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Brute Animals and Legal Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John O. Nelson
John O. Nelson
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

Various proponents of animal rights—for example, H. J. McCloskey— maintain that while brute animals (henceforth ‘animals’) cannot have; moral rights they can have legal rights. Indeed, McCloskey himself goes so far as to maintain that even inanimate objects are able to have legal rights.1 And why should not inanimate objects be able to? After f all, for there to be a legal right is anything more required than that whatever agency is empowered to issue legal rights simply legislate or proclaim that so-and-so has that legal right?

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 240 , April 1987 , pp. 171 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 See H. J., McCloskey, Ecological Ethics and Politics (Rowan and Littlefield, Totowa, New Jersey, 1983), 62–63.Google Scholar

2 See my ‘Philosophical Nonsense’, Metaphilosophy 3, No. 3 (July 1972), 238–243.Google Scholar

3 McCloskey, op. cit., 62–63.