Frey: Beyond the Moral Pale

Abstract

Abstract In questioning received attitudes toward the moral status of animals, it is a common experience to find one’s qualms reinforced by the jejune and sophistical character of the arguments put up in defense of our current practices. R. G. Frey’s book is sure to have this unintended effect, and for that reason may not be without value. He is out to oppose the “philosophical orthodoxy”(!) that calls for radical changes in our treatment of animals, and does so by offering a series of transparent paralogisms directed against the proanimal writings of various contemporary philosophers. Frey’s target is the claim, due originally to Leonard Nelson, that since animals have interests and interests confer moral rights, animals have moral rights. He is sceptical of this claim on two counts: he does not believe in moral rights at all, and he denies that animals have interests. Since the first of these contentions is not specific to the case of animals, he proposes to concentrate on the second. His procedure is to examine a number of suggested bases for the possession of interests-having needs, beliefs, desires, emotions, being sentient, and having the capacity to suffer-and to deny either that animals have them, or that they confer interests. On each of these topics his arguments have the unmistakable hollow ring of the bottom of the barrel. Some have suggested that sentience and the capacity to suffer give animals an interest in not being subjected to certain kinds of life.