Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress
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Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1894) is a book by Henry Stephens Salt, the English social reformer. It is widely considered to be the first explicit treatment of the concept of animal rights.[1]
Henry Stephens Salt was an English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions, and the treatment of animals. He was a noted ethical vegetarian, anti-vivisectionist, socialist, and pacifist, and was well known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist. It was Salt who first introduced Mohandas Gandhi to the influential works of Henry David Thoreau, and influenced Gandhi's study of vegetarianism.
In the book, Salt argues against the idea of speciesism, though the term was not coined for another 76 years:
Speciesism is a form of discrimination based on species membership. It involves treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species even when their interests are equivalent. More precisely, speciesism is the failure to consider interests of equal strength to an equal extent because of the species of which the individuals have been classified as belonging to.
[T]he notion of the life of an animal having 'no moral purpose,' belongs to a class of ideas which cannot possibly be accepted by the advanced humanitarian thought of the present day – it is a purely arbitrary assumption, at variance with our best instincts, at variance with our best science, and absolutely fatal (if the subject be clearly thought out) to any full realization of animals' rights. If we are ever going to do justice to the lower races, we must get rid of the antiquated notion of a 'great gulf' fixed between them and mankind, and must recognize the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood."[2]
Vivisection, also known as V-section, is surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The word is, more broadly, used as a pejorative catch-all term for experimentation on live animals by organizations opposed to animal experimentation, but the term is rarely used by practising scientists. Human vivisection, such as live organ harvesting, has been perpetrated as a form of torture. However, as vivisection etymologically means a surgery on a living being, all forms of open surgery on living people are literally human vivisection.
Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the consumption of meat, and may also include abstention from by-products of animals processed for food.
Reception
James H. Hyslop reviewed the book contemporaneously for the International Journal of Ethics, strongly praising the book's intentions "its spirit shows the finest feelings a moral being can possess" but also arguing that it failed to present a theoretical justification for the equal rights it presumes between humans and animals: "No fundamental position, philosophical or theological, is taken as ground for such rights, and hence we have only an exposure of certain logical weaknesses in the defence of existing practices towards animal life."[3]
James Hervey Hyslop, Ph.D, LL.D, was a professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University, a psychologist, and a psychical researcher. From 1906 until his death he was the secretary-treasurer of the American Society for Psychical Research. He was one of the first American psychologists to connect psychology with psychic phenomena.
Hyslop also argues that Salt conflates disparate ethical questions:
the book confuses three distinct problems which ought to be kept distinct from one another. (1) The abstract question of animal rights of any kind; (2) The question of their treatment as sensible beings, whether we accord them the same rights as man or not; and (3) The question of vegetarianism. The last question virtually assumes that they have equal rights with man. On the other hand, some can defend animal rights of a certain kind without including a prohibition of animal food. Then, independently of all questions of rights, others may insist on human conduct towards animals upon the grounds of man's duty to moral law in general.[3]
In 1895, The William and Mary Quarterly said of the work: "Mr. Salt is undoubtedly ahead of his age by many years."[4]
A new edition of the book was published in 1980 with a preface by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who is well known for his work on the ethics of treatment towards animals (specifically in the book Animal Liberation). The 1980 reissue prompted a review from Stephen Clark who praised Salt's book with some provisos. He states that Salt's attempt to blame the treatment of non-human animals on the theological doctrine of man having "dominion" over the natural world was mistaken.[5]
Notes
↑ Taylor, Angus. Animals and Ethics. Broadview Press, 2003, p. 61.
1 2 3 Hyslop, James H. (July 1895). "Animals' Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress by Henry S. Salt". International Journal of Ethics. 5 (4): 532–533. doi:10.1086/205375. JSTOR2375563.
↑ "Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress, etc by Henry S. Salt". The William and Mary Quarterly. 3 (3). January 1895. JSTOR1914789.
↑ Stephen Clark (January 1983). "Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress by Henry S. Salt". The Philosophical Quarterly. 33 (130): 98–100. doi:10.2307/2219213. JSTOR2219213.
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