If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

Animals Don't Have Rights

by Jack Boulogne

146 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-2296; ISBN 1-4120-1918-4; US$16.50, C$19.99, EUR13.00, £9.50

Highly readable, this compact book is written by a professional philosopher for a general audience. The author tackles the myths of animal rights movement head-on without promoting hatred towards animals.

Read more!

about the book      about the author      sample excerpts or Table of Contents      catalogue info

About the Book This book is written for a general audience but it remains philosophically serious though humourous in tone. Animals rights is a serious matter of concern for law makers but common ethical propositions are often dead wrong. Animals do not need rights to be treated decently and human rights are always prior to animals.

---

About the Author Jack Boulogne was born a long time ago on a straw mat in Indonesia. When he was six he and his mother and sisters were put in a Japanese concentration camp. For three years he didn't see his father, who was in a different camp. After the camp years, things improved considerably. The family spent a few years in Holland, and then moved to Canada, where Jack had a successful high school education, and was class Valedictorian, not really deserved, because Esther Williams got one percent higher scores in the government exams. After working in a bank, which was interesting, he studied at the University of British Columbia in Canada and got a general degree in physics and mathematics. After some employment and some unemployment, Jack took a dangerous decision and entered the teaching profession, where he taught roughly fifteen different courses, but mainly Physics courses. He, in the meantime, got a masters degree in philosophy, his main passion being the study of moral reasoning. He was able to slip a philosophy course into his high school curriculum, and when that was successful, in terms of student interest, he sneaked in a new course on moral reasoning called Ethics 11. Since hardly any materials were available, he wrote a textbook called "Handbook of Practical Morality" which much later turned into "Morality...Is a 4-Way Stop'. Things did not go well for him after this, and he started to have serious health problems, and boldly quit teaching, which is a heroic act. With modest funds, he became a landlord and managed to eke out a modest, but relatively happy existence. In his later years he designed and built two houses, being at heart an engineer and inventor. He still lives today in the second lovely house with an absolutely lovely wife, with a supremely lovely view of Georgia Straight and Mount Baker, and steadily turns out as many books as he still can. Table of Contents INTRODUCTION CHAPTER ONE- What Does "Having a Right" Mean? CHAPTER TWO- 'Rights' is a Moral Concept CHAPTER THREE- What is Morality? CHAPTER FOUR- Double- Universalisability CHAPTER FIVE- The Moral Rules and Rights CHAPTER SIX- Moral Virtues CHAPTER SEVEN- Kindness and Moral Duty CHAPTER EIGHT- War and Peace CHAPTER NINE- Low Cost Morality CHAPTER TEN- The Natural Order CHAPTER ELEVEN- Species Warfare CHAPTER TWELVE- The Deer and I CHAPTER THIRTEEN- A Recapitulation CHAPTER FOURTEEN- The Charter of Rights CHAPTER FIFTEEN- So Why Be Moral? CHAPTER SIXTEEN- The Moral Code Encoded CHAPTER SEVENTEEN- Do Animals Need Rights? CHAPTER EIGHTEEN- Are People Too Moral? APPENDIX A- A Truly Brief Summation of Arguments THE MORAL DOMAIN ABOUT THE AUTHOR BIBLIOGRAPHY Excerpts INTRODUCTION There are two kinds of people in the world according to their thinking about the rights of animals. Perhaps the simplest, clearest way to distinguish these two groups is by what the author calls "Boulogne's Famous Turkey Test" which is not famous yet, but might be useful anyway. The Test goes something like this: You have landed on a desert island from a ship wreck, say, and your survival is in jeopardy, because you have very little food and equipment to settle down on this island for a long haul. The island is unfortunately in a unfrequented area of the Pacific Ocean. What you have with you is one on these handy liquid fuel cigarette lighters, one big fat juicy turkey, and two loaves of bread. The desert island is not really a desert, but has some trees, and other vegetation, and a source of semi fresh water. Now comes the test of moral reasoning: What do you eat first? The turkey? The bread? Only the bread? So why does this test put humans into different camps of thinking? The problem of course is whether the turkey has any rights like you do. If turkeys have independent rights as living beings, then the turkey has a claim on your concern. Some philosophers describe morality as having an equal concern for others, as much as you do for yourself. What is not so clear with those philosophers is whether one can simply apply "concern for others" to all living beings, or whether this concern should be brutally confined to humans, or at least to all rational sentient beings, a