Roger Scruton argues that animals do not have rights but that we do have duties and responsibilities towards them.

The denial of animal rights covers familiar ground. A creature with rights is duty-bound to respect the rights of others. If animals had rights, then whole species would be condemned out-of-hand as criminal by nature. Rights and duties belong only to creatures capable of making reasoned choices, i.e. self-conscious and language-using persons, who can give reasons for their beliefs and actions and can enter into a reasoned dialogue with others. Only humans appear to be such moral beings. But we do, he says, owe duties towards animals.

In the cases of pets and of animals reared for our purposes (e.g. livestock, race-horses, specimens in zoos or laboratories, etc.), we take responsibility for the animals by deliberately making them dependent upon us for their individual survival and well-being. This amounts to assuming a duty to care for them, which requires us to give them a fulfilled life and an easy death. With pets, and with animals used as beasts of burden or in sport, this duty involves exposing the animals to suffering in so far as this is a by-product of them engaging in the exercise, activities and interests appropriate to them. It also involves the deliberate infliction of pain in so far as this is necessary to train them. But it is a requirement of the duty of care to see that the balance of pleasures and pains in the animals' lives comes out in the animals' favour.

In the case of wild creatures, we do not assume a duty of care, but we still have duties to protect their habitats, to secure (as best we can) the balance of nature, and to inflict pain or fear only if it is a necessary part of our legitimate dealings with them.

How do these duties towards animals arise? He lists four roots of our moral judgements. First, there is the moral law which concerns the rights of moral beings and the corresponding duties entailed by those rights. Second, there is sympathy, which is a motive for obeying the moral law and a ground of duties of kindness. Third, there is virtue: we need to cultivate a virtuous disposition if we are to be moral in difficult situations. Fourth, there is a kind of piety which underlies all moral sentiment and which is a deep-down recognition of our frailty and dependence, a reverence to the world on which we depend, and a humility before the works of nature. These roots, he says, give rise to duties towards animals in the following ways.

First, he suggests, though without explanation, that the assumed duties of care (to animals we make dependent on us) are connected to the moral law. Second, our sympathies extend not only to other moral beings but also to animals, and so therefore do the duties of kindness and, in particular, a duty not to inflict suffering for its own sake. Third, virtuous dispositions would be undermined if they were not exercised in relation to animals as well as to moral beings (which again rules out cruelty). Fourth, piety is a respectful attitude toward the world in which the species are regarded as sacred, and in which we recognise our general responsibilities towards the environment. He adds: "modern civilisation has destroyed a precious part of the human soul in its arrogant assertion of a right to control and exploit the world's resources" (p. 57).

These principles lead him to approve of keeping pets, using animals for work and sport, eating animals, angling, fox-hunting, deer-stalking, some animal experimentation, and perhaps even bull-fighting, since apart from the benefits to humans, the consequences of these activities are that more animals live - and live a better life - than would otherwise be the case. But he condemns factory farms and zoos (because of unfulfilled animal lives), dog and cock fighting and bear-baiting (which involve inflicting suffering for its own sake), and some experimentation on the higher mammals (which involves callous treatment and so undermines virtue).

Roger Scruton raises a large number of issues in this pamphlet, and I disagree with him about most of them. Unfortunately, I can only go into a few of them here (so I will have to refrain, e.g., from exposing the follies in his remarks about pornography). But let me begin with agreement.

I think he is perfectly correct in arguing that animals do not have rights. Few things in philosophy are as clear and evident as that. Of course, nothing in philosophy is beyond dispute; but for that very reason one has to make a judgement about what disputes are worth having.

The more puzzling questions are whether we have duties towards animals and, if so, what they are and how they arise. Roger's answers to these questions I find completely unsatisfactory. Let me begin with the "assumed duty of care" towards the animals we take under our control.

In talking of us "assuming" a duty of care, what he seems to have in mind is that by taking control of these animals we undertake to treat them in certain ways. But with whom do we agree such an undertaking? With the animals? With nature or "the environment"? But animals, nature or the environment are not moral beings and so cannot be parties to any agreement. He talks of pets being "honorary members of the moral community" (p. 69), so perhaps he does envisage the duty of care as being part of an "honorary" agreement with the animal. But if so, the duty is only an "honorary" duty, i.e. a piece of make-believe which is no more a real duty than the animal is a real moral being. In short, he has made no case for there being any "duty of care" towards animals under our control.

