Animal Rights and Science

Question: Your center's position on animal rights is negative. Your position is based upon the belief that because rights are obtained from reasoning, and animals cannot reason, they cannot have rights.

Yet you do not provide references from a qualified animal behaviorist that support your claim that no animal can reason. According to acclaimed animal rights advocate and animal behaviorist Jane Goodall, a chimpanzee can demonstrate analytical reasoning. Some impaired adult humans cannot. Many children cannot.

Therefore, what you use to dismiss animals and there rights can be equally transferred to dismiss children and the disabled their rights from harm.

I am interested in hearing from your center and how they consider these elaborations. Yet I highly advise that the center actually speak to an animal behaviorist qualified to speak of the capacities animals have, rather than a non-animal scientist offering his or her presuppositions on animals he or she have never studied the behavior of and cannot cite specific references to support his or her conclusions.

Answer: The issue you brought up lies more in the realm of philosophy than science, because it can be answered without specialized scientific knowledge, with the help of established facts. That animals are not fully rational beings is easily provable by a layperson without the expertise of an animal behaviorist, and it is a fact of reality that no scientist can alter.

While animals can clearly feel sensations and perceive their surroundings, for the most part they are unable to think in conceptual terms. This means that they cannot integrate their knowledge of their surroundings and use it to make the type of advances that human beings can. Ayn Rand details this further in her book The Virtue of Selfishness:

“The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations which is the faculty of perception....An animal is guided not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts...It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further.” (19)

An animal’s actions are therefore largely instinctual and require no volitional rational faculty. This is demonstrated by the fact that most animals can survive on their own from the time they are born by their instinct. But human infants cannot do this because they have not acquired the rational faculty that they need to deal with their surroundings.

The most straightforward confirmation that animals do not possess a rational faculty is the fact that while human beings have made several tremendous advances over time, all animals (including those that have close genetic links to humans) have remained at the same level at which they started out. Our advanced civilization is the result of achievements made by the human mind, specifically by the rational faculty possessed by human beings. Animals continue to lead the same lives they led hundreds of generations ago, which is the best proof that they are not capable of the same level of reasoning as us.

To go a step further: suppose chimpanzees were actually capable of some degree of rational thought, and we did accord them rights, what rights would these be? The right to life (being the most fundamental right that humans are entitled to)? That would mean that humans would be restrained in their behavior toward chimps because we would recognize this right, but it places no restriction on the chimps’ behavior toward humans. Even if we were to recognize their rights, they would certainly not recognize ours (because they are not, in fact, capable of dealing with us in a rational context). And rights cannot exist unless recognized and respected equally by both sides. Therefore even if higher animals are capable of some sort of reasoning, they are still incapable of living by a system of rights.

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Rights cannot exist unless recognized and respected equally by both sides.

While human children do not possess the full workings of a rational mind, they are still entitled to the right to life because childhood is a temporary and natural state of human development and this child will eventually grow into a rational being. Children are entitled to the right to life, which in their case translates into the right to remain free from physical harm inflicted by others.

As for mentally impaired people: if they have or had the potential to be capable of rational thought—if their problem is temporary or occurs in old age alone, then they are still entitled to the right to life, which is the right to be free from the use of unwarranted physical force. However a human who is born without the mental capacity to reason (i.e., very severely mentally impaired) and who will never acquire this ability (as a normal infant would), is not entitled to the same natural rights. He would be incapable of any sort of productive activity and would not be able to live in human society independently. In most cases, normal humans would still not physically hurt such a person, but this does not remove the fact that a non-rational entity is not entitled to the natural rights that rational humans have.

Ayn Rand addresses the question of rights in detail in her book The Virtue of Selfishness in the chapter “Man’s Rights.”

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