Greenpeace

Most people, even those who to an extent support animal rights and think it wrong to cause suffering to any creature, still believe that the moral status of all humans is somehow significantly different from that of all nonhuman animals and that, consequently, the moral obligations owed to nonhuman animals, while possibly legitimate, are significantly different (and significantly less vital) than those owed to humans. I question this assumption on the grounds that there is no legitimate basis for making such a distinction.

Anyone who has studied psychology and neuroscience enough can tell you that the differences between humans and other animals are differences of degree and not of kind. I don’t want to argue for this premise as it is well supported by science and doesn’t need philosophical justification. If anyone disagrees with it I challenge them to name the quality that all normally functioning (not mentally retarded, not senile, etc.), adult humans possess fully and that no other animal possesses at all.

That said, it could be argued that humans possess some quality to a degree necessary to achieve a different moral status, and that no other animals possess the quality to the same degree. If this is the case, I again challenge anyone making this claim to name what this quality is, where the degree is at which that quality justifies a significant change in moral status, and why this point is the relevant one. I am willing to bet that this cannot be done and that any quality and degree of that quality chosen will be arbitrary at best, and that most likely there will be either humans who wouldn’t meet the given criteria or animals who would, or both.

Even if that weren’t the case, however, this type of argument suffers from another serious problem. If it is degree of possession of a certain quality which gives humans greater moral worth than other animals, then the same logic can and should lead us to conclude that some humans have greater moral worth than other humans. There are two ways in which this is true, the first of which is recognized much more consistently. The first is the difference between human children and human adults. Human toddlers, for example, are approximately the equivalents of chimpanzees in most ways. Why, then, do human children have a higher moral status than chimpanzees? There are two common ways of answering this question and I think both are bad. The first is to say the difference is that human children will eventually develop into human adults, whereas chimpanzees will remain chimpanzees. I am not at all convinced that the future potential of a given being should relevantly affect its moral status, but even it does, this potential does not apply in the case of, say, a human toddler who has a fatal disease and will certainly not live to be an adult. Many similar cases can be given, and I think that in all of them we want to say the child has the same moral status as other children. The second way of answering the question is to say that it is wrong to harm human children because of the suffering other humans go through as a result.  But it seems extremely odd to say that the reason it's wrong to harm children is because their parents (or other humans who hear about it) will suffer.  We think it's wrong to harm the child for the child's sake.  This argument also doesn't explain why it would be wrong to harm or kill children in cases where other humans would not suffer or would suffer very little--for example an orphan child with no caretaker, or a newborn baby whose parents don't want it and have no surviving relatives who would regret the baby's loss.

The second way in which the logic of degree should lead us to conclude that some humans have a higher moral status than others (the one which is more rarely mentioned and yet, I think, serves as a more telling argument) is that the capacities of some normally functioning human adults are far greater than the capacities of others. This is true of any of the qualities that I can imagine to be morally relevant (ability to reason, richness of experience, ability to recognize and participate in moral behavior). I think the difference between the most intelligent human adults and an average human adult is probably as great as the difference between an average human adult and a human child or a chimpanzee. These qualities do not either exist or not exist, they exist on a scale along which different humans and different animals fall at different places, with considerable overlap and many humans being significantly further along the scale. If we are going to make moral distinctions based on degree then some humans are going to turn out more valuable than others and some nonhuman animals are going to turn out to be more valuable than some humans. Unless we want to say that Stephen Hawking and John Nash have more rights or deserve greater consideration than most of the rest of us, we should avoid this way of doing ethics. And, quite apart from these dangers, I think this method is completely misguided.

I think the above argument covers the types of reasoning that most people use, but there are two others I want to consider: that humans have a different moral status because they can participate in a contractual moral agreement while animals cannot, and that humans have a different moral status because they have souls or because God has given them that status.

The second consideration is by far the easier to answer: to make such an argument you need to justify belief in a soul (and furthermore, a soul that all humans have and that animals don’t and, even beyond that, the idea that this soul makes a relevant moral difference) or belief in God (and more specifically a God who has given humans a greater moral status and, perhaps most difficult of all, the idea that the whims of some arrogant deity are morally relevant). This has never been done and I doubt that it's going to happen anytime soon. If your religious beliefs are based in faith and not reason, then you should be responsible enough to recognize that you cannot justifiably treat other beings in significantly different ways (specifically ways harmful and prejudicial to them) simply because of a belief you cannot prove to be true.

The first consideration is worth taking more seriously. The first thing to note is that this argument assumes a contractualist theory of ethics, which few philosophers would agree with, and so anyone wanting to make this argument would first need to argue successfully for such a theory. Even if this were done, however, I don’t think contract ethics provides a firm basis for making moral distinctions between humans and other animals. There is little or no evidence to suggest that all normally functioning adult humans are capable of participating in moral contracts in ways than no other animals are. The fact is that the ‘moral’ behavior of most humans is just a combination of instinct and conditioning, and very rarely the product of rational deliberation. Nonhuman animals are capable of acting in these same ways. Arguably, some nonhuman animals are also capable of deliberating and making decisions to some extent—the same as humans are. There are few, if any, humans who consistently behave in ways dictated by a type of rational deliberation that other animals are not capable of. Most of these arguments are based in a simple misunderstanding of the way humans or animals (or both) think and behave. Once these issues are cleared up and a realistic picture of human and animal psychology is formed, there is little or no basis for making firm distinctions.

What, then, is the basis for these distinctions? I think there is none. I do not deny that there are differences between humans and animals, even very big ones, but such differences also exist between humans and I don’t think any of them give some creatures a significantly different moral status from others. The reason it is wrong to torture, for example, applies equally to all creatures: they suffer, and suffering is bad.