Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? by Gary L. Francione

Author:Gary L. Francione [Francione, Gary L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Abolitionism
Amazon: B00511N2X0
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2010-07-28T21:00:00+00:00

Animals as Spiritual Inferiors

The second reason for denying animals the basic right not to be treated as things is that although animals are sentient and have an interest in not suffering, God has given us permission to ignore those interests.4 Although we post-Enlightenment types like to think of Western culture as secular and as upholding the separation of church and state, Western culture has its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that tradition has had a profound influence on our thinking about animals and on their legal status as property. As we saw in Chapter 3, although the concept of property is ancient and has taken different forms, and although animals have long been regarded as property, the primary architect of our current concept of private property, and of animals as private property, was John Locke. Moreover, we saw that Locke maintained that the origin of property rights as a general matter was the absolute right that God had supposedly given to humans to use and kill animals. Locke’s theory of private property and his view that animals are property, both of which have had an enormous effect on British and American law, were based directly on the Book of Genesis, in which God created humans in his image and gave “dominion” to us over the earth and all of the animals with whom we share the planet. Locke argued that because humans were made in God’s image, there cannot be any “Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one anothers uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours.”5 Locke opposed treating humans as property and therefore opposed slavery. He interpreted God’s grant of dominion as a license for human domination over the “Inferior Creatures” intended for the “benefit and sole Advantage” of humans, who may use and “may even destroy” them.6 For Locke, God’s grant of dominion over animals meant that we had divine permission to exercise domination over them.

According to Locke and others in the same theological tradition, the Bible established that animals could have no moral significance; we could have no direct moral or legal obligations to them. As we saw earlier, to the extent that Locke regarded inflicting gratuitous suffering on animals to be morally problematic, his only concern was that such conduct would tend to make us treat each other less kindly. Locke’s theory is inconsistent with Bentham’s humane treatment principle—and with any standard that accords moral significance to animals. One cannot simultaneously maintain that animals are inferiors created by God as human resources and that animals have moral significance. If we believe that animals and humans can never have similar interests because animals are our spiritual inferiors, created by God exclusively as means to human ends, then the principle of equal consideration can never be applicable to animal interests. Indeed, this is exactly the problem we encountered in the context of the animal welfare laws. We claim to accord animals some moral

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