Concetti Chiave
- Animal law and rights are increasingly being taught and discussed in academic settings, yet animals are still heavily exploited.
- Intensive farming and scientific experiments demonstrate the industrial efficiency and indifference with which animals are treated.
- Global warming is linked to human actions, particularly the livestock sector, which surpasses transport in greenhouse gas emissions.
- Philosophers like Descartes viewed animals as unthinking machines, denying them intrinsic rights.
- Rousseau and Bentham emphasized animals' sentience, arguing for their rights and equating animal cruelty to racism.
Animals' philosophy
Today animal law is taught in many law schools, animal rights is the topic of university courses, and there are several organizations for the protection of animals. Yet more animals than ever are being treated as if they were mere things for food, clothing, research: intensive farming breeds and kills millions of animals with industrial efficiency and indifference, while millions of others are used for scientific experiments.
We live in an age when we can no longer afford to behave as If we owned the world.
Many philosophers have taken animal rights into consideration. Consider these three positions:
- Descartes claimed that animals are machines without the ability to think or feel. Hence a dog yelping is no different from a clock chiming. Therefore, animals have no intrinsic rights.
- Kant, as wheel as Locke, said that cruelty to animals was wrong because it was bad not for the animals, but for humans: by mistreating animals, humans accustom themselves to being brutal.
- Rousseau argued that animals might not be rational, but they sure are sentient and so should not be made to suffer. Bentham agreed, adding that cruelty to animals is analogous to racism.
These two philosophers believed that animals have right that umans need to recognize and respect.
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