Xenotransplantation,
Subsistence Hunting & the Pursuit of Health:
Lessons for Animal
Rights-Based Vegan Advocacy
For the Between the Species special issue in honor of Tom Regan.
Final version here: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol21/iss1/8/
Comments welcome on Dropbox [most current version, with better formatting than below] or Academia.edu or here or by email!
Final version here: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol21/iss1/8/
Comments welcome on Dropbox [most current version, with better formatting than below] or Academia.edu or here or by email!
Xenotransplantation,
Subsistence Hunting & the Pursuit of Health:
Lessons for Animal
Rights-Based Vegan Advocacy
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA USA
Abstract:
I
argue that, contrary to what Tom Regan suggests, his rights view implies that subsistence
hunting is wrong, that is, killing animals for food is wrong even when they are the only available food
source, since doing so violates animal rights. We can see that subsistence
hunting is wrong on the rights view by seeing why animal experimentation,
specifically xenotransplanation, is wrong on the rights view: if it’s wrong to
kill an animal to take organs to save a human
life, it’s wrong to kill an animal to
eat that animal to save a human life or improve human health. I discuss
these arguments’ implications for animal rights-based vegan advocacy, insofar
as some people claim that they don’t feel their best on vegan diets and so their
eating meat is morally justified. I argue that such an attempt to justify
consuming animal products fails on Regan’s rights view, but discuss some
attempts to morally excuse such violations of animals’ rights. These attempts
are inspired by Regan’s attempts at potentially excusing animal rights
advocates’ using medications developed using animals.
Contents
1. Introduction
Communities that
survive by subsistence hunting probably rarely, if ever, encounter vegan or
animal rights advocacy. But a common question asked of vegan advocates is, “What if you were somewhere where there
was literally nothing else to eat but animals? Would eating animals be wrong
then?”
I suspect that
many vegan advocates dodge the question, observing that our finding ourselves in such a situation is very unlikely, and very
unlike most of our present circumstances where vegan foods are readily
available. They might also urge postponing the question until we found
ourselves stuck, say, at the North Pole, when it’s a “live” issue for us. They
might also respond that just as we don’t need to decide whether and when human
cannibalism is ever morally permissible to know that it’s wrong in ordinary
circumstances, we also don’t need to answer this question to know that we
should eat vegan when we easily can. And some might respond that, no, it
wouldn’t be wrong, in those challenging circumstances to eat animals: perhaps
the view would be that “all (or many) bets are off” in such extreme
circumstances: ordinary moral rules no longer apply.
I argue, however,
to the contrary, that killing animals for food, even in circumstances such as
these, is wrong: subsistence hunting is wrong. At least that’s what animal
rights advocates, following Tom Regan, should think. I then discuss the impact
this finding should have for vegan and animal rights advocacy insofar as some,
more than a few, people claim to not feel their best on vegan diets and so argue
that their eating meat or other animal products is
justified. I show that such an argument fails on Regan’s rights view, but discuss
some attempts to morally excuse such violations of animals’ rights, inspired by
Regan’s attempts at potentially excusing animal rights advocates when they use
medications developed using animals.
2. Xenotransplantation
and Animal Rights
To see why subsistence
hunting – that is, roughly, the killing
of animals for food when there is literally nothing else for human beings to
eat besides those animals (and we are assuming that cannibalism is not a
morally acceptable option or is just not an option, for a potential solitary
subsistence hunter) – is wrong, we can consider the animal rights basic perspective
on animal experimentation, the using of animals in medical contexts to try to
benefit human beings. As Tom Regan reviews in his essay “Empty Cages: Animal Rights and Vivisection”:
Experimental procedures include drowning, suffocating, starving,
and burning; blinding animals and destroying their ability to hear; damaging
their brains, severing their limbs, crushing their organs; inducing heart
attacks, ulcers, paralysis, seizures; forcing them to inhale tobacco smoke,
drink alcohol, and ingest various drugs, such as heroin and cocaine (2012, p. 108).
Experimentation
clearly harms animals, especially since they are nearly always killed at the
end of the experiments.
