In recent days an article by Cesare Cavalleri has been published by "L'Avvenire" which leads to a reflection on animal rights or pseudo-such campaigns, "But do animals have" rights "like men?".
“For years, former tourism minister Maria Vittoria Brambilla has been leading a nice and worthy battle in favor of animals that should not be vivisected, abandoned, raised in degrading conditions, or sadistically made to suffer. It is a good fight singularly devoid of theoretical reflection, as can be seen from the Animalist Manifesto that the willing Brambilla published a few weeks ago (Mondadori, pp. 200, € 17). The misunderstanding is well summarized in the subtitle: “Let's defend their rights”, where “theirs” stands for “animals”.
Well, animals do not have "rights", because from Aristotle to Kant and beyond, passing through St. Thomas, only rational animals, that is, men, who are self-conscious to the point of being able to renounce their own rights, are entitled to rights. . Animals have the sensitive soul with which they can communicate with the man whose rational soul absorbs both the sensitive soul and the vegetative soul. And then we can speak of rights only if there is a consideration for duties, and the animals do not have duties. Nor should it be said that a newborn has no duties: he does not have any in the period in which he has only the right to live, but in due course he will assume his duties, starting with those provided for in the Fourth Commandment. A cat, on the other hand, no matter how long it camps, will continue to have no duties.
Animals must be respected and treated well, despite being subordinate to man, because, otherwise, man, in addition to making them suffer, degrades himself, becomes brutalized, with harmful consequences for humanity itself. Furthermore, the fragility of a thesis is demonstrated by taking it to the extreme: Brambilla is against furs, and it can also be good. But shoes, probably hers too, which are generally made of leather and animal skins, will we abolish those too? Away, all barefoot or with vegetable socks.
Theoretically well supplied, however, the provocatively titled volume Against the rights of animals? (Medusa, pp. 120, euro 13), which contains three essays signed by John Baird Callicott, Christine M. Korsgaard and Cora Diamond, with a preface by Roberto Peverelli. The basic thesis is that one can be an environmentalist and even a vegetarian without being an animalist, in controversy with Tom Regan and Peter Singer who are the prophets of "liberation" and animal rights.
Particularly interesting is the essay by Korsgaard, a Harwardian scholar of Kant, who tries to make Kant say what Kant did not say. The German philosopher, in fact, excluded "rights" for animals, but argued that if it is lawful to kill them and use them for our purposes, they should not be inflicted on them cruel and gratuitous suffering for the duty we have towards ourselves "to cultivate favorable feelings to the development of the moral life "(Peverelli).
Korsgaard maintains, in Kantian terms, that our humanity consists in the rationality that allows us to consider each man as an end in himself; but our animal nature is also an end in itself, argues the harwardian, and if we claim it it will be possible to do so for other animal lives as well. The limitation of the argument lies in separating, in man, animal life and rational life which, on the other hand, as mentioned above in Tommasian terms, form a whole: it is the rational soul itself that carries out the sensory and vegetative functions.
However, the book of Medusa is of useful reading (or rereading), also advisable to the intrepid Brambilla whose Manifesto, among other things, is grammatically too focused on the first person singular: "I", "I", the pronoun that Carlo Emilio Gadda taught to hate. "
Arci National Hunting
(January 4, 2012)