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Articles

Animal Rights, Anthropomorphism & Traumatized Fish

Alistair Robinson examines whether animals can suffer.

Most of us are outraged by the violent actions of animal rights extremists, but at the same time the movement’s ideas and assumptions are gaining a foothold in the media and the public imagination. From my own experience it seems that among young thinking people animal rights is a very attractive political and ethical stance. My question is this: how can we be sure that empathy for animals, concern for their moral status, and the desire to put them on a par with humans, do not stem only from a false attribution of uniquely human emotions?

We have a predisposition to see ourselves in the world around us: we endow the universe with human characteristics such as consciousness, and call it God; we hear an expression of love in a cat’s purr; we see an ancient oak as dignified and venerable. This is anthropomorphism. We attribute human characteristics to the things of the world, and those things are independent of that attribution: the fact that we have decided that they have qualities of our own does not make a difference to the actuality of the things themselves.

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