1. On-line class,
week of October 11th, 2011
Phil 362 / 662 Environmental Ethics 6th Class
What beings can have rights?

2. Overview: questions we discuss in this class
Where we are and where we are going
Questions for this class:
What beings can have rights?
What is the basis for having rights?
What beings have rights?
3. Overview contd the texts
Regan, Animals as Subjects-of-a-Life
Stone Should Trees have Standing?
Feinberg The Rights of Animals
Attfield The Good of Trees
4. How Ill proceed in this presentation
First Ill introduce some definitions and such that will help us ask the right questions
Next Ill briefly go through the readings and identify some of the questions they raise.
Finally Ill offer a few general observations and raise some general questions.
5. Part I: introductory Remarks
6. Definition: what are rights?
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states. (SEP, Rights)
The rights that we focus on in this class are the entitlements that protect individuals (human beings, animals, plants, species, or other) from certain maltreatments by the actions or inactions of moral agents. So, rights, as we will use the term, are protections that oblige moral agents to do or refrain from doing something that affects the interests of the individual (be they human, animal, plant, or other).
The main question of this class is what sorts of objects that can be the carrier of a right. Or, same question in other terms: What sorts of objects can have entitlements that oblige moral agents (human beings) to do or refrain from doing something that affects their interests.
7. Who has rights, the traditional response
A classical answer to the question of what can have rights is that only those who can respect and be bound by the rights of others can be bearers of rights themselves.
This answer leads to an anthropocentric position (assuming that only human beings can respect and be bound by the rights of others). But weve also seen that the idea that only moral agents can be moral patients (which is the underlying assumption of this interpretation of rights) is questionable. In this case it seems to entail that infants, the severely retarded, or those whove lost their mental faculties to senility or in an accident cannot have rights. Few would accept this conclusion.
So, the questions remain: what is the basis of rights? Who or what can have rights? Why? The rest of this lecture will be about the answers to these questions we find in this weeks readings.
8. The Distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions
A necessary condition: something that must be the case for something else to be the case.
Example: there is no life without water = water is a necessary condition for life.
If we can identify a necessary condition for some X (a phenomenon, property, norm or other thing), then two sorts of inferences are safe:
First, if the necessary condition for X does not obtain, then X is not the case. For example: if there is no water on Mars, there is no life on Mars.
Second, if X is the case, then the necessary condition obtains. For example: we found life on Mars, so there must be water on Mars.
9. Contd: Sufficient conditions
If condition or set of conditions are sufficient for some phenomenon, property, or norm X, then we know that if the conditions obtain, then X obtains.
If, for example, eating fifteen ice-creams is sufficient to make Socrates feel sick, then we know that if Socrates ate fifteen ice-creams then Socrates feels sick.
Note: we cannot infer from the presence of some phenomenon X that the sufficient conditions obtain, for there may be more than one set of sufficient conditions. Socrates might feel sick, not because he ate fifteen ice-creams, but because he ate eleven chocolate bars.
10. Relevance of the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions
If we can identify necessary conditions for having rights, then we can define the scope of beings that might have rights and thereby also define what beings certainly does not have rights. If, for example, having desires is necessary for having rights, then plants cannot have rights (assuming that plants cant desire anything).
If we can identify a set of sufficient conditions for having rights, then we can identify beings that have rights. If, for example, having cognitive capacities is sufficient for having rights, then we know that human beings have rights (assuming that we have cognitive capacities).
The question is: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for having rights. If we can answer this question, then we can define what beings have rights (and also have the beginning of an answer to why they have them).
11. Summary, part I
Definition of rights: were using the term rights in the loose sense of protections that oblige moral agents to do or refrain from doing something that affects the interests of the individual.
We doubt that only those who can be bound by rights are also the only ones who can have them (moral patients need not be moral agents)
Distinction necessary and sufficient conditions.
12. Part II: the texts
13. Recap of Regan Animals as Subjects-of-a-Life
Regan presents the following argument for the conclusion that sentient animals have rights:
All and only beings that are of inherent value have rights. (Here inherent value means that the being cannot be treated as of merely instrumental value, but must be seen as an end in itself.)
Human beings have rights, because they are of inherent value.
Human beings are of inherent value, because they are subjects of a life (they have alive as opposed to merely being alive; they have and perceive that they have interests in their own flourishing).
So, human beings have rights, because they are subjects-of-a-life.
So, by generalization, every subject-of-a-life has rights.
Sentient animals are subjects of a life
Thus, sentient animals have rights.
14. Two questions for Regan
Why does inherent value suffice to give its bearer rights?
(Might being a subject of a life be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having rights?)
Why should we think that animals are subjects-of-a-life in the relevant sense?
15. Chris Stone,Should Trees Have Standing?
Stone goes further than Regan. Stone argues that we should give natural objects of various kinds legal rights.
Stone proposes that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called natural objects in the environment indeed, to the natural environment as a whole. (47)
16. Stones proposal contd
Three criteria that must be satisfied for something to be a holder of legal rights:
It must have legal standing: meaning that it can be represented and make claims before the courts.
Courts must be able to count injury to it as an object of legal concern and possible basis for claims to reparations.
It can be the recipient of legal awards.
Stone notes that currently neither of these criteria is satisfied by trees, forests, cows, or so on. Stone thinks that it should be the case that natural objects can hold legal rights and thus have standing, harm to them be of legal concern, and they should be able to receive the awards for such harms when they are judged legal wrongs.
