Are Human Rights Human? by Paola Cavalieri: Standing Up for Animal Rights

In Paola Cavalieri’s text, “Are Human Rights Human?”, Cavalieri provides the reader with the antiquities of Western ethics and descriptively outlines the “zero grade moral status” treatment of nonhumans. Paola’s goal throughout the text is to provide context for the reader to display how animals have been completely excluded from the moral community, which is mostly emphasized in her evaluations on recent views toward nonhumans being limited to a moral patient status. She believes that since the focus of human rights is the right to create a purpose in life, animals should be given the same legal rights as humans because of their ability to express and feel emotion, the main difference between an object and subject. Many different perspectives are shown through the four sections of the text, and the passage is broken down term by term so the reader can only infer what the author is saying in one way.

Cavalieri begins the first section quoting Immanuel Kant, a Prussian philosopher who said, “so far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as means to an end. That end is man. . . . Our duties towards animals are merely indirect duties towards humanity” (Animal Ethics Pg. 30). As the reader, I took this as Kant saying that animals do not think like humans when it comes to repentance and compensation, and humans need to respect animals for their way of thinking and not take advantage of them for their lack of understanding. He then provides a quote from Aristotle, the exact contrast of his first quote that describes nonhumans as nothing but an existence for the good of the man in regard to his needed services and food. He then emphasizes the wild ones to take priorit...

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...le in freedom to the human rights system. If only all humans could recognize that we are truly treating animals today like we did in the years of civil rights for African Americans. Forcing animals to live in horrible conditions until they are slaughtered for cheap meat, in my opinion is truly comparable. Why should animals have to do face these horrors in order for us to get cheap food? No one truly wants to live a life like this and all of the Homo sapiens on this planet truly need to come up with a solution to fix all of this unethical mistreatment.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Susan Jean, and Richard George Botzler. The Animal Ethics Reader. London ;New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Cavalieri, Paola. "Are Human Rights Human?" The Animal Ethics Reader. By Susan Jean Armstrong and Richard George Botzler. London ;New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. 30-35. Print.