Volume 11, Issue 2 - Human Rights and the Rights of Non Humans; Guest Editors: Tali Kritzman-Amir and Iddo Porat

Potentiality plays an important role in bioethical debates concerning embryos and fetuses. In these debates, “conservatives” tend to attribute ethical significance to an organism’s potential for human life, whereas “liberals” are likely to deny both the logical coherence of the concept and its ethical significance. Whether favorable or critical, both sides of the debate have had in mind a very specific sense of potentiality, namely, natural potentiality, a pre-given telos awaiting to unfold. This Article argues that an equally important and novel sense of potentiality is at play in these cases, namely, techno-potentiality, a power that medical technology extracts from the organism and holds in-reserve for future use. Examining three bioethical debates, brain-death pregnancy, fetus viability, and pre-implanted embryos, the Article demonstrates the importance of techno-potentiality for understanding how these debates have come about. Understanding the emergence of a new kind of potentiality is as ethically significance as is resolving the bioethical dilemmas to which it gives rise.

What exactly does it mean to be human or for that matter a “non-human”? This essay unpacks questions regarding the personhood of embryos and fetuses. It takes as its lead the escalating political demand for embryos to attain rights and the status of children. The essay argues that such political demands are not in isolation physically, medically, or legally of women’s health and rights. It makes the case that embryos and fetuses cannot be granted rights without impermissibly implicating pregnant women. Thus, the essay argues against the extension of criminal and tort law to punish pregnant women under fetal protection laws by drawing an analogy to the duty to rescue jurisprudence.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, the definition of human was uncontroversial. It included all members of homo sapiens regardless of gender, ethnicity, race or religion and it did not include animals. In the decades since then, who—or what—should be included in that definition has become less clear. Recently some scholars have argued that some animals should be accorded human rights of liberty and equality. This paper considers what characteristics and qualities should be required for a bearer of human rights. To do that, the paper examines beings who might occupy the space between animals and homo sapiens —a de-extincted Neanderthal or a “humanzee,”—both of which are at least theoretically possible with new technology. It concludes that the cognitive and moral abilities to be both a beneficiary and a contributor to a human polity is a central part of being a bearer of human rights in this context. It determines that a humanzee, and possibly a de-extincted Neanderthal, might have those capabilities. The best way to respect such human rights in those beings would be not to create them.

This Article contemplates the environmental argument in favor of vegetarianism or veganism, while reviewing its historical development and relevance to the current environmental debate. Today there is an apparent synergy between ecological ethics and animal rights discourse; nevertheless, this presents an inherent paradox. Whereas the moral, environmental and health arguments advocating for vegetarianism and veganism seem to reinforce one another, conflicts may also arise between them. Under certain conditions, the environmental stance may lead to different and perhaps even contradictory attitudes about the raising of livestock and the permissibility of animal-based food. Therefore, this Article first addresses the affinities and conflicts between both versions of non-anthropocentric ethics: biocentrism (individual animals’ rights and welfare) and ecocentrism (intrinsic value of nature and ecosystems). It then examines the historical development and creeds of environmental vegetarianism, and reviews the debates on the precise impact of animal-based food products on the environment. It suggests that recent estimations of the negative impacts underlying the argument for environmental vegetarianism depend on currently unsustainable (and utterly unethical) practices of factory farming and industrialized agriculture. These facts could change if such destructive methods were halted and replaced by sustainable practices which, perhaps, may sometimes tolerate or even require livestock and the ecological services it provides in order to grow sustainable plant-based food. However, many activists still hold both biocentric and ecocentric values, and see them as different facets of their non-anthropocentric intuitions. In order to account for such intuitions, the paper shortly explores two concepts: the mixed society (of both humans and domesticated animals) and virtue ethics. A mixed non-anthropocentric ecological society might not be strictly vegetarian (e. g., semi-vegetarian or even carnistic) and still be environmentally sustainable. In such a sustainable society, caring for nature and non-human animals are considered righteous, even virtuous, and “biophilic” intuitions could be respected and even reinforced, without being committed to strict ethical biocentric principles. Virtue ethics could provide ways to communicate different non-anthropocetric intuitions in such an ecological mixed society, where moral values and intuitions regarding both individual animals and holistic nature is respected, even if certain dilemmas and conflicts between non-anthropocentric ethical positions still prevail.

During the last few decades, there have emerged organizations, as well as theorists, that demand our respect for and acknowledgement of animal rights. The comprehensive meaning of such a claim is virtually a demand to extend the boundaries of morality, its range of applicability, and its validity, beyond human beings alone. This Article intends to continue this tendency and suggests another breakthrough in mankind’s moral attitude, this time towards silent nature. I argue that in the same manner that we make non-anthropocentric moral considerations with regard to animals as living creatures, we should expand our concern toward silent nature, too.