Should We Love Animals or Grant Them Rights?

Abstract

There are situations in which we do not entrust our affairs to the law, even though these are often the matters of greatest importance. One such case – and the central theme of this article – is friendship. It is not that we avoid the law whenever we enter into various official or commercial relationships with our friends, for such situations can of course vary considerably. Rather, we do not entrust the very principles governing friendship itself to the law. We regard friendship as something too subtle to be regulated in this way. The same holds true of love: marriage does not regulate love itself so much as it situates love within a legal framework. Both Plato (especially in the Statesman and the Laws) and Aristotle (above all in the Nicomachean Ethics), whose views will serve as the principal point of reference in what follows, employ a certain hierarchy. To simplify: love possesses a divine nature (Plato, Phaedrus), whereas law – even when bestowed by the gods – grows cold once it passes into human hands. Although at the moment of its enactment it may shine with the brilliance of justice, over time that justice fades. This is particularly true of written law, which necessarily operates within a kind of unreal generality. The difficulty is that, once established, the law also comes to regulate matters that could well manage without it. Like every instrument, the law is marked by a certain excess – an excess that arises both from the nature of the instrument itself and from those who employ it. Put more simply, there will always be situations in which the law speaks where we would have been capable of resolving matters by other means. Yet the law demands obedience and, with it, a certain inexorability.