The animal rights perspective
on animal experimentation is, of course, that it is wrong because it violates
animals’ rights to their lives and bodies, at least. And it’s wrong even if
done “humanely” and with a painless death: healthy, or potentially healthy,
animals are done no favors by being killed before their natural times. And it’s
wrong even if human beings, even lots
of human beings, benefit from it. While it is overall morally worse when a
rights violation is institutionalized, commercialized and has widespread social
support, animal experimentation equally violates animal rights if done by
isolated, “lone wolf” vivisectors. These claims form the animal rights position:
so-called “animal welfare” positions deny some or all of this in permitting
animal experimentation if certain conditions are met.
According to the
animal rights view, for example, animal experimentation in development known as
“xenotransplantation,” the “harvesting” or theft of organs from animals such as
pigs and primates to transplant to human beings who will likely die without an
organ transplant, is wrong (Begley, 2017). This is because it violates the
animal’s rights whose organ is taken and dies as a result. While it is very unfortunate
when a human person needs a new organ to survive and that organ is not
available from a human donor (and no artificial organ is available), that does
not justify violating any animal’s rights, just as it would not justify
stealing an organ from a human patient in the next room, even if that organ
theft victim will survive the loss.
Tom Regan provides
a theoretical explanation for why such organ theft, in both human and animal
cases, is wrong: doing so treats others as mere things for one’s own personal benefit
(Regan 2004/1983). Even if it’s a one-time operation, never to be done again, organ
theft treats someone else as a mere resource to be used for the benefit of
others. Fundamentally, it’s a disrespectful action that denies the victim’s inherent
value. There are limits to what we may do to save our own lives, even when we
are “under attack” not by any moral agent or even a moral patient but a disease
or our own bodies’ malfunctions, and violating others’ rights is never a
morally acceptable response to the attack. For example, if my child is gravely
ill, I cannot perform a fatal experiment on my neighbor’s healthy child to even
successfully save my own child’s life, especially if the parents don’t consent,
and even if they do, since this violates
that child’s rights.
3. Subsistence
Hunting
We are now able to
see why subsistence hunting is wrong. Animal experimentation of many kinds is wrong since it violates animals’ rights. And if
animal experimentation of various kinds is wrong, for reasons like those that Tom
Regan develops and defends, then it is also wrong to kill animals for food even
when there is nothing else to eat.
If it’s wrong to
kill an animal to save your life from
a likely fatal medical problem by taking a pig’s or primate’s organ(s) to save
your life, then it is also wrong to kill an animal to save your life from starvation. If you can’t permissibly kill a pig
to get an organ to transplant to save
your life, then surely you can’t permissibly kill the pig to get an organ to eat to save your life. One’s “needs,”
even one’s needs for what’s needed for life itself, need not justify violating
another’s rights, as Judith Thompson made clear in her famous discussion of
abortion (Thompson, 1971): even if someone needs to use another’s kidneys to
stay alive, they do not have a right
to the use of those kidney’s and nobody violates their rights by not allowing
them to use their kidneys: a person’s own right to life is not a right to
someone else’s body, even if that body is needed to preserve one’s own life. And
a potential patient who receives an animal’s organ can’t fully pass the blame
onto the surgeon or the many people who raised the animal before the
xenotransplanation, claiming that he or she didn’t personally violate the animal’s rights so has done no wrong: all
are engaging in wrongdoing here, says Regan’s rights view.
Thus, subsistence
hunting is wrong because it violates animals’ rights: hunters do not have a
right to animals’ lives and bodies, even if those animals’ lives and bodies are
needed to sustain the hunters’ lives. So, unless communities that depend on
subsistence hunting can find something else to eat that doesn’t involve violating
rights, they will have to move to stop violating animals’ rights in these ways.
Or they would have to perish, it seems, according to Regan’s rights view.
