What a Prominent Columnist’s Tweet Tells Us About Our Approach To Animal Rights

Quite a while ago, I was reading a scathing piece on the celebration of Labor Day by NRO’s Kevin Williamson. After making it amply clear that he’s no fan of unions, he went on to take a swipe at animal rights activists, calling them “animal-rights nuts.”

Being someone who supports animal rights myself, I contacted Kevin on Twitter to register my objection and share with him an excellent pro-animal rights piece by a conservative Matthew Scully, a former speechwriter for George Bush and Paul Ryan.

His immediate response was to denounce Scully’s views, but what he said upon being prodded further was especially revealing.

Now, what does his shooting animals for fun have anything to do with them having rights? (Leave aside the ludicrous proposition that one can’t be cruel to non-human sentient beings.) If animals do, in fact, have rights, it would just mean that he’d been grossly violating them, not that they can’t possibly exist! After all, humans have been brutalized and subjected to all kinds of horror throughout history. That is not used as evidence against the existence of human rights (rightly so). Possessing rights does not automatically protect someone from violence.

There’s a reason I am highlighting and showing the problem with this particular bit of reasoning. What he said so openly is one reason people are so reluctant to accept the fact that animals, like humans, have rights. This is a typical response of a non-vegan:

“How could a pig have rights? I ate bacon just this morning. In fact, almost everyone eats bacon.”

Even if many don’t articulate it explicitly, this is how they seem to think. Now, it’s not as if animal rights have not been established enough by moral philosophers. Consider the very powerful Argument from Marginal Cases expressed by David Graham in the form of a dialogue between an opponent and a proponent of animal rights:

Opponent of animal rights: How can you say that animals have rights? It’s impossible.

Proponent of animal rights: Why?

Opponent: For one thing, animals can’t reason. They can’t be held responsible for their actions. To have rights, you must have these capacities.

Proponent: Wait a minute. Infants can’t reason. Does that mean it’s open season on babies?



Opponent: Well . . . let me think about that.

Welcome to the Argument from Marginal Cases.

So, in short, if you want to deny animals rights on the (very popular) basis that they can’t and will never be able to reason, you’d have to also deny any rights to a terminally ill infant. Same is the case with a mentally deficient adult. This shows that setting the bar at rationality yields nonsensical outcomes. The only way out is to accept that rights depend on sentience, the ability to feel pain or experience sensations.

Then, there is this non-objection objection repeated endlessly: “humans evolved to eat other animals, just as lions evolved to eat deer.” There’s a name for this kind of faulty reasoning: “appeal to nature” or “naturalistic fallacy.” The thing is the way humans or other species evolved tells us nothing about what we ought to do. It does not tell us what behavior is moral and what is not.

Many people steal, lie, rape and murder. Many species engage in infanticide and cannibalism. Notice how that is never invoked to derive a system of morality. No one ever says in these cases, “it’s natural, so it must be morally okay.” We realize that we have all sorts of tendencies; being ethical involves realizing which of our actions harm others and curbing them.

So, it’s not as if there is any intellectual objection to the concept of animal rights that keeps a large number of people from accepting its validity. Instead, it’s the more mundane fact that seeing so many animals used, tortured and killed for human convenience somehow makes it harder to accept that they could have rights. (Also, isn’t it just plain convenient?)

This isn’t a unique situation: when blacks were owned as slaves, anyone saying that they possess the same rights as whites would be laughed at. It would be just as obvious that blacks are meant to be owned and used, like it is now to own and use animals. It is baffling that many fail to see the obvious parallel here. (If you are saying, “but blacks are humans, these are animals,” you are falling prey to the same kind of essentialism that the racists employed; sentience matters, not attributes such as species and race.)

In a world where most of the meat and dairy products come from extremely cruel factory farms, the only moral thing to do is to expand our circle of empathy: to recognize that it’s wrong to use animals for our selfish ends, to go vegan and thus stop participating in and funding this violence.

It’s not even difficult once you see a pig or a chicken the way you see your dog:


Want to know more about how animals are treated in farms? Watch this 60-second video of treatment of pigs, or this award-winning documentary Earthlings. You can also read this informative post at What I Vegan.

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On the Left’s favorite catchphrase “Money Isn’t Speech”


“Money isn’t speech.”











