The issue of the justification of universal human rights can be seen largely as an applied problem of the justification of moral values. We can, of course, accept human rights not because they are morally right but because they are enshrined in legal orders, but this approach renders these rights as positive rights, thereby negating their universality.
1)
In my opinion, there is no reason to discuss the content of human rights unless we can identify a firm basis on which to justify their existence.
2)
Without these grounds, our reasoning on the wider issue would be similar to that of theologians attempting to interpret God's will despite the fact that the very existence of God himself is still open to question. The universality of human rights means that their justification must be extra-legal, for the declaration of their existence in a legally binding regulation is not dispositive in this regard. I take the same approach to the question of animal rights; I do not intend to discuss which specific natural rights non-human animals possess, because that is an afterthought. The first step, in my opinion, is the actual justification for why they should have any natural rights at all.
I am aware of the potential inconsistency between the content of certain human rights; for example, some see sexual freedom as a human right, while others believe that this is incompatible with their right for the protection of Christian values. For this reason, the criticism of the concept of human rights offered here is not based on ideological positions. The main focus is on the justification of the concept of human rights, with the topic of their actual content remaining a corollary concern.
At the same time, I am also conscious that even the concept of human rights itself has many different interpretations. Therefore, when I talk about human rights, I am not referring to "positivised" human rights but to human rights in a moral sense - the universal rights that all people possess (according to their proponents) by virtue of being human.
3)
In the article I term
human rights proponents
as those who believe in the existence of those very rights, but this does not include the proponents of a pragmatic approach to human rights, such as Daniel Dennett
4)
or Tomas Sobek,
5)
who, while acknowledging that a belief in human rights can be useful in some respects, still do not believe in their existence.
Before entering into the main argument, I would also like to clarify two more concepts which will be discussed in the article. The first is that of the
non-human animal
, which will be understood as all animals except humans. The second term is natural rights, which includes the universal rights of all creatures; the moral considerations of these rights are dependent on whether they are extended to humans (
human rights
), non-human animals (
animal rights
) or other entities.
Pain as a Decisive Criterion
Consideration and Treatment
We should perhaps start by determining the criteria which are to be considered crucial for inclusion in moral considerations. Two approaches could be distinguished here. Firstly, the capacity to feel pain is typically seen as a guiding principle. If a being can feel pain, then it can be included in moral considerations. This line of thinking can be termed hedonistic,
6)
and the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was an important proponent of the approach. Bentham argued that it was not important whether a being can think or speak; what is important is whether it can suffer.
7)
Bentham saw a clear equivalence between the suffering of animals and humans because all creatures can experience pain. However, the second approach to the issue suggests that other criteria must be fulfilled. The libertarian thinker murray Rothbard, who famously said that he would recognise the rights of animals as soon as they claimed them, can be considered as a proponent of this approach.
8)
The French philosopher René Descartes came up with the idea of the animal as a machine (
bete machine
) that lacks the capacity for language and cannot think.
