THIN RED LINE: Sentience and intrinsic worth as a foundation for fundamental animal rights
The world is an unjust place in which humans disrespect and exploit other sentient beings. To transition towards a world in which human beings can live in harmony with other animals, deep cultural change is required. Humans must learn to recognize the intrinsic value and sentience of other animals, and develop laws to ensure they are respected and protected.
JANE KOTZMANN: The world is an unjust place in which human beings disrespect and exploit other sentient beings and our shared environment. To transition towards a world in which human beings can live in harmony with other animals and the environment with which we are interdependent, deep cultural change is required. Human beings must learn to recognise the intrinsic value of other animals and the environment and develop the law to ensure that such value is respected and protected.
Recent decades have seen trends emerge in mostly Western countries of expressly recognising in the law that animals are sentient and have intrinsic worth. The extent to which such statements are symbolic versus having a real and substantive impact remains unclear. Nevertheless, even if the legal recognition of animal sentience and intrinsic value in some jurisdictions around the world constitutes mere ‘humane-washing’, these provisions may yet represent—or be used as—a small step towards the required cultural change. Specifically, animal sentience and intrinsic worth may be drawn upon to provide a foundation for the development of animal rights.
This article contends that the primary purpose of rights is the prevention of needless pain and suffering by sentient beings. As Pocar states, ‘the fact of life itself and its accompanying capacity for suffering provides a sufficient basis for assuming the existence of protectable rights among non-human beings. Here again, we see an evident parallel with human rights’. When we talk about the foundation of rights, we are referring to the justification or reason for the existence of those rights. In the context of human rights, the concept of human dignity is generally put forward as the justification for rights.
This article asserts that animal sentience and intrinsic worth should be used as a foundation for animal rights. Sentience is not the same thing as intrinsic worth and, on its own, fails to explain why sentient beings are deserving of protection. The concept of intrinsic worth can be used to provide this explanation, in that it asserts that the capacity to subjectively experience the world is precious and deserving of protection.
Like the concept of human dignity, which plays a foundational role in human rights law, the concepts of animal sentience and intrinsic worth have the benefit of bringing people to a point of consensus. The proliferation of provisions for the recognition of animal sentience and intrinsic worth in various jurisdictions are indicative of this broad consensus. Further, both sentience and intrinsic worth, like dignity, are not based in any comprehensive religious or moral view, thus increasing the possibility that the terms could be the subject of international consensus…
The interests concerned are pluralistic in nature. This means that there is no single underpinning interest such as pleasure or liberty… Allowing a plurality of interests to ground animal rights is important because it will allow for flexibility of approach. Rather than restricting the focus to a single or overarching interest, any objectively established animal interests could be drawn upon as a basis for a right…
It might be countered that all animals are not the same in their capacity for pain and suffering or in their intrinsic worth. It is not the position of this article that they are. Instead, the foundation of rights argued for here identifies the minimum characteristics to ground fundamental rights. What rights they ground will depend to some degree on the individual animal they are designed to protect. SOURCE…
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