Following up a bit on this post, in his book Morals, Reason, and Animals, philosopher S.F. Sapontzis has a helpfully clear discussion of just what animal liberationists are and are not claiming when they talk about “equal rights” for animals.

First, animal liberationists do not claim that animals do, or should, have all the same rights as human beings. This would be absurd, because animals don’t have an interest in, say, the right to an education or freedom of religion. “Recognizing that rights are tied to interests and that animals do not have all the interests we do (e.g., in religion and education), animal liberationists recognize that it would be nonsensical to seek for animals all the rights we require” (p. 79). Sapontzis identifies three broad rights that liberationists might agree they are seeking for animals: 1) the “right to live their lives according to their nature, interests and intelligence,” 2) the “right to live in a habitat ecologically sufficient for normal existence,” and 3) the “right to be free from exploitation” (p. 79). This is pretty radical stuff, but hardly the same thing as granting animals the same rights as human beings.

Second, liberationists aren’t committed to saying that the rights of animals do, or should, enjoy equal priority with the rights of human beings. He quotes Peter Singer to this effect:

A rejection of speciesism does not imply that all lives are of equal worth.[…] It is not arbitrary to hold that the life of a self-aware being, capable of abstract thought, of planning for the future, of complex acts of communication, and so on, is more valuable than the life of a being without these capacities. (quoted on p. 79)

And, lest this be thought a particular quirk of Singer’s utilitarianism, Tom Regan takes a similiar position in his The Case for Animal Rights.

In cases of genuine conlfict, then, such as so-called lifeboat scenarios, there is nothing irrational about holding that animals have the sort of basic rights listed above and that human rights should take precedence. As Sapontzis puts it,

We cannot infer from the principles used when we are forced to choose the lesser of two evils to the principles of moral status in force when such a hard choice is not required. Such emergency principles are invoked not as extensions of common moral principles but as auxiliaries needed because those common principles do not provide satisfactory guidance in these uncommon situations. Consequently, it is not self-contradictory to say that when we can fulfill both human interests (e.g., in food) and animal interests (e.g., in life), we ought (morally) to do so, but when we cannot fulfill the interests of both, we ought (morally) to give preference, within the bounds of fairness, to fulfilling the interests of those beings capable of the greater range of moral actions. (p. 80)

Talking about “equality” for animals, then, means allowing that they have an equal right, other things being equal, to have their particular interests respected:

Thus, animal liberation seeks neither to extend to animals the same set of rights enjoyed by humans nor to deny that normal human life–assuming that we ordinarily have a greater range of capacities for making the world a morally better place and will put these capacities into action–can have a greater moral worth than animal life. Rather, animal liberationists contend that just as it would be immoral to follow Swift’s “modest proposal” routinely (and avoidably) to sacrifice some people’s interest in life in order to fulfill others’ interest in food, so it should be immoral routinely (and avoidably) to sacrifice animals’ interest in life for such purposes. (p. 81)

Sapontzis concedes that what is or is not “avoidable” is an empirical question, and something to be determined on a case-by-case basis. But what is incontestable, I think, is that, by and large, we scarcely give that question any consideration. That’s the difference between animal liberation and anti-cruelty movements, laudable as those might be. Anti-cruelty movements accept the routine use of animals for human purposes as a given; meanwhile, the whole point of animal liberation is to challenge it.