A vindication of the rights of brutes

Abstract

The first defense of animal rights came in the form of a joke on human rights. As a reaction against the new ethics of the Enlightenment, a conservative aristocrat ridiculed rights for men and women by arguing that these would eventually lead to the laughable and absurd idea of giving rights to brutes, and perhaps even plants and things. The idea of human rights should thus be abandoned. After two hundred years it is worth revisiting this old argument to address the question of whether granting moral status to animals, plants, and even landscapes eventually makes hard-won human rights into a joke. In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) published Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to Edmund Burke’s conservative view of the French revolution. She argued that every man has an equal right to education because of his equal intrinsic capability to reason. Soon Thomas Paine (1737–1809) followed suit with a similar line of argument in his Rights of Man (1791). A year later Wollstonecraft enlarged her argument to also include women in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). These celebrated books stand today as examples of Enlightenment philosophies that also embody key values of today’s world. In their own time, they created much debate and were ill received by the conservative establishment. One particularly critical response, which will be the focus of the following pages, came in the pamphlet Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, published anonymously in 1792. This little booklet, largely ignored by historians of animal rights, suggested that animals were entitled to rights because of their intrinsic capabilities to reason, speak, and have emotions. Animals were entitled to rights because of these inherent characteristics and not because of human obligations or sympathies towards them. The booklet thus represents one of the first biocentric arguments in favor of animal rights. These arguments countered those of the Enlightenment thinkers concerned about the moral status of animals, plants, and things. The most important one was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who argued that even though only humans had rights, they ought not to treat animals badly, or destroy plants and other beautiful things. Such acts of the spiritus destructionis could corrupt the human sense of morality: