Toward a Consistent Positive Ethic of the Rights and Liberty of Animals (Part 4)

What then of “subjective value judgements?” We must admit that any animal whose behavior is dictated by instinct must have some degree of conscious self-awareness (at least the awareness of being or not being afraid), but this does not require us, necessarily, to admit any sort of conscious decision making on their part, particularly not based on any weighing of values.

Take, as illustration, a hungry male wolf in the midst of the Spring mating season and let us say that a deer has recently been felled in the woods. Being drawn by the force of instinct to the smell of blood and gore, our wolf comes upon the corpse only to find that a female wolf, in the dead of heat, has so also been drawn. Now, what is our wolf to do? Should he pursue the female in the hope of procreating but at the risk of some other scavenger claiming his meal, or should he eat to satiate his hunger thereby risking that the female may leave or that some other, more dominant male might happen by?

​Surely, instinct cannot have a preprogrammed response to such a situation. We cannot, with any sort of mathematical or scientific certainty, say that one outcome is, a priori, more likely to occur than the other. The outcome must, at least to some extent, depend on how hungry the wolf is at that particular moment; that is to say that the wolf’s awareness of the discomfort due to hunger is not absolute, but has degrees. Would it not be reasonable for us to say that it is more likely that the wolf would pursue the female given that it had eaten a full meal merely two days ago as opposed to not having eaten in more than a week and being on the brink of starvation; that somehow, some sort of reflection and judgement must be made on the part of the wolf?

​We may, however, yet insist that the determination of the wolf’s course of action is entirely passive or instinctual, not at all involving reflection or decision making, by reducing any such “choice” to the relative sizes of the impulses being fired from the brainstem. However, this implies some fixed level of one or the other impulse so as to act as a threshold beyond which a change in behavior will occur. That is to say, if one action is to be chosen over another on the basis of the relative sizes of the impulses, and we admit that the impulse to satiate hunger is variable, there must be some fixed level of impulse to procreate beyond which the desire to eat becomes dominant, say perhaps 3 days’ hunger worth, so that if the wolf has eaten within 3 days the impulse to procreate will be stronger than that to alleviate hunger pangs and so he will chase the female with amorous intent, whereas if it has been longer than 3 days the wolf will eat first and seek love in the by and by.

​But clearly this is false. The impulse to procreate is not at all times stable (at least not in wolves), and must be said to fluctuate with the seasons, being present and persistent in the Spring and lying essentially dormant throughout the Winter months. Consequently, itself being variable, the impulse to reproduce cannot set such a constant threshold as would be needed to determine behavior solely on the basis of stimulus and response.

​So it seems that we are unable to deny rights to animals, particularly the right to property in one’s self, either on the basis of being human in particular, of possessing the capacity for reason, or of lacking consciousness, self-awareness, or the capacity to make decisions. Then what are we to conclude? What is the only logically consistent answer which presents itself in a universally valid way? The only such conclusion must be that the right to self (and the rights to property which follow therefrom) belong to any being that has a self; that is to say, any being that is alive.