17. Stones Argument?
Stone does not provide much of an argument for the conclusion that that animals, trees, species, or rivers have rights. But he clearly thinks that these objects can be harmed. And perhaps we can find in the capacity to be harmed something that we might use to reconstruct an argument on his behalf? What things can be harmed?
What do you think Stones argument is? Can we reconstruct a good argument for his conclusion? Do you think that Taylors argument from last week might help us out here?
Final question: Stone appears to think even things like rivers should have rights: could a river have a right? Can a river be harmed?
18. Joel Feinberg The Rights of Animals
According to Feinberg, Things that can have rights are things that have interest. Having interests is a necessary condition for having rights.
So, Feinberg immediately rules out that rocks could have rights. But he thinks that whether our ancestors, future generations, fetuses, animals, plants, or species can have rights are open questions.
In this article he attempts to show how we can answer these open questions by focusing first on the case of individual animals.
19. Feinberg contd
Feinberg proceeds by focusing more closely on the notion of having interests.
Having an interest, Feinberg argues, amounts to having a good of ones own, and this in turn amounts to having a conative life (i.e. to have a level of psychology that includes desires, wishes, unconscious drives, aims, impulses, and the like).
20. Feinberg Contd
So, a preliminary conclusion, beings that have interests (i.e. a conative life) can have rights.
Sentient animals have a conative life.
So, sentient animals can have rights.
Question is: do they?
21. Feinberg: yes, sentient animals have rights
Why? Because we think that we can do them wrong. Think of the last man torturing a dog, if it is wrong, then isnt it because he wrongs the dog?
Two questions:
First, is there anything else that can have rights?
Second, is there anything else that does have rights?
Feinberg says: no and, therefore, no.
22. Feinbergs sentientism
Feinberg maintains that having a conative life is both necessary and sufficient for having rights. From this he argues that only sentient animals (including human beings, of course) have rights.
23. Feinbergs negative argument:
A thing can have rights only if it has interests
A thing has interests only if it has (or is capable of having) a conative life.
Plants, lower animals, species, and so on, do not (and are not capable of) having a conative life.
So, plants, lower animals, species, and so on, cannot (and so do not) have rights.
24. Feinbergs positive argument
Beings with interests have rights
Sentient animals have interests.
So, sentient animals have rights.
If we combine the positive and the negative arguments, we get:all and only sentient animals have rights. (Because having interests is necessary and sufficient for having rights.)
25. Questions for Feinberg
Feinbergs basic argument is that having interests is both necessary and sufficient for having rights and that a conative life is the stuff that interests are made off; wherefore only sentient beings have interests, wherefore only sentient beings can have rights.
Two critical points to this argument: 1. The claim that only beings with interests can have rights, and 2. The claim that only beings with a conative life (i.e. higher sentient beings) can have interests.
So, our questions are: First, Are we convinced by Feinbergs argument that only beings with interests can have rights? Second, Are we convinced that only beings with a conative life have interests?
26. Robin Attfield,The Good of Trees
Attfield does not think that Feinbergs argument succeeds.
Attfield agrees that only beings with interests can have rights, but he rejects that only sentient beings have interests.
Attfield also rejects that all beings with interests have rights.
So, according to Attfield: interests are necessary, but not sufficient, for having rights.
27. Attfield and Feinberg contrasted
Feinberg
Interests necessary and sufficient for having rights
Only beings with a conative life have interests
So, all and only sentient animals have rights
Attfield
Interests necessary, but not sufficient for having rights
All living things have interests
Not immediately clear what beings have rights.
28. Attfield contd
According to Attfield (echoing Rolston III, Taylor, and others) all living things have interests. Some of these living things have special interests in not being exposed to pain.
If interests were sufficient for having rights, then (contrary to Feinberg) insects and trees would have rights.
Attfield doesnt think insects or trees could have rights. Yet, they have interests and we can harm them.
29. Attfields paradox
So, Attfield says he has identified a paradox:
Trees have needs and a good of their own, yet they have no intrinsic value and no rights of their own. Trees have interests, yet we have no obligation to protect those interests in themselves. And this is a position uncomfortably close to unreason; for, in other cases, what has interests of its own becomes ipso facto of moral concern, whereas in this case we are prepared to disregard a large set of interests and treat them as morally irrelevant. (66-7)
30. Solving the paradox?
Attfield suggests that we can solve the paradox by looking at a variation on the last man example. Imagine the following scenario:
The last man is also the last sentient being. He feels like killing the last of the elm trees, just for fun. The elm tree could continue the species of elms into the future, but if it is killed, then elms are eliminated from the universe forever.
31. Questions
So, here are some questions for you to reflect upon:
Do you think it would be wrong for the last man to kill the last of the elm trees?
By stipulation, if it is wrong, it cannot be because he violates the interests / rights of any sentient being, so, if it is wrong is it:
Because he violates the right of the tree?
Some other reason? But then, what?
Why does Attfield think this example points to a solution to the paradox what is the solution?
32. Part III: conclusion: questions
33. Some good questions
(These are, of course, questions you might reflect further on in your discussion post.)
What is Stones argument?
Can rivers have rights? Do they?
Can plants have rights? Do they? Does the last of the elm trees have a right not to be killed for fun?
Can insects have rights? Do they?
Can species have rights? Do they? Is killing the last elm tree a violation of the rights of the species of elms?
Can sentient animals have rights? Do they?
What, if any, is the relation between the capacity to have rights and having interests?
What are interests? What beings have them?
Why do human beings have rights?
34. Inness, The Elm Tree