Reply to Fulda on animal rights

Abstract

Joseph Fulda has proposed a somewhat recherchd reply to my criticism of the doctrine of "animal rights. ''I It is always permissible to kill any number of animals rather than let a human being die, not because animals lack rights, says Fulda, but because the rights of animals are denumerably infinite in size while human rights are non-denumerable. (Fulda mistakenly asserts that R I is the number of sets of integers; this assertion is the famous Continuum Hypothesis, which is neither provable nor refutable within standard set theory.) Since any non-denumable exceeds any finite number of denumerables, animal rights may be supposed to exist but are infinitesmal compared to human rights. I am not sure that Fulda's "non-standard-moder' differs much from the common-sense view I endorsed, for reasons that a few preliminary points make clear. First, Fulda's terrorist example does not compel a non-additive view of rights, since, as is a commonplace in the literature, handing over a hostage to a terrorist is doing something wrong, whereas refusing to hand over the hostage is allowing a wrong to happen. Perhaps the governing intuition is not that killing one person is as bad as killing a thousand, but that, standing finn, you have killed nobody while all the moral blood is on the terrorist's hands. Maimonides notwithstanding, most people would chose actively taking one life over actively taking ten million, implicitly treating the value of lives as additive. Fulda's second motive for his model, the supremacy of animal rights over property rights, is also not compelling. If millions of termites are destroying my house, am I not allowed, morally, to kill them? If a wolf is decimating a flock of sheep and mining a rancher's livelihood, isn't the rancher allowed to kill it? If a limit exists to the destruction the rancher must endure, animal rights in Fulda's scheme become finite numbers considerably smaller than most property rights. Third, Fulda's model solves the central man 2 - vs. - animal problem only if the universe is sufficiently small. Suppose you are the quartermaster