DRAWING THE LINE

Prominent animal-rights activist and lawyer Wise (Rattling the Cage, 2000) makes a case for animal rights based on “practical autonomy.”

He begins with the now-familiar analogy between animals and slaves. His discussion adds nothing new to the parallel, nor does it address the contention that the argument insultingly patronizes slaves, distorting their status as responsible agents both before and after liberation. Wise also compares animals to the mentally deficient and to children. While he mentions the objections to his arguments posed by primatologist Franz de Waals, who insists that rights are tied to responsibilities it would be absurd to enforce on other species and that rights talk debases animals (apes, de Waals has said, aren’t “retarded people in fur coats”), he never really ponders these objections. Instead, Wise seeks to back up his argument by showing that animals can be assigned “autonomy values” based on a scale deriving from developmental psychology. This makes an implicit reference to Kant’s notion of autonomy, or the fundamental and incorrigible freedom of the subject, while adding to it the very un-Kantian features of Piaget’s developmental psychology. In this way, Wise contextualizes the freedom of the subject as a result of a psychological process with certain supposedly extra-species features. He then adduces seven cases (honeybees, African gray parrots, elephants, dolphins, gorillas, orangutans, and dogs) in which he gives reasons to assign autonomy values. Except for the chapters on bees and elephants, he concentrates less on ethological studies than on human-to-animal communications studies, such as that conducted on African gray parrots at MIT. From the animal as communicator, Wise goes through other developmental tests, like “mirror self recognition.” Unfortunately, his extrapolation of practical autonomy gradients seems dubious on ethological grounds, as well as displaying a contradiction in the animal-rights position: far from combating anthropocentrism, this procedure universalizes it.

Preaches to the converted, but will leave others unconvinced.