Human Rights for Nonhumans, Activism for Introverts, and Other Seeming Oxymorons

As I explained here on the blog yesterday, from today through Sunday, I'm attending Vegan Summerfest. In yesterday's essay, I provided the descriptions of each of the talks I'll be giving and went into some detail about the first one (which I'll deliver later today), titled Free Speech for Animals. As promised, in today's essay I discuss my other talks. For those of you who missed yesterday's essay and don't want to click over to it, I'll provide the official description of each before diving in to a brief further exegesis of what I hope to accomplish.

Human Rights for Nonhuman Animals: The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights has played a critical role in efforts to combat grave injustices, including torture, genocide, and enslavement. But why should rights against such practices be restricted to human beings? Let’s explore whether, and if so, how, “human rights” can be a basis for securing rights for non-human animals.

The genesis of this talk is an observation that my late colleague Lou Henkin frequently made in the mid-1990s, when I had the honor of co-teaching a seminar with him to JD and LLM students at Columbia. Anyone remotely familiar with human rights law will have heard of Lou. The first sentence of his obituary in The New York Times described him as "a legal scholar often credited with creating the field of human rights law" (and also noting that he was "the author of classic works on constitutional law and the legal aspects of foreign policy.") The seminar I co-taught with Lou was called Constitutionalism in Comparative Perspective or something like that, and I understand that before I came along to play Robin to Lou's Batman, others had also played the role. It was very much Lou's course. I nonetheless did my best to pull my weight.

This is not the place for reminiscences, so I'll cut to the chase. In our seminar, Lou presented the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as rooted in . . . nothing. By that, I don't mean, and Lou certainly didn't mean, that the Universal Declaration lacks a foundation in morality or reason. Rather, what Lou meant was that the Universal Declaration does not take a position on where human rights come from. It does not say they come from any particular religious tradition or some vague notion of the Divine more generally. It does not base human rights on social contract theory. And although, as a practical matter, the Declaration has the status of international law because it was agreed to by sovereign nations creating the United Nations, the Declaration does not claim authority simply in virtue of that fact. (Some nations expressed reservations but all now accept it, which is not to say they abide by it.)

In teaching students about the origins of the Universal Declaration, Lou praised its agnosticism about the source of rights because, he would say, that agnosticism enabled agreement and true universality. One can think of his position as noting the virtues of incompletely theorized agreement but that leaves out part of what Lou thought was the genius of the Declaration's agnosticism with respect to the origins of human rights. To him, that agnosticism facilitated not only agreement but breadth. He saw the reliance on the notion of "human" rights not as a vehicle for excluding non-human animals but as a means of including everyone and everything to which they're entitled. For that reason, I do not regard human rights for nonhumans as oxymoronic. It simply widens the circle to make it more inclusive still.

None of that is to claim that Lou was a closet vegan. He wasn't. If pressed, he almost certainly would have said human does exclude nonhumans. I can't say for sure because I wasn't yet a vegan myself until the last two years we were colleagues; by then we were no longer co-teaching the class, and it did not occur to me to press him. Nor am I claiming that any of the authors of the Universal Declaration believed that it encompasses nonhuman animals.

Nonetheless, it is striking the extent to which the rationale for and the rights listed in the Universal Declaration can (and in my view should) extend beyond humans. Adopted just three years after World War II and the Holocaust, it begins by noting that "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind." After offering some pragmatic reasons for human societies to accept universal human rights, it then sets out key rights.

We do not yet live in a world in which the barbarous acts committed against nonhuman animals (on farms, in slaughterhouses, in the oceans, and beyond) outrage the conscience of more than a small portion of mankind--but they should. Thus, the core justification for the Universal Declaration should apply to nonhumans as well.

So too should most of the rights it sets out. At their core, those rights are freedom, equality, and dignity, but in elaborating what that entails, the Universal Declaration sets out rights that could and should protect the interests of all beings capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, whose wellbeing is grossly diminished by enslavement or torture, and whose lives fundamentally belong to them. It is possible, with relatively minor modifications to the Universal Declaration, to create a Universal Declaration of Sentient Rights, as Jamie Woodhouse at Sentientism has in fact done. (I was a guest on the Sentientism podcast a few years ago.)

During the course of my session on human rights for nonhumans, I intend to draw on some of the language of the Sentientism Declaration and the questions raised therein. To my mind, the hardest questions concern equality.