I think that in fabricating this duty of care, Roger has been misled by the language he uses. For instead of talking of duties towards animals, he talks of "duties and responsibilities". I think it is the treacherous vagueness and ambiguity of the word "responsibility" that sends him awry. It is as though he passes from saying that I have responsibility for an animal to saying that I have a responsibility towards the animal (i.e. that I owe a duty to it). But such an inference is simply invalid. For example, I am normally responsible for looking after my own property, i.e. I have responsibility for it, so if, e.g., it suffers damage through neglect, I have only myself to blame. But it does not follow that I have responsibilities towards it, i.e. that, absurdly, I owe duties to my property. It does not even follow that I have to answer to another person if I damage it.

On the matter of sympathy, I think he is completely wrong. First, while sympathy may often support morality in making it easier for people to do the right thing, it also often undermines morality, e.g. where sympathy for an evil-doer tempts one from the straight and narrow. Second, sympathy is never a moral motive. The only moral motive is the desire to do the right thing. If one does the right thing out of sympathy, one's motive is not moral. (Yes, I am following Kant here.) Third, sympathy, which is subjective and contingent, cannot be a ground of moral duties. Propositions expressing our moral duties are objective and necessary; though they cannot generally be known with certainty (indeed, we may feel absolutely convinced of the truth of a moral proposition yet be mistaken). In all these respects, moral truths are like the truths of mathematics. Grounding morality on our sympathies is like grounding mathematics on our urges to go forth and multiply.

Consequently, while I agree that sympathy is immensely important in our lives, and that people without sympathy are potentially very dangerous, I deny that sympathy gives rise to any moral duties even to people, let alone to animals.

The argument from virtue is a Kantian one, but it is one that I reject. If we are to be moral, we must cultivate virtuous dispositions. If being cruel to animals makes us less likely to be kind to people, then our duties to other people will require us not to be cruel to animals. So far, so good; but note two things. First, the duties here are duties towards people that constrain our behaviour towards animals. There is nothing in this argument that requires us to recognise any duties towards animals. Second, it is debatable whether cruelty towards animals necessarily undermines our kindness to moral beings. Why should we not clearly demarcate the behaviour which is appropriate to moral and to non-moral beings? After all, we make a clear distinction between animate and inanimate things, and people who are quite happy to kick a football around a field are not thereby tempted to kick animals (or people) about.

In his talk of piety, Roger seems to have succumbed to a form of Earth-worshipping eco-mysticism. How do "responsibilities to" the environment arise? I admit we may have duties to people which constrain what we do to the environment; but that is not what he says. He even enunciates the principle that "we must maintain, as far as possible, the balance of nature" (p.89). Let me briefly make the following points. The word "nature" can be used in an inclusive or an exclusive sense. In the former sense it includes humans, so whatever humans do is a natural force and part of the balance of nature. An injunction to maintain the balance of nature, in this sense, would prohibit nothing. In the exclusive sense, nature means what happens spontaneously without human intervention. To maintain the balance of nature in this sense would therefore prevent us from doing anything. But meddling with the balance of nature, in this sense, so far from being an evil, is a positive good. Hurricanes, disease, pestilence, predators are all part of the balance of nature, but human life and happiness require that they be conquered, not deferred to. Civilisation, art, convenience and relief from suffering are all the result of human interference with the balance of nature. Does all this sound familiar? It ought to, since it was said by John Stuart Mill in his 1874 pamphlet, Nature (a pamphlet which all actual or prospective eco-mystics ought to study).

Further, some of the judgements to which Roger is led by the duties he recognises seem to be repugnant to our ordinary moral intuitions. For example, he condemns factory farming, though he recognises that without it the cost of food would rise and the poor would suffer most. A couple of consequences would be that some people would go hungry and some would die in winter because they cut back on heating to pay for food. In other words, people will suffer and die so that some animals can live more fulfilled lives! As for experiments on the higher mammals, the alternative is to have experimentation on human beings, since the surgeon will have to operate on people without the benefit of knowledge obtained from experiments on animals.

In conclusion, I do not think Roger has given any good reason to believe that we have duties towards animals. This perturbs me because, like most people, I am an animal-lover, a sympathetic person who is pained by animal suffering. However, in relation to people we make a distinction between what we are obliged to do and what it would be kind to do. Even if we have no obligations towards animals, that does not stop us from being kind to them whenever we can.

Finally, it is a commonplace of moral philosophy that, while rights imply duties, duties do not imply rights. What this commonly means is that, if one has a right, then others have a corresponding duty to respect that right, but one can have a duty to others without them having any corresponding right. For example, if I make a promise to someone, then I have a duty to do for them what I have promised, but they have no right to it (if I do not do what I promised, they cannot compel me either to do it or to compensate them). However, from the foregoing, it seems that there is one sense in which duties do imply rights, viz., that if one has a duty, then the creature to whom one owes it must be a creature of a type that has rights (a moral being). I say "creature of a type" to take account e.g. of infants, to whom we owe duties though they may not yet have any rights.

Danny Frederick