Roger Scruton - Animal rights and wrongs

Na tej stronie można przeczytać całą książkę Rogera Scrutona "Animal rights and wrongs" (plik pdf). Książka miała kilka wydań, kolejne były uzupełniane, do przeczytania jest chyba drugie (w każdym razie nie ostatnie).

Scruton jest autorem wielu książek z dziedziny m.in. estetyki i etyki, filozofem, krytykiem, a także kompozytorem. Konserwatysta. W Polsce wydano kilka jego książek. Zwolennik m.in. polowań na lisy (patrz tu), nastawiony zdecydowanie polemicznie i do Regana i do Singera. Jakiś obraz postaci w tym aspekcie, który nas interesuje na forum, wyłania się z następującego fragmentu z jednego z wywiadów:

Professor Scruton, in addition to writing and teaching, you run a rural consultancy together with your wife, and a farm. Is your farm profitable, or is it more of a hobby?

Very few farms are profitable, and ours exists more to establish our identity as a rural consultancy and ideas factory. Our neighbors turn grass into milk and make a loss; we turn grass into ideas and make a profit. We keep horses of our own, which we look after, and allow our neighbors to use the pasture for their cows: cows too, viewed from the window, can easily be made into ideas. We also keep chickens, and occasionally pigs, which we turn into sausages, after their brief time as ideas.

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Spis treści:

• Preface 7
• Metaphysics 10
• The moral being 25
• Life, death, joy and suffering 33
• The moral margin 41
• The roots of moral thinking 45
• The rational basis of moral judgement 53
• The moral status of animals 59
• Duty and the beast: moral conclusions 86
• Morality and the law 93
• Postscript: BSE 96
• Appendix: thoughts on hunting 98
• Notes 109

Wstęp:

Animals were once regarded as things, placed on earth for our use and enjoyment, to be treated according to our convenience. This is no longer so. All thinking people now recognise the gulf that exists between sentient and non-sentient beings and almost all recognise that we have no God-given right to ignore the suffering that we cause just because the victim belongs to some other species. Some, however, go further than this, extending to animals the rights that have until now been reserved for humans. In 1965, Brigid Brophy published ‘The rights of animals’ in the Sunday Times, consciously harking back to Tom Paine and the Rights of man; in 1975, with the publication of Animal liberation, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer outlined the case, as he saw it, for a complete rethinking of our relations to other species. Meanwhile, Richard Ryder had introduced the term ‘speciesism’ in order to imply that, like racism and sexism, our attitude to other animals is a form of unjust discrimination, lacking both rational basis and moral title. These writers have so changed the climate of opinion that no thinking person could now treat animals as our ancestors did, ignoring their feelings and desires and thinking only of their human uses. In a world dominated by humans and their appetites, animals are now widely perceived as a victim class. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the philosophical case mounted by Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Richard Ryder and others has no real cogency. I do not wish to denigrate their achievement in awakening the world to needless cruelties and in compelling us to rethink so many comfortable prejudices. On the other hand, their single-minded emphasis on the features which humans share with other animals – notably, on the capacity for suffering – causes them to overlook the distinction between moral beings (to whom their argument is addressed) and the rest of nature. Since traditional morality is based on this distinction, it cannot be revised by arguments which so blithely ignore it. It seems to me, indeed, that the philosophical discussion of our duties to animals has recently been conducted at a level which gives no real grounds for any conclusion – certainly no grounds for the quite radical conclusions drawn by Singer, Regan and Ryder.

This is not to say that all is right with our traditional morality. But if we are to know what is right with it and what is wrong, we must explore the roots of moral thinking and try to discover exactly how it is, in such a case, that questions of right and wrong could be decided. In what follows I present a map of the territory. Every issue that I touch on is hotly debated and to explore all the philosophical arguments would be not only tedious to the reader but also destructive of my purpose, which is to help those who are genuinely puzzled by the question of animal welfare to see how it might be answered by someone who takes it as seriously as a philosopher ought. At the very least, I hope to show that you can love animals and still believe that, in the right circumstances, it is morally permissible to eat them, to hunt them, to keep them as pets, to wear their skins and even to use them in experiments. The real question is not whether we should do those things but when and how.

Moral sentiment has a natural tendency to seek expression in law. For many people in Britain, it is a scandal that Parliament has barely considered the rearing and training of domestic animals, has shied away from the issue of battery farming and has considered the fate of wild animals only in the context of species protection or in response to single-issue campaigns against field sports. There is no doubt that our Parliament passes too many laws and has too many laws imposed on it by Brussels. Nevertheless, it is necessary to consider why, how and to what extent animals should enjoy legal protection, lest hasty legislation, introduced under pressure from lobbyists on one side of a many-sided debate, should worsen the situation of other sentient species and increase the resentment of those on whom their welfare ultimately depends. My argument should therefore be understood as exploring the moral background to a legal question.

I have greatly benefited from discussions with Jim Barrington, Bob Grant, Sophie Jeffreys, Geoff Mulgan, Geoffrey Thomas and David Wiggins. Like many of those who have ventured into this area, I am indebted to creatures who have no idea of the fact – to Puck, who guards the gate, to George, Sam and Rollo who live in the stables, to the nameless carp in the pond across the field, to the cows next door and to Herbie, who has now been eaten.

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