animals & rights (triff's notes)

speciecism: the view that moral rights are extended only to human animals.

human exceptionalism: humans have uniquely distinct capacities and it is on the basis of these capacities that humans have moral status over other animals.

person properties: reason, free will, sentience, autonomy. most animals lack the human level of reason and free will. though a dolphin, a gorilla and an elephant can be considered quasi-persons, dogs are getting more attention now (but a dog doesn't have the brain of a dolphin or a primate).*

animals however have sentience. 

legal persons: animals don't respond for themselves.

animal rights' problems:

1- the problem with animal rights is that they can't defend these (a right to life would be paramount. if so, we can't eat them).

2- the scalar** problem: do we extend rights to all animals? it would be impossible. imagine killing insects that attack food, or livestock. just mammals? if so, why not fish, birds, insects? some have suggested "danger of extinction" as a scalar.

in the end humans would have to invoke exceptionalism. 

animal welfare: it's the concern for the treatment of food animals, both during their lives and when they are slaughtered. animals should be pre-stunned prior to slaughter (there are exemptions for religious groups to provide kosher (or shechita) and halal meat.

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*primates have a degree of the following: episodic memory, self-consciousness, self-knowing, self agency, referential and intentional communication, mental time-travel, numerosity, sequential learning, meditational learning, mental state modeling, visual perspective taking, understanding the experiences of others, intentional action, planning, imagination, empathy, metacognition, working memory, decision-making, imitation, deferred imitation, emulation, innovation, material, social, and symbolic culture, cross-modal perception, tool-use, tool-making, cause-and-effect.

** We can think of interests as scalar; crucial interests are weightier than important interests, important interests are weightier than replaceable interests, and all are weightier than trivial interests or mere whims. When there is a conflict of interests, crucial interests will always override important interests, important interests will always override replaceable interests, etc. So if an animal has an interest in not suffering, which is arguably a crucial interest, or at least an important one, and a person has an interest in eating that animal when there are other things to eat, meaning that interest is replaceable, then the animal has the stronger interest and it would be wrong to violate that interest by killing the animal for food if there is another source of food available.