While this may
seem harsh, it is perhaps comparable to a country where, for whatever reason,
nearly all the citizens are in desperate need of organ transplants or else they
will die. A neighboring country could be raided and its citizens’ organs taken,
and those people killed in the process. But that would be profoundly wrong, as
it would involve massive rights violations. So, unless another solution can be
found, it appears that the organ-needy persons would have to perish. This reminds
us that respecting rights can be personally demanding and have high personal costs, but this is a simple
consequence of the idea of rights: some actions must be done (or must not be
done) “though the heavens fall” for individuals or communities. A contrary
position, that self-preservation or community-preservation can be justified at literally
any cost to others is indefensible. And
we can’t forget that, in this case, violating rights would have high personal
costs to those whose organs are stolen and their lives taken.
In the only
passage from Tom Regan highly applicable to subsistence hunting that I can find,
since he appears to only discuss “sport” hunting, he writes this concerning the
potential permissibility of killing animals for food:
If
it were the case that these [essential] nutrients [that meat provides] were not
otherwise available [from non-animal sources], then the case for eating meat, even given the rights view, would be on solid
ground. If we were certain to ruin our health by being vegetarians, or run a serious risk of doing so . . and given that the deterioration of our
health would deprive us of a greater variety of number
of opportunities for satisfaction than those within the range of farms animals,
then we would be making ourselves, not the animals, worse-off if we become
vegetarians. (Regan 2004/1983, p. 337, emphasis mine).
Regan’s response
to this reasoning is just to observe that the factual claim concerning
nutrition is false: we don’t need to eat animal products to be healthy. So, he
responds that meat-eating could be justified,
if the facts were different from what they are, but that they are not.
Regan does not,
however, engage the hypothetical “What
if?” and underlying moral reasoning behind his argument that eating meat
could be permissible, even on the rights view. This is unfortunate since what
he says seems to be, at least, inconsistent with the animal rights perspective
on xenotransplantation. Consider some comparable potential claims in defense of
xenotransplantation:
If
we were certain to ruin our health, or
lose our lives, by not taking organs from
healthy animals, or run a serious risk of doing so . . and given that the deterioration of our health, and loss of
our lives, would deprive us of a greater variety of number of opportunities for satisfaction than those within the
range of farms animals, then we would be making ourselves, not the animals,
worse-off if we refrained from taking organs from animals. If it were the case
that these organs from xenotransplantation were not otherwise available, say
from human donors or artificial organs, then the case for xenotransplantation,
even given the rights view, would be on solid ground.
Rejecting such
reasoning is at the core of the rights view: indeed, it distinguishes the
rights view from, say, utilitarian and other so called “welfarist”
perspectives: animals rights must be
respected, even if that makes human persons worse off.
So, what Regan
says about eating meat from animals killed and their rights violated – that it
would be justified if we would be seriously harmed if we didn’t eat it –
appears to be inconsistent with the rights view: what he says, and would say,
about vivisection he should also say about potential life-saving meat eating. I
do grant that if every human being
had to eat meat to survive, as opposed to a few isolated individuals with
peculiar biological needs for meat, and that’s the way it always has been, that
might make the case feel different:
in this world, it would seem unavoidable that we routinely engage in rights
violations. This recognition, however, might prompt us to vigorously seek to find
some other food sources that don’t involve rights violations, or we might
realize that we are making a choice to violate rights that we don’t really have
to make, and act accordingly, whatever that might be.
Rights are not
absolute, however; Regan acknowledges that they are prima facie in nature and that there can be circumstances where
violating rights is justified. Indeed, his comments about the “solid ground” for
killing animals for food appears to be an application of a misinterpretation of
his own “worse-off principle,” which is meant to provide guidance in cases
where we must violate rights:
Special
considerations aside, when we must decide to override the rights of the many or
the rights of the few who are innocent, and when the harms faced by the few
would make them worse-off than any of the many would be if any other option
were chosen, then we ought to override the rights of the many (Regan 2004/1983,
p. 308)
This principle
prioritizes those who are made worse off by an action, whatever their numbers, when we must violate rights: if must either minorly violate the rights of a
1000 people or majorly violate the rights of one person, we should minorly
violate the rights of a 1000: the numbers
don’t matter.
