>The issues are quite fundamental, such as whether there can
>be ethics or not, and whether ethics can properly be applied
>to politics. Many people demonstrate disbelief in both of
>these propositions. If, however, people agree that ethics
>can be applied to politics, that is, that some political
>actions are better than others, then the question arises as
>to whether it is wrong to do harm to at least some other beings
>and, if so, which those others are. While the set of beings
>considered as candidates for this political and ethical status
>have at times been severely restricted, as to one's family,
>tribe, nation, class, or party, in recent generations it has
>become widely accepted that human beings in general make the
>grade. The argument for humans in general often seems to turn
>on their common mental capacities, regardless of wealth,
>position, accomplishments, or appearance: a man's a man for
>a' that.
>
>Now, it is easy to show that many non-human animals, like many
>humans, are conscious, experience emotions, pains, and pleasures,
>are intelligent in the sense of modeling portions of the
>universe in their nervous systems, communicate with one another,
>anticipate future events, and so forth. It has been shown
>that some primates almost certainly are aware that others have
>a separate consciousness from their own -- a mental act of
>which some humans are incapable. Non-human animals seem to
>differ from humans in two just categories: they do not seem
>to be really capable of human syntax, and (possibly as a
>result) they are not capable of the level of abstract thinking
>which some humans employ.
It strikes me as inherently obnoxious to posit the essence of humanity ahistorically ("common mental capacity" or whatever the "essence" is assumed to be) first and then see if a human individual or a group of human individuals in question empirically possess this posited essence (or "make the grade," as Gordon felicitously puts it). This is the problem of the Robinsonades:
***** Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual -- the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century -- appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history's point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature. (Marx, _Grundrisse_) *****
Irony, as Michael Hoover suggests, is that both humanists and "animal rightists" assume the ahistorical essence of what "being human" means. Now, the (implicit or explicit) question "Is X Human?" arises only when X in question is assumed to be a boundary case, because of the oppression of X (whether X be mentally retarded individuals, blacks, Native Americans, women, foreigners, homosexuals, etc.). *If* we ever get to create a communist society where no oppression exists, we'll forget to ask such an *insulting* question; since no one's humanity will be under question, humanism, having completed its historical task, will gracefully disappear into the dustbin of history. The existence of humanism is a necessary & necessarily tragic accompaniment of the "wrong state of things," to use Adorno's words; so, what we need to work on is to abolish the "wrong state of things," as soon as possible. (Ethics & politics, for communists who seek to abolish all oppressions, must be considered with this goal in mind; therefore, universal moral principles designed for *all* purposes & occasions [or one-size-fits-all morality] are out of question, firstly because capitalism with all its contradictions, together with sexism, racism, & other oppressions, makes a mockery of universalism in practice, and secondly because to abolish capitalism one must be a partisan, thinking in terms of what's good for the working class, not of "humanity" in general.)
Now, the question of rights and liberalism. As you correctly point out, rights, in practice, do not serve well women, blacks, disabled individuals, etc. (in fact, non-property owning working class individuals in general, including white men) who were originally excluded from rights discourse. Moreover, bourgeois rights of equality, even if they were to be universally, not arbitrarily, enforced, are and will be always the unequal right to unequal labor. Why? Because human beings are different in their needs & abilities, whereas equal rights assume the necessity of reducing differences to some common measure. Granting "rights" to humans does not fundamentally solve the problem of unmet needs. The needs of animals will be met *even less* adequately through the "rights" discourse, since "rights" were *not* designed for, nor can they ever be exercised by, those who by nature cannot enter, as "free & autonomous individuals," into the exchange relations in the sphere of "freedom, equality, property, and Bentham."
Forcing animals into the Procrustean bed of "rights" discourse, to me, is a form of cruel and unusual punishment, expressive of the irony & aporia of idealism. Concrete differences are not allowed to exist without them being forced into abstract identities & contradictions under capitalism, so not just human beings but also animals are now asked to bear the ideological burden of abstract individualism & identity thinking. Pathetic indeed.
Yoshie