The Rights of Nature:

...In such cases, the word strikes me (and other similarly-engaged British philosophers such as Stephen Clark) as an intrusive fifth wheel, supplying animal-abusers with welcome ammunition and multiplying confusion, because for most kinds of animals nobody has the faintest notion about how we could actually use the idea...

...For the first, certain aspects of humane individualism will indeed serve, which was what made Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1977) so successful...

...The trouble is that the notion of rights-and the whole social contract model that underlies it-is expressed in intensely individualistic terms...

...It treats the vast problem of how to forge concepts that can make us treat the nonhuman world decently...

...It is a competitive, confrontational term (they have rights against one another), not a term which helps at all to arbitrate these clashes...

...Enlightenment thinkers and politicians deliberately reduced moral talk to these terms because they were countering the political oppression of individuals, and were trying to recruit these oppressed people to make decisions for themselves...

...In fact, Nash's attitude toward the need for conciliation is remarkably offhand...

...Friction between different kinds of environmental campaigners has accordingly wasted a great deal of energy on this point, energy which might not have been lost had they realized from the start that what they were engaged in was not a simple, single issue-certainly not just a standard continuation of the "American way of politics"-but a quite new, complex, and many-stranded enterprise, one requiring adequate new ideas...

...Altogether, the systematic reduction of all morality to "rights" was a fiercely deliberate narrowing of the moral horizon for political purposes...

...the law supposes them all to be capable of defending their rights in court, and has to fall back on legal fictions when infants or imbeciles do so "through" an advocate...

...And there is much more awareness than there was a little time ago that these concerns are complementary-that all can work together...

...It is a forensic term...

...But incoherence beyond a certain point is a drawback even for myths, and this one shows serious signs of strain...

...From these he believes there is a process already at work today, carried by its own momentum and demanding little change of direction, that will lead to an adequate recognition by society of rights for nonhuman nature...

...Nash sees two great landmarks so far in the process-the Declaration of Independence and the abolition of slavery...

...That is why, it seems to me, Americans continually insist on bringing the term "rights," with all its attendant difficulties, into controversies that most of us would think are already thorny enough without it...

...It carried still further the anthropocentric narrowing that monotheism, working on Greek humanism, had already achieved...

...This narrowing occurred all over the Western world, and it has gradually been seen to call for a great deal of corrective emphasis, involving the use of a much wider tool kit of moral concepts...

...What, exactly, are the rights possessed by an individual rat or seagull...

...Mary Midgley This is rather a stupid book, but all the more instructive for that...

...At this point, abstractions such as species or populations begin to be invoked...

...Fortunately, however, that job was done over a decade ago by John Passmore in Man's Responsibility/or Nature (1978), in a style and with a depth that make that book still a profoundly reliable handbook for our terrible and confusing journey.sing journey...

...he seems, if anything, rather to welcome the idea of having another civil war on the issue...

...For the second, we are much shorter on ideas, but are building them up busily out of various aspects of the religious traditions we had so carefully ditched, together with the modern science of ecology-itself owing a great deal to that rejected and despised ancestress, Victorian natural history...

...I think this is why, for instance, Tom Regan {Earthbound, 1984) is not content with arguing admirably for better treatment of animals, but has to use the word "rights" for them, and then go to the extra trouble of splitting off all its habitual links with things like rationality, speech, and citizenship...

...Accordingly, they displayed the whole of morality-not just its political aspect-as a deliberate, optional bargain, arrived at by free contracting parties (male of course), each acting out of enlightened self-interest...

...Roderick Frazier Nash believes that what is needed to complete this transformation is but one more repetition of a step that American culture well understands- namely, the extension of civil rights to a wider constituency...

...The Enlightenment not only removed God as well, but tended to narrow the morally relevant functions of human beings, centering on various forms of highly rational competition, notably voting and litigation...

...The mere success of the American Revolution and the absence of competing hierarchical traditions left plenty of space for it, and the absolute need to build new and appropriate lofty ideals into the new way of life caused this language to take on a sacredness of its own...

...The church had largely removed nature from the official moral stage...

...It is one thing to be concerned about individual seagulls, another to be concerned about the species...

...For the larger historical and philosophical job that the book's title suggests, it is not really a starter at all...

...Now if this myth succeeds-if people can actually use it-then it must of course be welcomed, because the wider environmental cause is going to need every source of support that it can possibly get...

...Nothing forces us to go on living in the Enlightenment...

...we can learn from it and pass on...

...and these different kinds of concerns need to be expressed in different conceptual schemes...

...In this context, "rights" is a legal term, describing the privileges of each contractor...

...In the United States, however, the Enlightenment's legacy remains deeply entrenched, forming a background not easily shifted...

...This book is not much help for that process, though it documents some recent aspects of the disagreement...

...But some animal rights campaigners become indignant because they see that the crusade has changed direction...