the published criticisms of his own views and views like his. Anyone familiar with the scientific objections to the use of animal models in medical research and toxicology will recognize that Cohen has not presented an adequate case that such research is scientifically justified. Cohen has not shown such research to be morally justified, even on wholly speciesistic and humanistic moral assumptions.
To show that Cohen’s case is unsuccessful is not to show that animals have rights. Regan’s argument that animals have rights is predicated on an argument that human beings have rights. Regan surveys a range of moral theories, egoistic and hypothetical contractarianism, virtue ethics, and utilitarianism, and presents provocative and challenging objections to them all. Critics and defenders of these views will find these sections of great interest, especially since Regan’s main objection is that the theories yield not only morally unacceptable results for animals, but for human beings as well.
Regan concludes that an adequate moral theory for human beings must include moral rights. Not taking rights seriously can too easily result in individuals being regarded as having only instrumental value, value only for the benefits they can bring to others. When rights aren't taken seriously, an individual’s “inherent value” is ignored. Rights impose a duty to respect this inherent value and not harm the individual to advance the interests of others.
Regan’s view is Kantian but with a broader view of who has inherent value or moral worth. In Kant’s view, only autonomous, rational persons have inherent value. As a result, Kant seems to lack the resources to explain why human infants and severely mentally challenged adults should not be exploited for their instrumental value, which Regan, Cohen, and most people would find morally horrendous. Regan argues that human beings have inherent value and the right to respectful treatment because they are “subjects of a life” (p. 200). They are conscious, psychologically unified, and have an experiential welfare that can go better or worse for them. They have value beyond their usefulness to others and so deserve respectful treatment.
The inference to animals having rights is simple. Some animals have psychologies that enable them to be subjects of a life, and so things can go better and worse for them. Therefore, they too are not mere “things” to be used, as Cohen aptly puts it, “like inanimate tools to advance human interests” (p. 22). They too have inherent value and have as much right to respectful treatment as marginal human beings. Since marginal human beings have the right not to be eaten, worn, or experimented on for the benefit of others human beings, so do animals of comparable or more advanced psychological capacities. Regan does not argue that all human beings or all animals have rights. He merely argues that if a being is a subject of a life, then it has the right to, at least, not be treated as a thing.
It seems clear that the moral status of a being depends on its psychological capacities, not necessarily its biological species. Possible inadequacies in Regan’s case therefore seem to have little to do with extending rights to non-human animals but with his basic notions of rights, inherent worth, and the duty to respectful treatment. We might easily have thought that rape, murder, child molestation and kidnapping are wrong because of the suffering and harms that come to the victim. According to Regan, however, suffering and harm are “not themselves the fundamental wrong.” What is wrong is that the victims are “treated with a lack of respect” (pp. 153, 198-99). It is not at all clear that this is the most fundamental or best explanation for why such acts are wrong.
If “Mother Teresa and the most unscrupulous used-car salesman” both possess inherent value equally, as do all human and non-human animals who have inherent value, according to Regan, and neither should be reduced to their instrumental value, it is unclear whose life should be saved in a desperate situation where only one can be saved (p. 195). If the car salesman really is the most unscrupulous, then we might very well think that the car salesman should be sacrificed. But what are we to say of the car salesman’s inherent value, that he supposedly possesses equally with Mother Teresa? It is not clear, at least from this text, what Regan’s views imply for comparing human lives in such possible cases, much less comparing human beings to non-human animals or one animal to another. However, this is a hypothetical concern since it is rare that treating non-human animals respectfully ever puts human beings in anything comparable to a sinking lifeboat or a burning building.
Finally, the utility of the language of rights remains unclear. It seems plausible that, for beings whose lives can go better and worse for them, there is a duty to respect them and not use them merely as things to advance the interests of others. That individuals, human or non-human, ought never merely be used, even in minor ways, to advance the overall good is controversial. Clashing views here might come down to fundamental moral intuitions. It seems that to say that a being has rights is just to say that we are obligated to respect it and not sacrifice it or its most important interests for the overall good. If this is so, then rights-talk seems redundant and non-explanatory, since the core of the moral view can be clearly articulated and defended without ever mentioning rights. Rights-talk also seems unhelpful in adjudicating cases of competing moral claims.
However, if the notion of rights is indispensable, and having rights depends on psychological properties, which marginal human beings have, then it would seem difficult for any satisfactory theory of human rights to deny rights to non-human animals, since many animals have psychological capacities comparable to some human beings and can suffer comparable, if not sometimes greater, harms. It seems likely that all attempts to deny rights to animals would either result in marginal humans not having rights or rights being founded on a morally irrelevant basis.
While Cohen and Regan’s theoretical conclusions are very different, it seems that they should agree much more on practical matters than Cohen suspects. Cohen holds that we are obligated to treat animals humanely, to not impose needless pain or death. He condemns hunters and fur-trappers. His reasons might very well imply that nearly all animal agriculture ought to be condemned, especially animal agriculture on factory farms, as well as all other exploitive uses of animals in industry and educational institutions that cannot plausibly be thought necessary to meet any human need. Cohen’s own moral principles and the non-moral facts might imply that, even if Regan is mistaken and non-human animals do not have rights, the overwhelming majority of the uses of animals are morally unjustified and ought to be abolished.
Nathan Nobis
Philosophy Department
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627-0078
USA