Moral Significance of Humans & Animals

In examining the moral significance of human beings, many philosophers differentiate between human beings and animals, emphasizing those qualities which separate human beings from animals, implying that these qualities prove moral significance and thus that the absence of these qualities would deny such significance. Inherent in the discussion of the moral significance of animals is that human actions will be determined by the outcome of the argument. Human beings tend to view animals as a resource that exists for human use:

Since animals exist for us, to benefit us in one way or another, what harms them really doesn't matter--or matters only if it starts to bother us, makes us feel a trifle uneasy. . . (Regan 47).

If animals have moral significance, we have to think beyond our personal needs and beyond the idea of animals as a resource.

As noted, the argument often centers on what attributes separate human beings from animals. Among the uniquely human attributes usually evoked in such discussions are reasoning ability, complex langu

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presented by Descartes, who expresses the long-held view that human beings and animals are completely different because human beings possess consciousness and immortal souls while animals have neither souls nor consciousness. For Descartes, animals were like machines, incapable of feeling pain and only seeming to suffer (Patterson 8). The second path implies that because human beings can anticipate pain and death, and because they know that death will represent the end of consciousness forever, and because they recognize that threats to one person may represent a threat to all, the protection of human rights is thus essential to everyone's peace of mind: Sounds nice, but it amounts to philosophical surrender. To rely completely on this argument is to concede that language, reason, and self-consciousness are morally important only to the extent that they magnify suffering or happiness. Pain and pleasure, in other words, are the currency of moral assessment (Wright 25). However, Wright says that many, if not all, nonhuman animals seem to possess the currency of pain and pleasure: So unless you can come up with a non-arbitrary reason for saying that their particular qualities are worthless while our particular quantities are
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Approximate Word count = 1486
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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