PHI 2630 1st Edition Lecture 8 Outline of Last Lecture I. Lecture Notesa. Moral Agents vs. Moral PatientsII. Carl Cohen, Do Animals Have Rights?a. Two Reasons for Answering Nob. Rightsc. Objections to Tom ReganOutline of Current Lecture II. Nadine Strossen, Why Censoring Pornography Would Not Reduce Discrimination Or Violence Against Women.III. Peter Singer, “All Animals are Equal”a. Lecture Notesb. Reading NotesCurrent LectureI. What is the morally relevant difference between humans and non-human animals?II. If one wants to justify treating non-human animals differently than humans, one has to explain what grounds there are for this kind of treatment.III. Compare the following scenarios:a. Torturing animals for funb. Hunting (sports/trophy)c. Using animals for medical testsd. Using animals for beauty product testinge. Eating animalsf. Do you think all of the above scenarios are morally justifiable?g. If not, which ones and why? What is the difference between the acceptable and unacceptable cases, if any?IV. Moral agents and moral patientsa. Moral agents: “have a variety of sophisticated abilities, including in particular the ability to bring impartial moral principles to bear on the determination of what, These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor’s lecture. GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes, not as a substitute.all considered, morally ought to be done and, having made this determination, tofreely choose or fail to choose to act as morality, as they conceive it, requires.”b. Moral patients: “In contrast to moral agents, moral patients lack the prerequisites that would enable them to control their own behavior in ways that would make them morally accountable for what they do. A moral patient lacks the ability to formulate, let alone bring to bear, moral principles in deliberating about which one among a number of possible acts it would be right or proper to perform. Moral patients, in a word, cannot do what is right, nor can they do whatis wrong.”V. Carl Cohen, Do Animals Have Rights?a. Cohen believes noi. Non-human animals lack moral rights even though humans have moral obligations with regard to them.ii. Rebuttal of Tom Regan, whose argument depends on the claim that nonhuman animals, like human beings, have inherent value and thereforehave moral rights.1. This commits the fallacy of equivocation by attributing different meanings to the term “inherent value.”b. Right: a valid claim, or potential claim, made by a moral agent, under principles that govern both the claimant and the target of the claim.i. If animals have rights they certainly have the right not to be killed, even to advance our important interests.ii. Rights differ from interests. We may have an interest in learning how to vaccinate against certain diseases, but we do not have a right to learn such things. 1. We use mice or monkeys because there is no other way. There is and will be no way to determine the reliability and safety of new vaccines without repeated tests on live organisms. We cannot use people, so we must use animals or we will never have such lifesaving vaccines.c. Objections to Tom Regani. Regans’s Position1. Believing that rats have rights as humans do, Regan was convincedthat killing them in medical research was morally intolerable.a. The harms others might face as a result of the dissolution of some practice or institution is no defense of allowing it to continue. No one has a right to be protected against being harmed if the protection in question involves violating the rights of others. No one has a right to beprotected by the continuation of an unjust practice, one that violates the rights of others. b. On the rights view, we cannot justify harming a single rat merely be aggregating the many human and humane benefits that flow from doing it. Not even a single rat is to be treated as if that animal’s value were reducible to his possible utility relative to the interests of others.ii. Cohen’s Objections1. Cohen’s argument has extraordinary consequencesa. We can no longer eat animals.b. Live-saving studies will have to stop, and there is generally no alternative to the use of animals in these studies.iii. Animals do not have rights1. Rights entail obligations. However, obligations do not entail rights.a. Therefore, although many obligations are owed by humansto animals, it does not follow that animals have rights.2. Animals cannot be the bearers of rights because the concept of rights is essentially human – it is rooted in and has force within a human moral world. To say of a rat that it has rights is to confuse categories, to apply to its world a moral category that has content only in the human moral world.a. Imagine a lioness attacking a baby zebra to feed her young.If the zebra has a right to live, we ought to intervene, if we can, on behalf of right. But we do not intervene, though we surely would if the lioness was about to attack a humanbaby. We justify different responses to humans and to zebras on the ground (implicit or explicit) that their moral stature is very different. b. Rights are of the highest moral consequence, but lions and zebras and rats are totally amoral – there is no morality for them, they do no wrong, ever. This is because they are moral patients, not moral agents (see above). To be a moral agent is to be able to grasp the generality of moral restrictions on our will.i. Humans understand that some things, which may be in our interest, must not be willed. We exhibit moral autonomy by laying down moral laws for ourselves.1. Though infants and some mentally handicapped people cannot make moralclaims or judgments, it must be noted that it is not individual persons who qualify for the possession of rights, but rather rights are universally human.ii. Dogs know there are certain things they must not do – but they know this only as the outcome of learning about avoiding the pains they may suffer isthey do what had been taught forbidden. It is in their interest to obey. They do not, however, know that any conduct is
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