The Journal of Value Inquiry 27:111-112, 1993.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Forum
Reply to Fulda on animal rights
MICHAEL LEVIN
Department of Philosophy, City College and the Graduate Center, City University
of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA
Joseph Fulda has proposed a somewhat recherchd reply to my criticism of
the doctrine of "animal rights. ''I It is always permissible to kill any number
of animals rather than let a human being die, not because animals lack
rights, says Fulda, but because the rights of animals are denumerably
infinite in size while human rights are non-denumerable. (Fulda mistakenly
asserts that R I is the number of sets of integers; this assertion is the famous
Continuum Hypothesis, which is neither provable nor refutable within
standard set theory.) Since any non-denumable exceeds any finite number
of denumerables, animal rights may be supposed to exist but are infinitesmal compared to human rights.
I am not sure that Fulda's "non-standard-moder' differs much from the
common-sense view I endorsed, for reasons that a few preliminary points
make clear. First, Fulda's terrorist example does not compel a non-additive
view of rights, since, as is a commonplace in the literature, handing over a
hostage to a terrorist is doing something wrong, whereas refusing to hand
over the hostage is allowing a wrong to happen. Perhaps the governing
intuition is not that killing one person is as bad as killing a thousand, but
that, standing finn, you have killed nobody while all the moral blood is on
the terrorist's hands. Maimonides notwithstanding, most people would
chose actively taking one life over actively taking ten million, implicitly
treating the value of lives as additive.
Fulda's second motive for his model, the supremacy of animal rights
over property rights, is also not compelling. If millions of termites are
destroying my house, am I not allowed, morally, to kill them? If a wolf is
decimating a flock of sheep and mining a rancher's livelihood, isn't the
rancher allowed to kill it? If a limit exists to the destruction the rancher
must endure, animal rights in Fulda's scheme become finite numbers
considerably smaller than most property rights.
Third, Fulda's model solves the central man 2 - vs. - animal problem
only if the universe is sufficiently small. Suppose you are the quartermaster
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of a universe in which denumerably many human beings, each of value R 1,
are competing with R 2 hungry crocodiles for subsistence. If the choice is
between all the people and all the crocodiles, the rights of the crocodiles, or
their value as sentient beings, outweighs those of the human beings, so you
had better feed the crocodiles. I don't know whether there could actually be
R 2 of anything, but the best way for Fulda to accommodate this possibility
- and this may best express his basic intuition - is to say that human rights
are inaccessible while animal rights are smaller, where a nondenumerable
cardinal n is inaccessible just in case, if m < n, so is 2 m. As set theorists
might say, human rights are "too big to reach from below." (Recent work
by the mathematician John Conway has begun to fill the chasm between the
finite and the infinite. 3)
If animal rights are incomparably smaller than human rights and feeble
compared to most property rights, the difference between having rights this
weak and having no rights at all becomes hard to see. Suppose I claim that
other people have rights to your organs. However, these fights are so weak
that your right to your organs overrides those of the whole rest of the world,
and if anybody else attempts to act on his right - by, say, cutting your heart
out for a medical experiment - he will deserve punishment. Surely that right
is no right at all.
I remain convinced, therefore, that the problem of n crocodiles vs. one
man is the central objection to animal rights. Proponents of animal rights
agree. Peter Singer writes: "What, for instance, are we to do about genuine
conflicts of interest like rats biting slum children? I am not sure of the
answer. TM Perhaps, if pressed, Singer would also see a problem about rats
biting children who don't live in slums.
Notes
1. Joseph S. Fulda, "Reply to an Objection to Animal Rights," The Journal of
Value Inquiry 26.1 (January 1992): 87-88.
2. While the stated policy of this Joumal is to reserve gendered words, such as
"man" and "he," for gendered reference, rather than, as in the previous
convention, for possible reference to human beings generally, I have insisted on
the latter convention because I do not want to give into this change of convention, which I see as politically dictated by the feminist movement. I use "man"
and its cognates inclusively.
3. See D. E. Knuth, Surreal Numbers (London: Addison-Wesley, 1974), pp.
99-111.
4. Cited in Louis Pojman, "Animal Rights and Egalitarianism," unpublished.