Abstract
Animal rights positions face the ‘predator problem’: the suggestion that if the rights of nonhuman animals are to be protected, then we are obliged to interfere in natural ecosystems to protect prey from predators. Generally, rather than embracing this conclusion, animal ethicists have rejected it, basing this objection on a number of different arguments. This paper considers but challenges three such arguments, before defending a fourth possibility. Rejected are Peter Singer’s suggestion that interference will lead to more harm than good, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s suggestion that respect for nonhuman sovereignty necessitates non-interference in normal circumstances, and Alasdair Cochrane’s solution based on the claim that predators cannot survive without killing prey. The possibility defended builds upon Tom Regan’s suggestion that predators, as moral patients but not moral agents, cannot violate the rights of their prey, and so the rights of the prey, while they do exist, do not call for intervention. This idea is developed by a consideration of how moral agents can be more or less responsible for a given event, and defended against criticisms offered by thinkers including Alasdair Cochrane and Dale Jamieson.
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Notes
- 1.
This presumably means that Cochrane would hold that, in those cases where it was not more ‘burdensome’ for us to intervene than to not intervene, we would have a duty of intervention. He does not expand upon this point, but it would likely mean that, for instance, we could intervene to spare a child the unhappiness of seeing a rabbit killed by a stoat. This does not seem unreasonable, provided the stoat could be interfered with in a way that respected her rights.
- 2.
Like Cochrane, however, the authors hold that agents, as opposed to moral agents, can violate rights.
- 3.
It is true, and worth remembering, that moral agents sometimes cause things for which they are not responsible. Neither drivers nor the state are responsible for accidental deaths on the road, provided drivers are cautious, and the state takes necessary precautions to prevent them. Provided a certain precautions are taken, no one is responsible for deaths on the road, and it is wrong to say that such accidental deaths involve rights-violations. If they nonetheless remain issues of justice, it is not because of the rights of victims.
- 4.
If we are troubled by the idea that the mother has a duty to intervene to prevent rights violations, she can be replaced for the purposes of the thought experiment with a police officer or other agent of the state tasked with preventing rights violations. Even if the mother need not protect the rights of others, the state must.
- 5.
There is perhaps one exception to this; a person cannot violate their own rights. As such, were the father responsible for the child’s having the knife, the mother would not have a duty to intervene to protect the father’s rights. She would, as it happens, still have a duty to intervene as placing a child in a situation in which he can pick up a sharp knife quite clearly violates his rights; the child, deeply dependent on his carers, has a right not to be put in an unsafe environment. Further, we may wish to allow some other duty (through, say, an appeal to virtue) to encourage her to intervene on behalf of the father. This would not, however, be a duty mandated by the rights of the father, and so is unimportant for the purposes of this argument.
- 6.
This violation of the wolf’s right is the equivalent to the way that we as a society violate the rights of criminals when we intervene to protect their victims, potential or actual. While this violation of the predator’s rights does not necessarily make intervention unjust, it does give us reason to pause.
- 7.
Even if capturing a stoat does not violate her rights, capturing her with the intention of subjecting her to torture surely does.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was produced as part of a research project funded by the Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland. Previous versions of the paper have been presented at the Association of Legal and Social Philosophy Annual Conference 2014 at Leeds University, the Queen’s University Belfast political theory workshop series and the Queen’s University Belfast philosophy society. My thanks to all who commented on these and other occasions, especially David Archard, Jeremy Watkins, Cillian McBride, Fabian Schuppert and Matteo Bonotti.
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Milburn, J. Rabbits, Stoats and the Predator Problem: Why a Strong Animal Rights Position Need Not Call for Human Intervention to Protect Prey from Predators. Res Publica 21, 273–289 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9281-2
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Keywords
- Animal ethics
- Animal rights
- Predator problem
- Environmental ethics
- Moral responsibility
- Justice