Do Animals Have Rights? 動物有權利嗎？

🔊Kant did not think animals were machines, and he condemned cruelty to them. His reason was indirect. A man who is cruel to animals becomes hard in his dealings with people, so we should treat animals kindly for the sake of humanity. On this view we have duties concerning animals and none to them. The dog has no claim of its own. It has the standing of a neighbor’s window, which we must not break because of what breaking it would do to the neighbor and to us.

康德並不認為動物是機器；而且他譴責對牠們殘忍。他的理由是間接的。一個對動物殘忍的人，待人也會變得冷酷；所以我們應該為了人性的緣故而善待動物。照這個看法，我們有「關於」動物的義務，卻沒有「對」動物的義務。那條狗自己並沒有任何可以主張的東西。牠的地位，像是鄰居家的窗戶：我們不可以打破它，是因為打破它會對鄰居、對我們自己造成什麼。

🔊In 1789 Jeremy Bentham, in a footnote to a book on the principles of law, compared the treatment of animals to slavery. The French had already seen, he wrote, that the blackness of the skin is no reason for abandoning a human being to a tormentor. One day it may be recognized that the number of legs or the hairiness of the skin is no better reason. What else could mark the line? Reason, or speech? “But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

1789 年，傑瑞米・邊沁在一本談法律原則的書的一個註腳裡，把對待動物的方式比作奴隸制。他寫道：法國人已經看出，皮膚黑並不是把一個人丟給折磨者的理由。也許有一天人們會承認：腿的數目，或者皮膚上有沒有毛，也不是更好的理由。還有什麼能劃出那條線？理性，還是語言？「但是，一匹成年的馬或一條成年的狗，比起一個出生一天、一週，甚至一個月的嬰兒，理性得多、也更能交流，簡直不能相比。可是，就算情況不是如此，那又怎樣？問題不在於牠們能不能推理，也不在於牠們能不能說話；而在於牠們會不會受苦。」

🔊The argument has two steps, and both have lasted. The first is that any property we might use to exclude animals, such as reason or language, is also missing in some human beings whom no one proposes to exclude. The second is that the capacity to suffer is what gives a being interests at all. A stone has no interests because nothing we do to it matters to it. A being that can suffer has at least an interest in not suffering, and Bentham saw no reason why the pain should count for less because of the shape of the body that feels it.

這個論證有兩步；而兩步都流傳了下來。第一步：任何一種我們可能拿來排除動物的性質，例如理性或語言，在某些人類身上也是沒有的；而沒有人提議要排除那些人。第二步：受苦的能力，正是使一個存在者有「利益」可言的東西。一塊石頭沒有利益，因為我們對它做什麼，對它都無所謂。一個會受苦的存在者，至少有「不受苦」這項利益；而邊沁看不出有什麼理由，可以因為感受痛苦的那個身體長成什麼形狀，就讓那份痛苦算得比較少。

🔊The footnote was little noticed for a long time. In 1975 Peter Singer made it the foundation of a book, Animal Liberation. His principle is the equal consideration of interests: like interests are to be given equal weight, whoever’s interests they are. To give less weight to an animal’s pain merely because it is not a member of our species is, he argued, a prejudice of the same form as racism, and he took up a new word for it, speciesism. The principle does not say that a pig and a child should be treated alike, since their interests differ. A pig has no interest in learning to read. It does have an interest in not being confined for life in a crate too narrow to turn around in. Most of the book is a description of what is done to animals in laboratories and on industrial farms, where today more than eighty billion land animals are killed each year.

這個註腳很久都沒有什麼人注意。1975 年，彼得・辛格把它當作一本書的地基：《動物解放》。他的原則是「利益的平等考量」：相似的利益，不管是誰的利益，都要給予同等的份量。他主張：只因為一隻動物不是我們這個物種的成員，就把牠的痛苦算得比較輕，是一種與種族主義同樣形式的偏見；他採用了一個新字來稱呼它：物種主義。這個原則並不是說，豬與孩子應該受到一樣的對待；因為他們的利益不同。豬沒有學識字的利益。牠卻有這樣的利益：不要一輩子被關在窄得轉不了身的欄架裡。那本書大部分的篇幅，是在描述實驗室與工業化農場裡對動物做的事；今天，每年有超過八百億隻陸生動物在那裡被宰殺。

🔊Singer is a utilitarian, and strictly he does not speak of rights. For him animals count in the sum of well-being, and an experiment that caused some suffering and prevented far more could be justified, on an animal or on a human being. Tom Regan thought this conceded too much. In The Case for Animal Rights, in 1983, he argued in the manner of Kant that some beings are not to be used as means at all. The beings he had in mind are those he called subjects of a life: creatures with perception, memory, desires, and a welfare that matters to them. They have a value that is not a quantity to be added up, and it gives them a right not to be treated as resources. On Regan’s view the cages should be emptied. Making them larger is not enough.

