In a previous post, I explored the question of whether access to clean water should be declared a “human right”.  One key question from that post that I avoided for the sake of brevity was “can creatures besides humans have natural rights?”  This post will investigate that question.

I’ll start by introducing a concept called “moral status”, follow by discussing the different possible manners in which entities can possess moral status, and end with my perspective on the original question

This post leans heavily upon the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), specifically its superb post on The Grounds of Moral Status.

Natural Rights and Moral Status

One might ask, “which entities qualify for natural rights?”  It turns out that this is a *really* hard question to answer in comprehensive way that isn’t arbitrary, doesn’t have frightening edge cases, or both. Fortunately for us, we can avail ourselves of hundreds (thousands?) of years of thought on the topic.  To do so, however, we’ll need to modify our terminology a bit.

We’ve already discussed that natural rights are rights carried by some entities (humans, in our previous discussion) that are intrinsically tied to some innate aspect of that type of entity.  That is, they are independent of context, laws, culture, or other human rules-based systems.  This is sufficiently close to the philosophical concept of “Moral Status” that deciding an entity has moral status necessarily implies that it has natural rights as long as the reason the entity possesses moral status is tied to an innate characteristic of the entity.

What is Moral Status?

Moral status is a property that, when possessed by an entity (such as by a human), means that other entities capable of autonomous action must consider that entity’s interests and well being in performing actions that affect it.  Per the SEP:

At the most general level, there are two ways of understanding moral status, or what others sometimes call “moral standing” or “moral considerability.” On the utilitarian approach…moral considerability (their preferred term) is a matter of having one’s interests (e.g., the intensity, duration, etc. of one’s pleasure or pain) factored into the calculus that determines which action brings about the greatest utility. On the non-utilitarian approach, to have moral status is for there to be reasons to act for the sake of the entity or its interest, reasons which are prior to, and may clash with, what the calculation of the overall best consequences would dictate.

To put this in context, what this is basically saying is that if an entity possesses moral status, other autonomous agents:

• Have an obligation to avoid negatively interfering in the affairs of that entity
• Have a reason to aid that entity in times of distress
• Have a reason to treat that entity fairly

Sounds similar to the negative, natural rights we talked about previously, doesn’t it?

Fractional vs. Binary Moral Status

When thinking about moral status, one must consider whether it is something that can be possessed in different amounts (fractional moral status) or if it is a switch that is either flipped or not (binary).

Fractional Moral Status

While they wouldn’t necessarily be aware of it, I would conjecture that most people in modern Western cultures naturally fall into a belief in fractional moral status, and for good reason.  Allowing for degrees of moral status provides much greater flexibility in moral thinking than binary moral status.

To illustrate this, consider the scenario where humans are at the top of a moral status hierarchy, smart mammals such as dolphins and monkeys below humans, dumb mammals such as dogs below them, and non-mammals such as fish and mosquitoes below them.  In this state of affairs, it would be wrong to torture a dog, but it’s not as wrong as torturing a human, and torturing a mosquito would be more an indication of possible mental illness rather than immorality.  The “wrongness” of the action is tied to the degree of moral status possessed by the animal being acted upon.

Binary Moral Status

The alternative to accepting gradations in moral status is to believe that moral status is something that an entity either has, or does not have, with no possible middle ground.  It allows the believer to categorize a very specific group of entities as being worthy of moral consideration and absolutely denying moral consideration to all other entities.

This has some convenient properties if one were so inclined to exploit them.  For example, if one posited that only humans have the moral status switch flipped, then one would not need to consider the well being of animals in scientific testing or the conversion of wilderness areas into farmland (at least from the perspective of the animals).

Scalar vs. Threshold Moral Status

While allowing for gradations of Moral Status is useful, it raises a further question – is there a maximum amount of Moral Status an entity can have?  If we were to say that humans are wrong to kill because they’re intelligent, would a creature more intelligent than humans be even more wrong to kill than a human (scalar moral status)?  Would the interests and concerns of a super-intelligent AI outweigh the interests of a large number of humans, or even all of humanity? Or do we say that both humans and super-intelligent AI’s meet the qualifications for the maximum degree of moral status and therefore their interests are equally weighted (threshold moral status)?

