I don’t really want to be in the position where I feel like I have to blog about everything that appears in the media on animal rights, especially since the same arguments tend to get repeated over and over again. But since this piece appeared in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, it might be worth looking at where it goes wrong.

The author, Russell Paul La Valle, writing about the Spanish Parliament’s impending protection of great apes, explains why animals can’t have rights:

Should animals have rights? The quick and only logical answer is no. A “right” is a moral principle that governs one’s freedom of action in society. This concept is uniquely, and exclusively, human — man is the only being capable of grasping such an abstraction, understanding his actions within a principled framework and adjusting his behavior so as not to violate the rights of others. The source of rights is man himself, his nature and his capacity for rational thought. To give rights to creatures that are irrational, amoral and incapable of living in a rights-based environment makes a mockery of the very concept of rights and, ultimately, threatens man.

For starters, it’s just not true that we only ascribe rights to beings capable of grasping abstractions, understanding their actions within a principled framework, and adjusting their behavior so as not to violate the rights of others. Infants, children, the severly mentally retarded, the comatose, and those suffering from dementia all have rights, but none of them meet this stringent set of conditions. They depend on others to press their claims and protect their legitimate interests, which doesn’t stop them from being rights-bearers. Why shouldn’t the same hold for animals?

Personally, I’m not wedded to the language of rights. I think it serves some useful purposes, particularly in setting strong moral limits to what may be done to recognized rights-bearers. But the language of rights can easily be taken, as it seems to be here, to mean that morality is fundamentally an agreement between rational adults to respect certain limits in their treatment of each other for the purposes of furthering their self-interest. When morality is conceived of in these terms, “marginal” cases tend to be pushed to, well, the margins of moral concern. The weak, the mentally disabled, and those who don’t meet a certain level of “rationality” end up morally less important.

This “contractualist” understanding of morality manages to ignore what are, for most of us, the lion’s share of our duties to others. Duties to family, friends, compatriots, ancestors, posterity, distant strangers, animals, the biosphere, and God don’t arise from agreements between self-interested parties. Giving undue prominence to quasi-contractual relationships seriously distorts the broader moral landscape.

Furthermore, it’s contestable whether all animals are “irrational” and “immoral” if this is taken to mean that don’t exhibit these capacities to any degree. Evolutionary theory should lead us to expect that animals exhibit degrees of rational and moral behavior, and experience bears this out. “Rationality” is not something that appears, full-grown in all its majesty, only with human beings.

Mr. La Valle continues:

Unlike most mammals or other types of creatures, humans are not born with instinctual, inherited knowledge of how to survive. Rather, man’s survival is achieved through reason, which allows him to integrate the facts of his surroundings and apply this knowledge to use and shape the natural world for his preservation and advancement. This includes the use of animals, whether for food, shelter or other necessities.

As the Nobel laureate Joseph Murray has observed, “Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacement, and all vaccinations.” Indeed, animal research and clinical study is paramount in the discovery of the causes, cures and treatments of countless diseases, including AIDS and cancer.

Cruelty to animals is of course repugnant and morally indefensible. Yet we should not lose sight of who we are or of our place in the world. Yes, humans have a responsibility as stewards of our domain, but not at our own expense or with the mentality that a cat is a rat is a chimp is a person.

Once again Mr. La Valle betrays an odd and extremely outdated view of animals’ lives. Modern studies of animals hardly support the idea that all non-human animals live solely according to instinct, and not by learning from their environment and applying that knowledge. Recent decades have seen an explosion in the understanding of the social and emotional lives of animals. La Valle, by contrast, seems to be operating with something like a Cartesian understanding of the difference between human and non-human animals.

It’s also odd, to say the least, to infer that because human beings are superior in at least some ways to non-human animals that they are licensed to use animals for whatever purposes they deem necessary. One person who certainly didn’t hold to human/non-human egalitarianism, and who was philosophically light-years away from, say, Peter Singer, but opposed the heedless exploitation of animals was C.S. Lewis:

We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men. And we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for man, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector: that we ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us….If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, or capitalists for the same reasons. (“Vivisection,” from God in the Dock)

It’s good, of course, to oppose cruelty to animals, but in practice this all too often means opposing cruelty only when no human interest (expansively defined) is at stake. For instance, if our animal cruelty laws don’t prevent factory farming or cutting open the brains of apes for research purposes, how sincere is our professed opposition to cruelty? If we hold that that any human interst, no matter how trivial, always trumps the vital interests of animals, how different is that really from “might makes right”? To talk about “animal rights” means, at the very least, that animals don’t exist for our sake, or as raw material for our purposes, but have their own lives to lead and a claim to being left alone to lead them.