Vegetarianism in a Nutshell: Animal Rights

The final reason I hear for adopting a vegetarian diet—and this may be the most important reason for teenagers and college students—is the growing understanding that other animals are more like us than they are unlike us, that they are our "cousins," to quote Richard Dawkins. The Rev. Dr. Andrew Linzey, a theologian at Oxford University, points out that animals were designed with certain needs, desires, natural behaviors, and inclinations, just as human beings were, and that animals have the capacity for pain and suffering, just as human beings do.

Of course other animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone, like we are. And of course a dead animal is, like a dead human, a corpse. So in my opinion, it makes a lot more sense to ask a person why he or she eats animals' corpses than to ask a person why he or she doesn't. Since "Why are you a vegetarian?" is the same question as "Why don't you eat rotting animals' corpses?" wouldn't it make more sense to ask someone why he or she does?

Other animals have the same five physiological senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Their experiences are similar. Any difference between a human and another animal is a difference of degree, not kind. From The Rev. Linzey's perspective, denying animals the things that they were designed to do and inflicting pain on them for reasons of convenience is categorically unethical. Linzey argues that causing pain to an animal is the moral equivalent of causing pain to a human being, because from the vantage point of the one harmed, the pain is the same.

Basically, Linzey's view is the animal rights perspective. The animal rights perspective holds that animals have a right, just as human beings do, to be free from pain and suffering. Back in the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, the father of the Utilitarian movement, stated that if we're talking about a being's right to be free from pain and suffering, then the morally relevant variable is not whether that being can think or talk or how we relate to that being's life, but rather his or her capacity to feel pain and to suffer. Of course, any introductory physiology course will teach you that birds, mammals, and fish all have the same basic capacity to suffer. We share this capacity with all animals.

The animal rights movement is a movement for justice, just like the abolition of slavery, suffrage, civil rights, and women's rights. Most people today understand that bias on the basis of race, gender, religion, or nationality—any bias against other human beings—is wrong. Species bias—the idea that just because certain beings are not human, we can do whatever we wish with them—has yet to become widely accepted. Dr. Albert Schweitzer put it well when he stated that "compassion, in which ethics takes root, does not assume its true proportions until it embraces not only man but every living being."

Again, prejudice is prejudice, whether it is based on race or gender or religion—or on species. In each case, a line is drawn, separating those in the group above the line from those in the group below the line. Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, who fled Nazi-occupied Poland, compared species bias to the "most extreme racist theories" and thought that animal rights was the purest form of justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the "might makes right" moral paradigm—a moral paradigm that is ethically bankrupt.

Interestingly, the animal rights perspective has been embraced by a wide range of brilliant thinkers and humanitarians that includes, in addition to those I've already mentioned, Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Harriet Beecher Stowe, C.S. Lewis, Susan B. Anthony, Leo Tolstoy, and Mahatma Gandhi.

More recently, we have moral heavyweights on our side that include Carl Sagan, Peter Singer, Richard Dawkins, and John Rawls—three of the foremost thinkers of the past 100 years, including the foremost Darwin scholar, Dawkins, and the man The New York Times called the most influential philosopher alive, Singer.