ABSTRACT
Philosophers have written more about animal rights in the past twenty years than their predecessors wrote in the previous two thousand. Not surprisingly, disagreements abound. To begin with, among those who challenge the attribution of moral rights to animals are philosophers who operate within well-worn moral traditions in Western thought. Peter Singer (1975, and this volume, Chapter 09) and Carl Cohen (1986, 1996, 1997) are representative.1 Singer follows in the tradition of the nineteenth-century English utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, who ridicules moral rights as ‘nonsense upon stilts’. For both Bentham and Singer, not only non-human animals but humans too lack moral rights. Half true, maintains Cohen. Animals, he argues, most certainly do not have moral rights; but Bentham and Singer err, in Cohen's view, when they deny that humans have them. Nothing could be further from the truth: according to Cohen, not just some, all humans possess basic rights, including the rights to life and to bodily integrity.
