Do animals have rights?

A committee of Spain's parliament thinks so, at least concerning some animals, at least regarding some rights. Last month the parliament's environment committee voted to give great apes -- chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutangs -- limited rights, including rights not to be tortured or imprisoned arbitrarily. Adoption of such a measure would prohibit medical experiments on apes and their use in circuses.

The basis for affording rights to apes -- or, if we accept the premise behind the movement, of acknowledging the rights that apes inherently have -- is their genetic similarity to humans (as much as 98.7 percent of the chimpanzee's genetic code is the same as humans') as well as their human characteristics, such as the ability to feel, think, communicate, and plan.

It is not hard to see the similarities between apes and humans. But it is harder to tease out precisely why apes should be accorded rights -- or, for that matter, why they should not. But then it is also quite hard to tease out why human beings have rights. We all assume humans do, but why do they? And if they do, why don't creatures who are so very much like humans?

SOME SAY God gave rights to us, and did not give rights to animals, which are (because of the way God ordered the universe) inferior to humans, and nothing more needs to be said. For those who like that sort of theory, it's the sort of theory they like -- but it doesn't seem very satisfying. It also bears an unfortunate similarity to certain discredited ideas such as the notion that black people, being naturally inferior to white people because of the way God ordered the universe, have no right against enslavement, regardless of any genetic similarities between the two.

On the other hand, not all human beings have the same set of rights. Children share the fundamental human right not to be tortured, but they lack many other rights adults enjoy. The clinically insane can be confined against their will, but they cannot be hunted for sport. Likewise for persons with severe mental handicaps.

Others, such as Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, take a stridently utilitarian approach that says an ape's interest in not being tortured should carry just as much weight as a person's. Pain is pain, no matter who or what feels it. But utilitarian reasoning leads down some very dark avenues. It could justify, for instance, plucking a person off the street and killing him to harvest his organs, if that act would thereby save the lives of five other people. Singer has written that killing disabled children "is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all." He contends, "when the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of a happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second." No, it isn't.

Still others place the origin of rights in individual autonomy and the ability to make choices, such as the choice as to what one does with one's own body. (Plants, lacking any capacity for choice, obviously also lack rights.) But most people also have a sense that human beings, at least, have certain rights even when they lack the ability to choose. For instance, a person who is temporarily incapacitated, even for a fairly long period, has a right not to have her limbs amputated for the fun of it. Or even for the advancement of medical science.

Why, though, do people generally think that an ape, which can feel pain and fear -- perhaps even despair -- should be subject to medical experiments, but a human being in a persistent vegetative state should not? Why is it acceptable to treat apes in a way we never would treat a person with a severe mental disability? Perhaps the answer is that one is a person and the other is not. Then what qualities confer personhood?

WE HAVE A sense that animals ought to be treated humanely -- at least up to the moment when we slaughter them for food. But this sense applies only to sentient animals and not to, say, clams. And animal welfare differs significantly from animal rights. It is not clear why we might rule some sentient animals worthy of rights but others not. Where does one draw that line, and why?

Judith Jarvis Thomson, an ethicist at MIT and the author of The Realm of Rights, advises against even asking such a question: "It is hardly ever possible to draw lines," she writes in an e-mail, "giving good reasons for them, where a deep philosophical issue is at stake." But of course the law must draw lines, it does so all the time, and it would be nice if legislators had good reasons for drawing them where they do.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.
Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.