phrase popular with many modern thinkers. The phrase modern thinkers also includes people like Jesus Christ who counseled his followers to love God above all, and "your neighbor as yourself". We must remember that in Jesus' times these ideas might well have been considered "modern", meaning new and innovative. The question for Christians can then be put in terms of whether a turkey is a neighbor or not. For humanity in general we can reflect on that very serious moral dilemma which is whether to allow young Jimmy to run back into the burning house to save Hiccups the beloved pooch and a true member of the family. The parents may be reluctant to encourage this courageous act of self- sacrifice, in the face of very poor odds, but Jimmy hears Hiccups" frantic barking, and sees only a fellow being- one he loves- in distress, one crying for help. The young fellow does run in, and saves his pet. There is much applause, and back patting for Jimmy, but perhaps there shouldn"t be. The question here is not so much to decry the happy ending, but to direct our attention to the basic question whether an animal's right is as important as that of a human being. Would the parents have been morally justified in restraining Jimmy, that is the question! Does a family dog have full human rights? The family may say yes in the case of their dear pet, but when it comes to the neighbors' annoying goat, they wish to exclude this noisy animal from the "moral community", as philosophers sometimes describe that group of beings that are "covered" by morality. In 1970, when I decided to study philosophy, especially Ethics- as moral philosophy is commonly labeled- I determined that my task would be to answer two difficult questions of ethics that seemed to me to be crucial before one could take any moral theory seriously; one was the Problem of the Soldier, the other the difficult Conundrum of Cruelty to Animals. The problem of the soldier is easy to state. Moral law seems to unequivocally state: Thou shalt not kill, yet soldiers are not murderers. How can that be? The cruelty of animals issue is also fairly easy to explicate. We kill cows and confine turkeys to be slaughtered, especially at Thanksgiving time, but if the turkeys and the cows knew what was 'acomin' they would hardly find it cause to give thanks. Yet! Yet we get upset if we hear our neighbors abusing their animals; we would be moved to pity and anger, and might well be motivated to do something about it, no matter how much we believe that the heart of morality is the fine art of minding one's own business and "live and let live". My instinct was right about these two questions. Before one can give a complete and satisfying answer to these questions, one needs a full- fledged moral theory. Some readers would immediately object that such a theory is impossible, and that moral questions must forever have vague and disputable answers. But that is too a moral theory, and it ignores the difficulty of proving that something is impossible. Look at the history of manned flight! In 1890 or so, some famous and respected physicist claimed stoutly that the laws of physics prohibited heavier than air flight, and yet, amazingly, in 1903, the Wright brothers managed to achieved this impossible dream. It took the author almost thirty years before he (that's me) arrived at a satisfactory theory of morality that deals with the hapless turkey, who, by God's mercy, doesn"t know what's- a- comin' and also deals with the moral qualms of the other sentient being who has been cast by fate upon this imaginary island, namely the turkey"s owner. Incidentally, note how casually we state that an animal can have an owner, while people cannot own people without unfairly oppressing them. Can one rightfully own animals? A number of years ago a well known philosopher wrote a book called: "Animal Liberation" and judging by that title we might suppose that the author, professor Singer, does not believe in owning our fellow sentient non- human beings. In brief, what is required is a universal theory of rights, so that we can make an objective judgment of what some cosmetics firm was doing with animals to improve women's welfare. We want to get away from inconsistency and knee jerk reactions, and move to objective reasoned judgments, almost like a science. This is indeed a tall order, yet it can be done, but not in this Introduction. You must read on, and follow the reasoning carefully. We will see that animals do not have moral rights, at least not the ones we humans have, and yet understand that our discomfort at even thinking of cruelty to animals is also rational, as well as being defensible in terms of moral theory. This may sound like a contradiction but it is not. Human concern regarding the just treatment of animals is not merely a matter of sentimentality. Catalogue Information Canada • USA • UK • Europe Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Terms of use | Author Login URL http://www.trafford.com © 1995-2007 Trafford Publishing, a division of Trafford Holdings Ltd.