Look at this beautiful, beautiful argument in favour of animal rights by Peter Singer (if I've misrepresented it, my apologies; I haven't read the original argument, just a summary on The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (www.iep.utm.edu)).
(1) In order to conclude that all and only human beings deserve a full and equal moral status (and that no animals do), there must be some property P that all and only human beings have that can ground such a claim.
(2) Any P that only human beings have is a property that (some) human beings lack (e.g., the marginal cases, infants, severely mentally disabled people, etc.).
(3) Any P that all human beings do have, however, is a property that (most) animals have as well.
(4) Therefore, there is no way to defend the claim that all and only human beings deserve a full and equal moral status.
It's so very pretty. Singer then concludes that all animals, humans and birds alike, have equal moral status. Everything we have a right to, so do all animals (of course, it's more complex than this - Singer says that animals don't have a right to education, because they'll never need it; but they do have an equal right to not suffer pain, because they care equally in that regard).
If we say humans are different from animals just because we are humans, and therefore deserve better treatment, then we are guilty of speciesism, and our mindset is analogous to racism and sexism (we Aryans are better than you Irish, because we're Aryan! Haha! We humans are better than you animals because we're human! Haha!).
It's a slightly flawed argument, however; first, there doesn't have to be a single property P that differentiates between animals and humans; it can be more complicated than that. However, I'm inclined to think that, if we let the P above stand for, instead of a property, a collection or choise of properties, the argument would still stand (so maybe this isn't a flaw at all. Go Singer!).
The second flaw I find more interesting; it's Singer's conclusion. Singer said all animals and humans are equal, because the alternative was too "counter-intuitive." What's the alternative? It is that not only are animals and humans inequal, but that humans are inequal amongst themselves. If some humans are better than others, there has to be a reason - intelligence, artisticness, attractiveness... you can see why he was repelled from this. Thinking you're better than other people because you've more sports trophies than them is not generally considered a virtue. It also creates problems with rights - they are sort of dependant on equality, otherwise they're not just, because if person x is better than person y, but y has an equal right to life, then it's not fair on x, is it?
This brings me to the first main point of this post - I don'tthink that absolute, inalienable rights (hereafter, just 'rights') necessarily exist, or that people should necessarily be endowed with them. The purpose of rights, as I see it, is basically a safeguard. You have some basic rights, and no-one can take them away from you, so you minimise the damage people can do to you. It has side-effects, of course; you're not allowed have 3-day abortions, even when the alternative is the child being killed in utero with a clothes-hanger, or it living a poverty-ridden and unhappy life; you're not allowed actively kill a man, even if it will indirectly save a million others' lives. The reason we have rights is because these situations are rare, because if rights don't exist we have to put a price on life, and because it opens up the door to us getting fucked over in a whole host of new and unpleasant ways. Unlikely, but nevertheless possible. I think the existence of rights is mainly to do with fear - of the unclear, of the malicious, of responsibility.
But I want to know if there is a form of government that will allay these fears. I don't think it impossible, but I don't think we are ready to relinquish rights yet. [info]gerbilsage thinks a meritocracy will work. But there are all sorts of problems - we are not even defended against unclear advertising or blackmail?
The second point of this post is justice - again, I am skeptical of this. If justice is your one virtue, then a scenario of two wealthy men, one more so than the other, is less moral than a scenario of two men starving to death equally (this insight was given to me by a play or summat recounted to me by my most beautiful Kate, and goes, if memory serves (which it doesn't, not at all), "in America, they put all money on table and is all stolen by one man; in Soviet Russia, we put all money on table, and watch it blow away EQUALLY!"). People give out about capitalism because it has created such a huge disparity of wealth; but the poorest of America or richer than the poorest of Cuba. By a long shot.
What do you think?
Ironic, no, that my interest in how to live properly is headed off by a disillusionment of rights, equality and justice, our most fundamental virtues? H'm...
-James