The problem though,
if this principle is supposed to justify any meat-eating, is this: in cases of xenotransplantation, or subsistence hunting,
there are alternatives that don’t involve any rights violations, namely, not stealing organs and not killing animals for food. That may,
or, for the sake of argument, will result
in human deaths. And those human beings might very well be worse off for that
than any animals would be, if they were
killed. But nobody’s rights were violated since human persons do not have a
(positive) right to everything necessary for their lives to continue. And the
very points of the rights view is that humans do not have the right to violate
the (negative) rights that animals have to their own lives and bodies. So, the
worse-off principle does not appear to apply to cases of xenotransplantation,
or any typical animal research, or subsistence hunting, contrary to Professor
Regan’s remarks, since they are not cases where any rights must be violated. So, subsistence hunting is wrong on the rights
view, if vivisection is. And clearly vivisection is wrong on the rights view,
so subsistence hunting is also.
4. Vegan
Advocacy
Few readers of
this essay, however, likely encounter subsistence hunters or have much, if any,
influence over them. We do, however, encounter people who claim to just not feel good, or not feel
their best, on vegan diets, or have
medical conditions that make eating vegan and staying healthy enough very
difficult or impossible. Some vegan advocacy organizations very much
acknowledge this concern and so avoid a false message that every person who eats vegan will be healthy and feel their best:
sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it is not, and that fact must be
acknowledged, respected and thoughtfully engaged (Adams, Breitman, Messina,
2017).
Some people who
claim to not feel their best on vegan diets may be not telling the truth, or
haven’t tried very hard, or would benefit from skilled nutritional guidance.
But it’s surely possible that some people have sincerely tried hard, have
sought expert guidance on how to meet their nutritional needs, and yet still do
not feel well on a vegan or vegetarian diet. It’s not only possible that there
are such persons, there probably really are such persons: they’ve tried their
best, but they still don’t feel well on vegan diets. In personal conversation,
Tom Regan told me that he knew of a man who he (Regan) sincerely believed just
felt very poorly if he did not eat meat.
For people who
don’t feel their best if they don’t eat meat or other animal products, is their
eating meat justified? And are people justified in raising and killing animals
to meet that need? I have argued that subsistence hunting is wrong, if animal
experimentation is wrong on the rights view. But if subsistence hunting is
wrong, and it’s wrong to kill animals to maintain one’s life (as it would be wrong to xenotransplant and take a healthy
animal’s organ to save one’s life), then it would presumably be wrong to kill
animals to maintain one’s health, in
the vague sense of “feeling good.” If it’s
wrong to kill animals to stay alive, which presumably is usually more important
than just feeling good, then it’s also wrong to kill animals to feel healthy
and one’s best. And so, it appears any “I just don’t feel good if I don’t eat
animal products” defense of eating animal products fails, at least on Regan’s
rights view.
This is not to
minimize or trivialize the importance of feeling good: living with chronic
pain, or chronic fatigue, or any other condition that profoundly worsens someone’s
quality of life, and perhaps entire worldview, is often be very bad for that person
and those around him or her. But that doesn’t seem to justify violating
anyone’s rights to try to improve the situation, including violating animal
rights, and so it would be wrong to kill animals for food, even if doing so is
genuinely necessary to promote or preserve one’s health and feeling well. Individuals
who raise and kill any animals on their own (e.g., backyard chickens) to
promote their own health would be doing wrong, as would those who raise and
kill the animals for pay, and those who pay them to buy and use the products,
would also be doing wrong: consumers, producers and sellers are all engaged in
wrongdoing. At least that’s what the rights view suggests.
Or does it?
Perhaps not. In
Regan’s (2012) essay, “Animal
Rights Advocacy and Modern Medicine: The Charge of Hypocrisy,” he considers the
charge that animal rights advocates who use prescription drugs, or other
medical treatments, developed using animals are “hypocrites” or not insofar as
they demand that animals’ rights not be violated, yet benefit from drugs, the
development of which involves violating animals’ rights. Regan discusses
attempts to, at least, morally excuse animal advocates if they use prescription
medications and thereby in some way support the violation of animal rights. Regan
seems to be trying to show that it is understandable or excusable to do so, an
admittedly vague category of evaluation, perhaps that is indeed morally
permissible to do so, but this is not entirely clear. Regan acknowledges that
the issue is complex, and his discussion is rich and full of insight and wisdom. And it is applicable to the issues at
hand.
