Animal Minds, Animal Souls, Animal Rights by Parker James V.;

Author:Parker, James V.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UPA
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Right and rights

The word right translates two slightly different Latin words, rectus, meaning correct or straight, and ius, meaning justice. Ethical discourse from Greek and Roman times to our own day has been concerned with both the correct and the just thing to do. It wasn’t until the Renaissance and Reformation in the sixteenth century, however, that the idea of rights—a third and plural form of the term—began to enter into wide circulation.

The reason that rights was a latecomer among ideas is that earlier moralists viewed social arrangements from the perspective of rulers rather than individuals in the populace. They taught that kings and nobles, who were assumed to rule by divine dispensation, had responsibilities to their subjects. These moralists spent their efforts on training and counseling those rulers to seek what was right and just.

In 1215, English barons on the field of Runnymede enjoined King John to sign the Magna Carta. That charter specified certain legal curtailments of the King’s privileges and recognized certain entitlements—among them habeus corpus—as rights held by the barons and freemen against the sovereign.

The idea that such rights are derived, eventually, from something more than the will of rulers—from human nature, perhaps, or from God—won general acceptance only slowly over the next three hundred years. By and large, the possible existence of human rights, rooted either in the laws of nature or in divine law, remained an example of what Lonergan called an “unknown-unknown,” something that had not occurred even as a question.

An exception was Aquinas, who lectured only some forty years after Runnymede. Although he didn’t enumerate human rights, let alone discuss the question of animal rights, he did develop a theory of natural rights. By nature, humans are rational and free, and for that reason, he expounded, we have the most basic natural right of self-determination.1

During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, moralists and a new class of political scientists began to view society through the opposite end of the looking glass. They paid more attention to the members than the rulers of society. They discovered human rights that didn’t depend on royal generosity and had to be recognized by rulers and governments.

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