Rothbard on Animal Rights

This video addresses an essay written by Murray Rothbard, which was published on mises.org. The link is in the sidebar. Rothbard talks about—he's making a case for human rights and against animal rights, or non-human animal rights. So, Rothbard talks about natural rights; he thinks that on Earth, only humans have them. He thinks that we have them because we make conscious choices, we transform the environment in order to prosper, and we collaborate consciously in society and in the division of labor.

A couple of problems show up right away. What exactly does Rothbard think that a right is? He clearly doesn't believe that it's an inter-subjective agreement about how to treat each other, but what he thinks rights actually are isn't made clear. The second thing: how can Rothbard claim to know that this collection of characteristics exhibited by most human adults does, in fact, bring into existence these apparently spooky entities called rights?

Things go from bad to worse. Here's an excerpt from where Rothbard talks about aggressing against other species: "It would surely be absurd to say that a wolf is evil because he exists by devouring and aggressing against lambs, chickens, etc. The wolf is not an evil being who aggresses against other species; he's simply following the natural law of his own survival. Similarly for man, it is just as absurd to say that men aggress against cows and wolves as to say that wolves aggress against sheep."

Since Rothbard is already using the naturalistic fallacy, he might as well do it properly and conclude that since when a wolf eats cubs, we don't say that the wolf is evil, then there's nothing wrong with humans eating their own babies either. I don't actually know if wolves do eat their cubs, but I'm sure they do other things that, in human society, we would consider antisocial.

Until the very last sentence of the article, Rothbard ignores the most serious problem facing anyone who wants to claim rights for humans while rejecting the idea of rights for all non-human animals on Earth. This objection is called the argument from marginal cases. If, in order to have rights, we have to be able to make conscious choices, transform the environment in order to prosper, and collaborate consciously in society and in the division of labor, then many humans don't have rights. For instance, babies and people with a severe mental handicap.

Rothbard tries to evade this criticism by moving the goalpost. Right at the end of his essay, he says, "The fact that animals can obviously not petition for their rights is part of their nature and part of the reason why they are clearly not equivalent to and do not possess the rights of human beings." And if it be protested that babies can't petition either, the reply of course is that babies are future human adults, whereas animals obviously are not.

So now it's to believe that it's not only people who currently have the capacity to make conscious choices, transform the environment, and so forth who have rights, but also organisms with the potential to have those capacities in the future. It takes some nerve to end an essay by opening such a big can of worms.

If it's the potential for an organism to have the capacities of an adult human that determines whether or not it has rights, then we've entered the "every sperm is sacred" territory. On Rothbard's view, then, a human sperm, perhaps together with a human egg cell, has the right not to be aggressed against, meaning that the use of spermicidal cream is morally impermissible, except perhaps in self-defense when sperm attack.

Meanwhile, an adult chimp, who can reason, who uses language, and displays clear signs of the capacity for suffering, has no rights at all, and humans can torture him with impunity. I hope that you find this idea as absurd and obnoxious as I do.

One more awkward implication of Rothbard's naive view on rights is that if a human had no prospects of becoming a person who had the capacity to make conscious choices, to transform the environment, and so on, then this person would have no rights. A great many people don't have prospects of developing all these capacities. Rothbard tells us it's true; then we aren't infringing on anyone's rights if we keep such people as slaves, torture them, or kill them for sports. I don't believe that he would find any of these things permissible.

Mises.org publishes a lot of insightful articles. It's a shame that this kind of nonsense gets published there too.