Regan does not advocate that animal advocates
simply let themselves die to avoid supporting drug companies who violate animal
rights in the development of pharmaceuticals. Presumably, although he does not
discuss the issues of this paper, he would also not encourage animal advocates to
starve themselves to death to avoid supporting any killing of animals for food.
It should be made immediately
clear, however, that, at least in industrialized countries, the potential of someone
dying because they refuse to eat anything that directly involves violating
animals’ rights is far more unrealistic than anyone dying from not supporting
the pharmaceutical industry. This is because it seems likely biologically
impossible that anyone must eat
recently killed conscious, sentient, “subject of a life” animals to stay alive
and healthy. It’s hard to believe that such a person
couldn’t survive and be healthy eating bivalves or other non-conscious animals, insects, the
eggs laid by chickens who live good lives, or roadkill, or animals who recently
died of natural causes, among other options. So, an “eat-animals-or-die” case is
unlikely in most geographical contexts compared to a
“use-animal-tested-medications-or-die” case, especially in locations where a
variety of foods are available: there will nearly always be a way to avoid death
without eating what can be called “whole” animals. Anyone who lives by
subsistence hunting, however, likely will not have these food options though:
they would have to eat whole animals or perish
unless they are unwilling to move to a vegan-friendly location (or
become cannibals, again, presumably a morally impermissible option).
With these qualifications
in mind, let’s see if what Regan argues
about the pharmaceutical case can be extended to anyone who must eat whole animals or else perish or,
more realistically to our culture, be unhealthy or not feel their best.
Regan discusses several proposals to justify animal
advocates’ using pharmaceuticals developed using animals, and criticizes many
of them. His tentatively and cautiously presented final proposal is that it can
be permissible, or at least excusable, for animal rights advocates to take
medications developed with the use of animals because the animal experimentation involved in the drug development is accidental to the development of the
drug, not essential: the animal use
did not causally contribute to the drug’s development; indeed, given misleading
results from animal research, the drug may have been developed in spite of any
results from animal research (287-288). This type of justification could be
used to try to explain why it’s not wrong to continue to use buildings made
from slave labor – the buildings were in fact made by slaves, but they could
have been made without them – and why using items made by Nazis using the
bodies of their victims is wrong – those items could not have been made without
brutal, inhumane violations of rights. So Regan’s motivating principle has
general plausibility, and so perhaps justifies animal advocates taking prescription
drugs, even though animals’ rights are violated in their development.
Can this type of
justification be could applied to cases where someone must eat whole animals to stay alive or be healthy or feel their
best? It seems to me like this would be a stretch. One could say that it is merely accidental that the needed nutrients, in the exact form and combination
that meat provides, are found only in the body of a subject-of-a-life animal,
not essential, and so it’s not wrong to kill
these animals to eat them. This claim could be
supported by observations about development of “clean” meat, that is, meat
developed apart from any animal’s body, to try to argue that meat and animals
are indeed separable: you can have meat
without animals. To me, however, this is an implausible stretch of the
principle since, in current actual
cases, (a) the nutrients and the body of the animal and (b) the life of the
animal are basically inseparable. This is
perhaps analogous to a murderer claiming that the experience of murdering that he or she seeks are separable from the
effects on the victim, that there is merely an accidental connection between
the two, and so murder is not wrong. This is
clearly an awful and absurd attempt justifying murder. So it does not seem that
the reasoning that Regan uses to justify animal advocates using pharmaceuticals
can be extended to the eating of animals, even when necessary to preserve one’s
life or health: a drug and the animal experimentation that was
involved in development of that drug are separable in a way that an animal and his or her consumed body are not: the latter is something a constitutional
relation, not a causal or temporal relation that might be present in drug
development.
Remember though that Regan does not discuss issue of eating
animals for health, as far as I know. And, again, we can only suspect that he
would argue that it can be permissible for animal advocates to eat animal
products if it were genuinely necessary for them to be healthy and feel good enough and that they are not hypocrites for doing so. Presumably, he wouldn’t argue that anyone in
such circumstances must just die or be very ill
when eating whole animal products would prevent that.