Scalar Moral Status

Scalar moral status makes the relative weighting of moral obligation easy, as long as you have some equation to accurately measure the grounds of moral status (such as intelligence) and assign it to a particular entity.  It lets us assess that Entity X has intelligence 100, assess that Entity Y has intelligence 200, and determine that Entity Y’s interests carry twice (200 ÷ 100 = 2) the weight of Entity X’s in our moral calculus.  The lack of upper bound means that if Entity Y’s intelligence is effectively infinite relative to Entity X, its interests would carry infinitely more weight than Entity X’s.

The downside to scalar moral status is that it results in some very sharp edges that run counter to commonly-held Western conceptions of morality. For example, if we say that moral status is assigned based on intelligence, and we know that intelligence is not equally distributed among humans, then we cannot say that all “all men are created equal” in the classical liberal sense of the Founding Fathers.

Threshold Moral Status

Threshold moral status allows us to assert the equality of all men by saying there is a maximum degree of moral status that any one entity can have, called Full Moral Status, and all humans qualify for Full Moral Status.  However, it has its own difficulties which must be discussed.  The key problem is that threshold definitions seem inevitably arbitrary.

If we assign moral status based on a single factor (such as intelligence), the maximum amount of that factor we consider is seemingly arbitrary.  While it would be convenient for us humans to say that human-level-intelligences qualify for Full Moral Status, but mosquito-level-intelligences don’t, there does not appear to be a deeper principle we can appeal to in order to justify that cut-off value.  If we assign moral status based on multiple factors, we retain the problem of arbitrary maximums and add the problem of arbitrary relative weighting between those factors.

The “Common Sense” Approach

As has been hinted over the course of the discussion, the “common sense” method of applying moral status to entities is to use fractional, threshold moral status.  It’s also the approach I personally prefer.

Fractional moral status is inherently flexible and allows one to tailor one’s actions in a graduated manner.  It appears more “useful” than binary moral status, in the same way that a chef’s knife is more useful than  a pair of kitchen shears.  A chef’s knife can perform any task that the shears can, but there’s no way to use the shears for many of the tasks one could accomplish with a chef’s knife (such as mincing garlic, or peeling an apple).

I confess that my attraction to threshold moral status is largely tied to the classical liberal ideals that I espouse.  Threshold moral status creates an egalitarian system where all entities who meet the threshold have equal rights, even if one individual is objectively more useful to society.  Accepting scalar moral status would be an abandonment of that core principle of classical liberal thought.  This isn’t to say it is necessarily wrong, but merely that it is inconsistent with a higher principle I personally hold dear.

So – Do Animals Have Natural Rights?

Getting back to the original question, it seems if we show that animals have moral status, then we’ve shown that they have natural rights.  Given the discussion thus far has been about the manner in which entities can possess moral status rather than what gives entities moral status, we’ll need to make an assumption on that front to finish the discussion.

When discussing what gives moral status, many people say some combination of: the ability to feel pain; intelligence/self-awareness; the ability to set future goals based on logic.  For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that our metric is intelligence.  It’s clear that animals vary wildly in intelligence, with none really attaining human-level intellects.  With our shiny new fractional/threshold method of applying status, we can now say that they do indeed have some measure of moral status, and that roughly translates into natural, negative rights, though perhaps bearing a lesser degree of obligation to respect.

One might raise the objection that the right to life of a pig is of a different kind, or nature, than the right to life of a human, for it is not absolute.  However, even the right to life of humans is not absolute.  For example, is it a violation of a Human A’s natural right to life if Human B kills him in self defense?  The rule that B is justified in killing A in self-defense is arbitrary, and (in my opinion) the best defense for that rule is pragmatic – a moral system that prevents the good from protecting themselves from the bad will create a world ruled by the bad.  Therefore, we see that even the absolute right to life of a human is governed by a higher set of rules by which it can be abridged, along pragmatic lines.  The fact that the justification threshold for abridgment of the rights of animals is lower than it is for humans is not itself an indication that they do not have natural rights or that they are a different kind of right.