辛格是效益主義者；嚴格說來，他並不談「權利」。對他來說，動物是算在福祉的總和裡的；一項造成若干痛苦、卻防止了多得多的痛苦的實驗，可以是正當的，不管是用在動物還是用在人身上。湯姆・雷根認為這讓步太多了。他在 1983 年的《為動物權利辯護》裡，以康德的方式主張：有些存在者，根本就不可以被當作工具來用。他所想的，是他稱為「生命主體」的存在者：有知覺、記憶、欲望，並且有一份對牠自己要緊的福祉的生物。牠們有一種價值，不是可以加總的數量；而這給了牠們一項權利：不被當成資源來對待。照雷根的看法，籠子應該清空。把籠子做大一點是不夠的。

🔊The strongest reply comes from the idea of a contract. Rights, on this view, belong to members of a moral community, beings who can make claims on one another, recognize duties, and be held to account. A wolf cannot respect the rights of a deer, and we do not blame it. To have rights is to stand in relations that animals cannot enter. The philosopher Carl Cohen put the point by saying that animals are not the kind of being that can have rights, though we may still have duties of kindness toward them. Human infants are covered because they belong to a kind whose normal members are moral agents.

最強的回應，來自「契約」這個觀念。照這個看法，權利屬於一個道德社群的成員：能夠互相提出主張、認得義務、並且可以被追究責任的存在者。狼沒辦法尊重鹿的權利；而我們並不責怪牠。擁有權利，就是處在一些動物進不去的關係之中。哲學家卡爾・柯亨這樣表達這一點：動物不是那種能夠擁有權利的存在者；不過我們對牠們仍然可以有仁慈的義務。人類的嬰兒之所以包括在內，是因為他們屬於這樣的一個類：這個類的正常成員是道德主體。

🔊A second reply defends partiality. The lesson on strangers found that we owe more to those close to us, and that this is not obviously a prejudice. Mary Midgley argued that a preference for one’s own species is like the preference for one’s own family. It is a natural bond that gives a reason, and it leaves room for real duties to outsiders. The defenders of animals answer that a bond explains why we care more about some beings, and it cannot show that the suffering of the others counts for nothing.

第二個回應，是為偏私辯護。講陌生人的那一課發現：我們對親近的人虧欠得比較多；而這並不明顯是一種偏見。瑪麗・米雷主張：偏愛自己的物種，就像偏愛自己的家人。它是一種自然的連結，能給出理由；而它也為「對外人的真正義務」留了餘地。為動物辯護的人回答：連結能解釋我們為什麼更在乎某些存在者；它卻不能顯示，其他存在者的痛苦一點都不算數。

🔊The Chinese tradition met the question early and gave an honest and uncomfortable answer. King Xuan of Qi, as an earlier lesson told, could not bear the fear of an ox being led to slaughter and ordered a sheep to be used in its place. Mencius approved of the feeling and drew a conclusion about the gentleman: having seen animals alive, he cannot bear to see them die, and having heard their cries, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. “That is why the gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen.” The feeling is taken as the root of humaneness, and the practice goes on out of sight. Mencius held that love has degrees: affection for family, humaneness toward people, and a sparing care for creatures.

中國的傳統很早就碰到了這個問題，並且給了一個誠實而令人不安的答案。齊宣王，正如前面有一課講過的，不忍心看一頭牛被牽去宰殺時的恐懼，下令用一隻羊來代替。孟子肯定了那份感受，並且對君子下了一個結論：「君子之於禽獸也，見其生，不忍見其死；聞其聲，不忍食其肉。是以君子遠庖廚也。」那份感受被當作仁的根苗；而那件事，在看不見的地方照樣進行。孟子主張愛有等差：「親親而仁民，仁民而愛物。」

🔊Buddhism went further and made not killing the first of its precepts, on a ground close to Bentham’s. “All tremble at the rod, all fear death. Treating others like oneself, neither kill nor incite to kill.” Chinese Buddhists, from the sixth century, drew the conclusion that monastics should not eat meat at all. Between Mencius’s kitchen and the monastery’s table lie most of the positions that people hold today. The philosophical question is whether the place where each of us has stopped rests on a reason, or only on what we have managed not to see.

佛教走得更遠，把不殺生定為第一條戒；根據很接近邊沁的那一個。「一切懼刀杖，一切皆畏死，以自度他情，莫殺教他殺。」中國的佛教徒從六世紀起得出了這樣的結論：出家人根本不該吃肉。在孟子的庖廚與寺院的齋桌之間，就是今天人們所持的大多數立場。哲學上的問題是：我們每個人停下來的那個地方，是立足於一個理由，還是只立足於我們設法不去看見的東西。