One of the arguments that Regan dismisses in favor of animal
advocates using pharmaceuticals is that
if they are dead or ill then they cannot effectively advocate for animal rights
(285-287). So, to continue advocating for the respect of animal rights, perhaps
it can be permissible to partake in some
practices that violate animal rights. Regan’s reservation about this argument is
that some means to promote, and even
secure, animal rights would be wrong: for example, Regan states that torturing animal
researchers’ children to end animal research would be wrong. This argument in
favor of using pharmaceuticals doesn’t
seem to recognize any moral constraints in seeking animal rights: Regan
concludes that “what is effective might well be morally wrong” (287), and this argument
doesn’t recognize that and so is faulty.
In reply, perhaps the argument could be augmented with a
constraint that if and only if the supported rights violation is not worse than
the rights violation that might be prevented in the long run by the initial
supported rights violation, or is a very similar
rights violation, then supporting that rights violation is permissible. So, for
example, someone’s supporting animal research, and the animal rights violations
involved, is permissible if doing so will enable that someone to help lessen
these types of violations of animal rights. Torturing children, however, would
not be permissible, even if doing so would lessen violations of animal rights,
as a worse type of rights violation. This response, however, is subject to many
concerns: it seems to involve “using” one group to benefit another, which
rights are supposed to make wrong, and it introduces complications concerning
how to compare the relative badness of different rights violations. And there’s
the question of how much and what kinds of advocacy for animals must be done to
make it permissible to benefit from their rights violations. So this is not a
trouble-free amendment to the argument: hard questions remain.
But rejecting it, or something like it, is
problematic also. It is hard to believe that any animal advocates dying for the
sake of animal rights in any way helps
the cause of animal rights, at least at present. Indeed, anyone dying for
animal rights is a setback, both in terms of both the attractiveness of the
movement to outsiders, potential advocates, and in terms of the numbers and
morale of current advocates. So while there surely are limits to what can be
done to promote animal rights, perhaps supporting some violations of animal
rights can be permissible if and only if those rights violations are not worse
than the animal rights violations we are seeking to end, given broader
animal-rights related goals, and the recipient of the benefits continues to
advocate for animal rights.
Regan emphasizes that the context of our decisions is not our
own creation: we are thrown into a world
full of massive rights violations, animal
and human, and must make the most of it to try
to lessen these rights violations and work for the respectful treatment of all.
Since the context of our decision is not self-created, and certainly not
created with a peaceable kingdom in mind, perhaps acts of self-preservation are
excusable and understandable, even if they involve some participation in rights
violations, if doing so is more likely to increase the respect for animal rights
than not, in the long run.
Finally, although Regan does not discuss this, this is perhaps
a situation where the “impotence of the individual” might make a positive
difference for animal advocates: in most cases, if an animal advocate were to
eat meat, or other animal products, it is
unlikely that purchase and consumption will cause
more animals rights to be violated. If so, then eating animal products might be
a kind of “free riding” that does not cause more rights violations but allows
for some human being to be in a better position to advocate for animals. The
same might be said about pharmaceuticals developed using drugs, although this
defense is harder to apply to xenotransplantation:
if a specific animal is killed for an organ for a specific individual then an
individual’s actions might plausibly make a causal difference to the fate of that animal. This justification, however,
is problematic in that it opens the door to anyone justify their behavioral indifference
to animal rights because, they insist, their actions won’t make a positive
difference for animals. We surely want to try to resist that type of reasoning
about all sorts of social justice issues. But, on the other hand, it does seem
to simply be true that individual actions often don’t obviously make the
concrete differences we hope they would: that truth should likely not be denied
and perhaps it sometimes makes a difference to, at least, how confident we
should be about the morality of our actions.
In sum, although it is hard to explain why, it appears then
that, perhaps, some actions that
involve violating animals’ rights, such as human beings’ using drugs developed
using animals and eating animal products when they genuinely must do so for
good or better health (or life), might
be morally permissible, or at least excusable, if doing so will better enable the person to advocate for animal
rights and the rights violations we benefit from are not worse than those we
try to seek to lessen or eliminate. This proposal might likely apply to many
more mundane actions that invariably results in harms to animals, such as
driving and common ways of growing and harvesting crops, at least. Arguably
these literally avoidable actions violate animal rights, and perhaps the
proposal developed above helps justify them.
