Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton, “Animal Rights.” Chapter 1, pages 25-42, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, Linda Kalof, editor, 2017.
- The term “animal rights” is not used in a consistent fashion; here, a right is “a way of protecting an interest [p. 25]”
- Rights protect interests even when the consequences of protecting that interest might not be desirable -- though rights need not be absolute, they can give way to extreme consequences.
- Animals traditionally have been “things,” and mistreatment was bad if the mistreated animals were someone else’s property, or if such behavior might cascade to direct human harms.
- Francione and Charlton suggest that any balancing of interests will always shortchange animals, as long as they are considered property.
- Some early animal rights activists include: Lewis Gompertz (1784?-1861), an SPCA founder, author, and vegan; Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt (1851-1939), author of Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892); the Vegan Society (1944) (including the word “vegan,” from Donald Watson and his (future) wife Dorothy); and the Oxford Group, coalescing in the mid-1960s.
- Singer's review of the Oxford Group's book helped to publicize animal issues. But Francione and Charlton's abolitionism differs considerably, in their view, from Peter Singer’s utilitarian approach. Singer "clearly regards animal life as having less value than human life [p. 32];" so, he leaves room for allowing human interest to almost always trump animal interests.
- Further, Singer is a proponent of “so like us” (in Martha Nussbaum's phrase) thinking, in that he believes that the genetic and cognitive similarity between humans and great apes suggests that primates "deserve greater legal protection than other nonhumans [p. 32]."
- Singer also supports animal welfare (as opposed to animal rights) and single-issue causes (like cage-free eggs), and he ignores the property issue that is central to Francione and Charlton-style abolitionism.
- Tom Regan, the author of The Case for Animal Rights (1983), comes close than does Singer to abolitionism, and his book is really the impetus for modern animal rights (as opposed to welfare), in that the rights do not give way when overbalanced by bad consequences. For Regan, animals are “subjects of a life,” with equal inherent value to humans. We need to respect that inherent value, and cannot use animals solely as a means to our ends; thus “institutionalized exploitation” must be abolished.
- Francione and Charlton diverge from Regan with respect to the lifeboat case. Regan maintains that "if we are in the proverbial lifeboat with a dog and a human and have to decide whether to throw out the dog or a large number of dogs or the human, the harm suffered by the human will be worse than that of any of the dogs because a human has more 'opportunities for satisfaction' than a dog does, so death is a greater harm for the human [p. 34]." But this exception could swallow the rule, and allow institutionalized exploitation in due to qualitatively different values of human versus animal lives.
- “The abolitionist approach rejects all animal use [p. 34].” Why? Animals matter morally, so they cannot be mere means to our ends, and hence, cannot be property. Therefore, all institutionalized exploitation of animals must end.
- Alternatively (but equivalently and without invoking rights), we can’t impose unnecessary suffering, while the common uses of animals for our pleasure impose harms without necessity.
- A potential exception is the use of animals for medical advancements, but even this cannot be justified if we would not be willing to use “similarly situated humans [p. 35].”
- Abolitionists don’t support reforms for better conditions for animals, like cage-free initiatives. These types of reforms wrongly suggest that there is a humane way to exploit animals, and might perpetuate such exploitation. For similar reasons, abolitionists do not support “single-issue” campaigns, like fur bans.
- The way to promote the goal of eliminating human exploitation of animals is through non-violent vegan advocacy.
- As with Bentham, for abolitionists, sentience is the only condition: any sentient being cannot be used as property for our purposes.
- In practice, animal welfare laws only rule out economically inefficient procedures – they forbid unnecessary suffering, while accepting customary suffering within industries that are themselves unnecessary.
