Obsessed

I'm so sorry. You must be so bored of the animals.

But here's something I have been thinking of.

A moral right can be considered as protecting one of your morally significant interests - as in the right to life, to not be tortured, to free speech and to reproduction.

Let's take a human female, Flora, who wants to have a baby. She has a right to reproduce. What confers this right? Her desire? No, because she could have a desire for a Bugatti or a bear cub rather than a baby and she does not seem to have a moral right to either of them. She has a right, it seems, to parturition, as a biologically natural process for a female mammal. Does that grant a vixen, Viola, the right to reproduce? It seems that society has some kind of obligation to assist women who cannot reproduce naturally, but there is no such obligation to assist infertile vixens. The vixen is biologically driven to perform mating behaviours and so seems to have an equal claim in that regard. Why should Flora suffer from the restriction of her desire more than Viola? The response here is that while Flora is conscious of her desire and consciously suffers if it is thwarted, Viola, presumably does not - or not to the same extent. Yet Flora's suffering at not getting a bear cub is not morally significant, so there seems to be some entanglement between the conscious desire and the biologically 'natural' behaviour.

That's contrived enough, but consider further. If Flora were in the Netherlands, her having a baby would be good for the nation as the Netherlands is encouraging people to have children for social and economic reasons. Flora's desire would be given additional weight in that it would maximise the national good. But if she were in Bangladesh, where population density is problematic, the maximum utility might compel Flora not to have a baby - regardless of her conscious or biological right to reproduce. Further, Flora in the Netherlands might consider that the resources she would otherwise invest in a baby would be better spent on family planning in Bangladesh. She could maximise utility by not having a baby and helping others not to have babies.

What's more, if Flora did this, despite her biological and conscious interests in having a child, she could console herself, through the application of reason and thus not suffer at all from the thwarting of her personal interests. Indeed, she could feel pleasure at having maximised utility.

This option is clearly closed to Viola. Reasoning ability confers on a subject the possibility of reframing suffering and thus preventing it - a capacity dependent not just on the intelligence of the subject but on her values. Indeed, rational persons with different values (environmental rather than anthropocentric) might come to very different conclusions about the cases of Flora and Viola.

Viola, like Flora, is also part of a wider community - in her case perhaps an ecosystem. Her failure to reproduce could lead to exponential increases in the number of rabbits, which in turn could lead to overcrowding, disease and starvation among the rabbit population as well as environmental degradation.

How one conceives of 'the good', by zooming out or zooming in (personal, social, national, global, environmental), and how one weights various values (conscious suffering, biological drives, diversity of life forms) dramatically alters perspectives.

Unfortunately, more on this tomorrow.