Whether these animal rights violations could be justified only if they better enable to someone to
advocate for animals is an interesting question: if ‘yes,’ that answer might,
surprisingly, result in it being permissible for animal advocates to occasionally
support violating animals’ rights, but wrong for foes of animals to do the same
action. That is an interesting result, and surely one that it would be hard to
use to develop policy, as well as a bit paradoxical: animal advocates can
sometimes support animal rights violations,
since they will go on to promote animal rights, but those indifferent to animal
rights, and oppose animal rights, cannot? Promoting such a view to the public
would surely not work, so perhaps everyone should be viewed as a potential
animal advocate and treated as if they were an actual advocate (a problematic proposal
in itself, insofar as rarely should potential
things of a kind be treated as actual
things of that kind).
5. Conclusion
Vegan advocates are often asked “What if you were somewhere where there
was literally nothing else to eat but animals? Would eating animals be wrong
then?” The basic options for response are to either dodge the question, answer
‘yes’, or answer ‘no.’ I have argued that the ‘no’ answer, that it would be
permissible to eat animals in these circumstances is contrary to at least
Regan’s animal rights theory: in particular, that reasoning would justify
xenotransplantation, which is clearly wrong on the rights view. I have argued
that the ‘yes’ answer faces challenges but that there may be complicated, though
plausible, ways to at least morally excuse people who support some violations
of animals’ rights, if their doing so better enables
them to advocate for animals. Perhaps the
best and wisest response, for most people, in most contexts, is to dodge the
question, as perhaps Professor Regan did, so that none of us get distracted
from the core, immediate, and pressing questions and challenges about animal rights
that confront each of us as we are and where we are, now.
Notes
For helpful
comments, I am grateful to Robert Bass, Rick Bogle,
Bob Fischer, Rupert McCallum and Josh Milburn and two anonymous reviewers for
this journal.
After developing
the main arguments for this paper, I read Jason Hanna’s excellent paper, “A
Moral License to Kill? Animal Rights and Hunting,” in Mylan Engel and Gary
Comstock, eds., The Moral Rights of
Animals (Lexington Books, 2016). He also argues that the animal rights
explanation for the wrongness of animal experimentation suggests the wrongness
of subsistence hunting. Hanna’s paper offers some arguments that are similar to
mine, but for generally overall different purposes, and readers are very much encouraged
to read his very insightful paper.
I also observe
that Mark Rowlands in Animals Like Us
argues that subsistence hunting is permissible, since it satisfies “vital”
human interest (161), but that animal experimentation never is, even though it
could occasionally satisfy a “vital” human interest (144-150). His arguments
are subject to the critique above.
References
Adams, Carol J.,
Breitman, Patti & Messina, Virginia. Even
Vegans Die: A Practical Guide to Caregiving, Acceptance, and Protecting Your
Legacy of Compassion. Lantern, 2017.
Begley, Sharon.
“She’s hellbent on solving the organ
shortage with ‘designer pigs.’ Just don’t keep her waiting.” STAT News. April 6 (2017). https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/06/crispr-pig-organs-transplant-luhan-yang
Hanna, Jason. “Animal Rights and Hunting.” In Mylan Engel and
Gary Comstock, eds., The Moral
Rights of Animals (2016):
257-277.
Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights, updated version. First edition,
1983. University of California Press, 2004.
Regan, Tom. “Animal Rights Advocacy and Modern Medicine: The
Charge of Hypocrisy.” In Jeremy Garrett, ed., The Ethics of Animal
Research: Exploring the Controversy (2012): 267-291.
Regan, Tom. “Empty Cages: Animal Rights and Vivisection.” In
Jeremy Garrett, ed., The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the
Controversy (2012): 107-124.
Rowlands, Mark. Animals Like Us. Verso, 2002.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis. “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy
& Public Affairs (1971): 47-66.
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