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EquivocationCircular Reasoning

Animals don't have rights

Short response

As a description of current law, largely accurate in most jurisdictions. As a moral claim, it restates the question rather than answering it.

The strongest version of this argument

Rights are not a natural feature of the world but something persons grant one another within a moral and legal community, and the law reflects this: animals are property, protected against cruelty but not holders of rights. What qualifies a being for rights is something like the capacity to reason, make claims, and recognise duties in return, and that, or simply being human, is what separates us from animals. Treating animals humanely is a real obligation, but it does not give them a right not to be used for food.

Full breakdown

The statement has two readings, and it moves between them. On the legal reading it is a true observation about the present state of the law in most countries: animals are property, with welfare protections that stop well short of rights. On that reading it says nothing about whether this should be so, and the same was true of every group whose legal status later changed.

On the moral reading it is the conclusion under dispute. Rights of this kind are not discovered; they are extended on the basis of some morally relevant feature, and the argument is about which feature does the work. Sentience is the usual candidate, on the grounds that the capacity to suffer is what makes treatment matter to the one being treated. Intelligence and species membership both run into the problem that they either exclude some humans or include many animals.

Fallacies in this argument
Equivocation

Using a single word in two different senses within one argument, so that a conclusion appears to follow when it does not.

How it applies here: 'Rights' moves between legal status and moral entitlement. The claim is true on the first reading and is the thing being argued about on the second, and it draws its force from running them together.

Circular Reasoning

Assuming the conclusion somewhere among the premises, so the argument never supplies independent support. The formal name is begging the question, or petitio principii.

How it applies here: On the moral reading, asserting that animals have no rights is a restatement of the conclusion rather than a reason for it.

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Tags
rightssentiencemoral status
Philosophy & Logic / Rights Theory

More in Philosophy & Logic

Animal farming is like rain: the harm comes with something we need

Rain is not a choice, and life cannot go on without it. Eating animals is a choice, and large studies of people who don't show it is not needed. The analogy only works if necessity is assumed, and necessity is the very thing in question.

False Equivalence

Plato, Socrates and Aristotle ate meat, so the form of the good allows killing animals for food

What a philosopher ate tells us little about what their philosophy requires. These same thinkers accepted slavery. The Platonic tradition is also split on this: Socrates' ideal city in the Republic eats no meat, and later Platonists such as Porphyry and Plutarch argued against eating animals.

Appeal to AuthorityCherry Picking

Eating meat benefits more people, counting all the byproducts used in medicine and clothing

A utilitarian count has to include the animals, and tens of billions of them are killed each year for this. It also has to compare meat with the realistic alternative, not with nothing. Most byproducts have substitutes, and the few that don't are a reason to keep using them, not to keep eating meat.

Cherry PickingFalse Dilemma