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Animal rights is the viewpoint that animals have rights and are worthy of ethical consideration in how humans interact with them.
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The concept of 'animal rights' is often confused with animal welfare - which is the philosophy that takes consideration of animal suffering into account. Animal welfarists range in their degree from organizations which profit from the exploitation of animals and claim to be concerned with the welfare of the animals that they profit off of, to radical animal welfarists such as Peter Singer. While Singer is often associated with the animal rights movement, and many animal rightists agree with much of Singer's work - his philosophy does not rely on a concept of rights. Rather, Singer's radical animal welfarist philosophy is based on ethical utilitarianism that takes the capacity of sentient animals to suffer into account - and thus promotes the concept of animal liberation and veganism as logical outcomes of this consideration.
The animal rights philosophy does not necessarily maintain that human and non-human animals are equal. For example, animal rightists do not call for voting rights for chickens. However, animal rightists do believe that because animals are capable of valuing their own life, regardless of whether humans have use for animals or not - then they should be afforded the right to possess their own flesh. This means that, according to a rights view, any human or human institution that commodifies animals for food, entertainment, clothing, scientific testing, or any other purpose infringes upon the rights of the animal to possess it's own being - and thus the property status of animals, which is used to maintain the use of animals for human ends, is unethical because it ignores the rights of animals.
Among the most famous philosophical proponents of animal rights are the philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan, who hold views that have much in common, but with different philosophical justifications (see below). Activists Karen Davis of United Poultry Concerns, Ingrid Newkirk of PETA, and Gary Francione of the Rutgers Universty Animal-Law Clinic, have each also presented fully-fledged political/personal philosophies of animal rights.
Although Singer is said to be one of the ideological founders of today's animal rights movement, his philosophical approach to an animal's moral status is not based on the concept of rights, but on the principle of equal consideration of interests. His book, Animal Liberation, argues that humans grant moral consideration to other humans not on the basis of intelligence (in the instance of children, or the mentally disabled), on ability to moralize (criminals and the insane), or on any other attribute that is inherently human, but rather on their ability to experience suffering. As animals also experience suffering, he argues, excluding animals from such consideration is a form of discrimination he calls 'speciesism'.
Tom Regan (The Case for Animal Rights), on the other side, claims that non-human animals that are so-called "subjects-of-a-life" are bearers of rights like humans, although not necessarily of the same degree. This means that animals in this class have "inherent value" as individuals, and cannot merely be considered as means for an end. This is also called a "direct duty" view on the moral status of non-human animals. According to Regan we should abolish the breeding of animals for food, animal experimentation and commercial hunting.
These two figures serve to illustrate the main differences within the animal rights movement. While Singer is primarily concerned with improving treatment of animals and accepts that, at least in some hypothetical scenarios, animals could be legitimately used for further (human or non-human) ends, Regan relies on the strict "Kantian" idea that animals are persons and ought never to be sacrificed as mere means. Yet, despite these theoretical discrepancies, both Singer and Regan mostly agree about what to do in practice: for instance, they both concur in that the adoption of a vegan diet and the abolition of nearly all forms of animal experimentation are ethically mandatory.
Gary Francione's work (Animals, Property, and the Law, et.al.) is based on the premise that the main obstacle towards a society where animal rights are recognized is the legal status of animals as property. Francione claims that there presently is no proper animal rights movement in the United States, but only an animal-welfarist movement, and that any such movement which does not advocate the abolishment of the property status of animals is misguided, logically inconsistent and doomed never to achieve its stated goal of improving the condition of animals. Francione says that a society which regards dogs and cats as family members yet kills cows, chickens, pigs, etc. for food exhibits "moral schizophrenia".
See also: Animal rights group, veganism, vegetarianism, anti-vivisection, ahimsa, Animal Liberation Front, imitation meat, in vitro meat, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
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