Exam different views about animal rights.

Traditional understandings of the sentience and rights of animals (derived from the Bible) have been seriously undermined by recent ethical studies by people like Bentham and Peter Singer. While there have been some attempts to rectify this by prominent Christians like Pope Francis by making the doctrine of stewardship more important, the teachings of the Bible and ethical studies into the rights of animals remain at odds. Descartes models his ideas of the rights of animals on Aristotle’s ‘hierarchy of the souls’ which dictates that animals do not have the same level of sentience as human beings and so do not deserve the same amount of ethical consideration. Descartes understood animals to be without souls given Aristotle’s function argument, asserting that they, then, do not feel pain in the same way that human beings do, calling them “automata”. This traditional understanding of Cartesian dualism (that the body and soul are separate and humans possess a soul while animals do not) has informed much of traditional christian thinking about the rights of animals. Therefore, it is, according to Descartes, ethical to utilise one’s dominion over animals regardless of how much pain they might appear to be in. This view is similarly held by Aquinas, who argues that “there is no sin in using a thing for the purpose for which it was made”, indicating that animals exist to serve a purpose to humans.
On the other hand, Christian ethics in its entirety has not been undermined by ethical studies into the rights of animals as there remains a strong basis in scripture for responsible and moral treatment of animals. In Genesis when God finishes his creation he looked upon all that he had made “and it was very good”. Aquinas takes Plato’s principle of plenitude (the idea that a world with many different creatures is better than one with only a few) to suggest that a truly powerful God creates a world with many different species to glorify his creation. Since our responsibility as humans is to glorify God (“all who are called by my name whom I have created for my glory”) it is therefore the responsibility of mankind to look after his creation. This view has been accepted by prominent Christians such as Pope Francis who wrote in his book “Laudato Si” that we should reject the notion that “God’s given dominion and image justifies absolute domination over other creatures”. Similarly, Victoria Harrison has argued that the environmental crisis of the 21st century has lead to the prominence of a new “ecotheology” which is concerned about recent studies into the deforestation and the extinction of God’s creatures. This is not completely at odds with traditional Christian teaching as the doctrine of stewardship has always been around. Therefore, ethical studies into the rights of animals have not undermined Christian ethics because there remains a strong current within Christianity that supports the preservation of God’s creation.
In conclusion, while there has been an effort by christians like Pope Francis to promote the doctrine of stewardship to support ethical studies (by Singer and Bentham) into the sentience and consciousness of animals are still in contradiction to traditional Christian ideas about the rights of animals based on Cartesian Dualism and Natural Moral Law. For example, the doctrine of dominion appears to be an intrinsic aspect of Christian ethical thinking; as God says “let us make man in our own image and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air”.