The standard move among proponents of rights for animals, best exemplified in my view in the work of Martha Nussbaum, is to say that all sentient beings have an equal right to moral consideration in light of their capacities. I agree with that proposition as far as it goes--which is pretty far, especially given that so much of the harm that humans do to nonhuman animals is also harmful to humans. Environmental degradation is a key example. In most circumstances, granting equal rights to all sentient beings is win – win.

But I doubt that I can sell all of the implications of the proposition that all sentient beings are equal, even with the qualifier that equality takes account of capacities. Here is a familiar reductio of utilitarianism: A doctor carves up a healthy patient who has come for a checkup in order to distribute his kidneys, heart, lungs, and liver to save five ailing patients. The intuition that this is immoral is extremely strong, so strong that utilitarians invariably find reasons why their view also condemns such an act. But what if the doctor can save five human patients by killing one bee? (No, I don't know how that would be possible. Perhaps bee brains contain a chemical that works as an anti-venom that scientists have not yet learned how to synthesize. Stop fighting the hypo). Doing so is inconsistent with the equality of sentient beings, even once we account for their particular capacities, because it is in no way in the bee's interest to be killed. And yet, I doubt that many humans would think it wrong to sacrifice the bee in this way. 

I'll have more to say in the session, but that's a flavor of my enthusiasm for and skepticism of modeling animal rights on human rights. I'll be briefer with respect to the other two sessions.

Ask an Ethicist (jointly with Mylan Engel): Got a question about animal rights, environmental ethics, or ethical veganism that you’ve always want to ask a professor who teaches animal ethics or animal law? Ever gotten a really tough question about the ethics of eating that you weren’t sure how to answer? Join us for this question-generated open discussion concerning the ethics surrounding animal rights and veganism. We’ll provide answers that can help you better advocate for ethical veganism.

In some ways this session will replicate a session Sherry Colb repeatedly ran at Summerfest and that found expression in her book Mind If I Order the Cheeseburger? And Other Questions People Ask Vegans. As the title suggests, some of the questions Sherry addressed in that book were about the social challenges of living as a vegan. But most were not. Most of the questions are moral questions: What about plants? (Chapter 1). Why not just be vegetarian? (Chapter 3). Aren't the animals dead already? (Chapter 6). Are you against abortion? (Chapter 7). Etc. What made Cheeseburger such a powerful book is that Sherry didn't just offer clever stock answers to questions skeptics of veganism might have. She took the questions seriously order to answer them for vegans ourselves.

In addition to drawing on my many conversations with Sherry and attendance at her prior sessions, I'm also looking forward to thinking issues through (and perhaps occasionally disagreeing with) Mylan. I'm especially interested in doing so because Mylan's own work problematizes the broad theory of animal rights one might construct based on human rights in just the way I was describing above. One of Mylan's best-known and powerful articles makes the case for veganism (called "ethical vegetarianism" in the title although Mylan is a vegan) by showing readers that principles they already believe and espouse commit them to it. The key principle is that it is wrong to cause the unnecessary suffering or death of animals. Most people believe that. Most people do not, however, believe that nonhuman animals deserve equal rights with humans.

Whether our session will explore such matters is unclear because we would like it to be driven by audience questions. But if there's a lull, I'll try to steer the discussion towards the question of equality.

Animal Activism for Introverts: As a vegan, you can greatly enhance your impact by persuading others to join our movement. But what if you’re an introvert? You’re uncomfortable at rallies, tabling, or posting provocative memes on social media. Do you just have to “get over it?” We’ll workshop means of spreading the message that won’t give you a panic attack.

Friends, relatives, former students, colleagues, and indeed anyone who knows me at all may have read that title and thought "Wtf, Mike? You're one of the most extroverted people I know." Well, yes and no. I'm certainly not shy in most social situations. And while I enjoy my alone time, I do get energized in a crowd, which is an extrovert characteristic. But I am extremely uncomfortable at the thought of many of the conventional forms of activism--especially anything that involves publicly espousing a viewpoint that is condensed in the form of a slogan.

In any event, activism for introverts is simply title that I thought catchy.The session might equally be called alternative forms of activism. Its point is to discuss ways one can actively contribute to a movement without engaging in tactics with which one is uncomfortable (either on philosophical grounds or simply as a matter of disposition).