The Online Library of Liberty

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• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Contemporary Currents In Libertarian Political Philosophy By David Gordon
• I: Social Science Methodology
• Social Science Paradigms
• Sociology, Theory, & the Welfare State
• Durkheim, Ideology, and Method
• Polanyi, Hierarchy & Reductionism
• Historicism: Individuality Or Pattern?
• Social Science: Game, Drama, and Text
• Alfred Schutz and Phenomenology
• Moral Honesty In Social Science
• II: Economic Analysis
• Austrian Vs. Neoclassical Economics: Equilibrium
• Frank Fetter & the Austrian School
• Subjective Vs. Objective Costs
• The Significance of Subjective Costs
• Socialist Economic Calculation
• The Welfare State: Business & Labor
• Child Labor and Capitalism
• Economics Vs. Minimum Wage Politics
• Adam Smith Vs. Neo-mercantilism
• Laissez Faire and Moral Revolution
• III: Human Rights and Ethics
• Recent Scholarship On Rights
• Two Concepts of Rights
• Establishing Human Rights
• Misunderstanding Human Rights
• Is Privacy an Absolute Right?
• Animal Rights
• Nature and the Tao
• Self-knowledge: Nietzsche, Heidegger & Buber
• The Prospects of Objective Morality
• Measuring Ethical Ideologies
• Individualism and “locus of Control”
• Should We License Parents?
• IV: The Heritage of Freedom
• How Conservatives Differ From Liberals
• English Radicalism: Rights Vs. War & Taxes.
• Liberalism: the Seedbed of American Culture
• Republican Liberty & Military Policy
• Thomas Burke: Whig Radical
• Liberal Republicans During Reconstruction
• Adam Smith & the Liberal Tradition
• Human Individuality and Autonomy

Animal Rights

Anthony J. Povilitis

• Senior Wildlife Ecologist for VTN Wyoming

“On Assigning Rights to Animals and Nature.” Environmental Ethics 2(Spring 1980):67–71.

Richard A. Watson has argued that most animals do not have intrinsic or primary rights such as the rights to existence and to freedom from unnecessary suffering. To have such rights, Watson claims, a living entity must be a “moral agent,” that is, it must possess self-consciousness, a free will, and whatever else is required to fulfill reciprocal duties in a self-conscious manner. Povilitis dissents and suggests (1) that Watson's “reciprocity framework is overly anthroprocentric in holding pre-eminent only those evolutionary features that appear to be unique” to the human species; that Watson's framework is based on an incorrect assumption that the Golden Rule refers to mutual rather than individual duties; and (3) that Watson arbitrarily identifies moral rights with primary rights.

Moreover, since “intrinsic” rights are virtually assigned rights, the assigning of rights to an entity corresponds to its perceived value. Thus Watson chooses “Cartesian values” in assigning rights by his very act of emphasizing differences between man and nonhuman animals. Conversely, the ecological and evolutionary relatedness of living things forms the basis for Povilitis's considering rights within the “naturalist tradition.”

The central life-and-death question is not “Do nonhuman animals and nature have rights?” but rather “On what basis should rights be assigned to animals and nature?” Povilitis favors a “naturalist” tradition which asserts that “life itself represents a value comparable to or greater than that assigned to the allegedly unique properties of the human mind.” Naturalists value nature “not only as a provider of goods and services but also as a place of creativity that cannot be duplicated by man, who is merely one of its derivatives.”