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Wildlife Rights and Human Obligations

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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Central Archive at the University of Reading Wildlife Rights and Human Obligations A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy Julius Kapembwa June 2017 DECLARATION I confirm that this is my own work and the use of materials from other sources has been properly and fully acknowledged. Julius Kapembwa __________________ i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A look back at early drafts of some chapters in this thesis reminds me how easy it is to underestimate my debt to Brad Hooker and Elaine Beadle—my supervisors—for the state of the finished thesis. With their intellectual guidance and moral support, which sometimes extended beyond my research, my supervisors helped me settle with relative ease into my research. My supervisors will surely be my models for fairness, firmness, and professionalism in any supervision work I will undertake in the future. I was fortunate to have presented my thesis work-in-progress on five occasions in the Department of Philosophy’s vibrant weekly Graduate Research Seminar (GRS). I would like to thank all graduate students for their engagement and critical feedback to my presentations. Special thanks to David Oderberg, who directed the GRS programme and offered important feedback during the sessions. I am thankful to Julia Mosquera, Joseph Connelly, and Matteo Benocci, who were enthusiastic respondents to my presentations. Thank you to George Mason, who kindly read and gave me some written feedback on parts of Chapter 5. This thesis has resulted in, and benefited from, four conference presentations. I would like to say thank you for helpful feedback to participants of the MANCEPT conference (Saving Nonhuman Animals panel) at University of Manchester, Animals and Death conference at University of Leeds, IRNEP York-Reading PhD Conference, and the British Postgraduate Philosophy Association conference, both at University of Reading. Sylvia Berryman and Anderson Scott showed a lot of interest in my PhD proposal and assured me the research was important. Even after I embarked on my research at University of Reading, they were generous with moral support for my project. I am very grateful to them for making me believe my research topic was important and one that I could undertake. The Commonwealth Scholarship Commission funded my study. The University of Reading paid a small portion of my tuition fees and the Department of Philosophy partially funded my expenses for the MANCEPT conference. I am thankful for all the financial support. I would like to say thank you to the University of Zambia for allowing me study leave to pursue my studies as a Special Research Fellow. I am indebted to the University and will work to ensure the expected benefits in quality teaching and research are realised. Lastly, I am thankful to Benson Kanyembo and Rhoda Kachali for their generosity with some literature and clarifications on issues of wildlife policy and management in Zambia. ii ABSTRACT Despite exponential growth of the field of animal ethics, wildlife ethics has continued to be a fringe discussion. My thesis seeks to make a theoretical contribution by focusing only on human-induced harms to wild animals. I use the rights approach to investigate demands of wildlife justice on human behaviour and wildlife policy. I take rights to be the best normative resource for determining and evaluating just and unjust relations. Given the fundamental position of moral rights that I espouse, moral rights must constitute the core of an ethically sound wildlife policy. The analytical framework I deploy throughout the thesis consists of the Interest Theory of Rights couched in the Hohfeldian matrix of rights. This framework provides some insights for improving on the influential rights approach expounded by Tom Regan. I apply the adopted rights view to several important ethical conundrums. These include the institution of wildlife property; human interference in wildlife predation and wildlife population control; human- wildlife conflict; and state obligations to ensure wildlife justice. From the rights view, I conclude that wild animals are morally not human property and that they are in fact owners of their habitats and the natural goods on which their wellbeing depends. Humans are morally prohibited from killing predators or lethally controlling wildlife populations except in the unlikely event of preventing an ecological catastrophe. Furthermore, humans are permitted in their acts of self- or other- defence in those circumstances where the humans are innocent and are not morally liable. Policies and cultures that allow the killing of wildlife as a resource are unjust and therefore prohibited. Lastly, I contend that the responsibility for protecting wildlife lies with all states whose citizens, organisations, or corporations harm wildlife anywhere on earth. The diffuse and extraterritoriality of unjust harms to wild animals seems to require a cooperative international approach to securing wildlife rights. iii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Wildlife Conservation without Wildlife Ethics .............................................................................. 2 1.2 Animal Ethics without Wildlife ...................................................................................................... 3 1.3 Outline of the Thesis ..................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2 An Animal-friendly Theory of Moral Rights .......................................................................... 12 2.1 The Structure of Moral Rights ..................................................................................................... 13 2.2 The Function of Moral Rights ...................................................................................................... 17 2.2.1 Will Theory of Rights ............................................................................................................ 18 2.2.2 Interest Theory of Rights ...................................................................................................... 22 2.3 Moral Rights and Wellbeing ........................................................................................................ 25 Chapter 3 Tom Regan’s Animal Rights Theory ...................................................................................... 32 3.1 Rejection of the Agency criterion................................................................................................ 32 3.2 Subject-of-a-life Criterion ............................................................................................................ 35 3.3 Sentience, Interests, and Rights .................................................................................................. 38 3.4 Some Dubious Rights .................................................................................................................. 40 3.4.1 The Right to Just Treatment ................................................................................................. 41 3.4.2 The Right to Respectful Treatment ...................................................................................... 42 3.5 Kinds of Rights-Correlative Obligations ...................................................................................... 42 3.6 The Right to Assistance ............................................................................................................... 44 Chapter 4 Predation and Wildlife Population Control .......................................................................... 47 4.1 What is Predation? ...................................................................................................................... 47 4.2 The Problem of Predation ........................................................................................................... 49 4.3 Regan’s Laissez-faire View .......................................................................................................... 50 4.3.1 A Critique of Regan’s Approach ........................................................................................... 51 4.4 A Revised Rights-Based Response to the Problem of Predation ................................................ 53 4.5 Innocent Carnivores and the Defence of Prey ............................................................................ 56 4.6 Animal Rights Theory versus Environmental Ethics .................................................................... 59 4.6.1 Holism or Individualism? ...................................................................................................... 60 4.7 Towards a Zoocentric Environmental Ethic ................................................................................ 65 Chapter 5 Wildlife Property Rights and Sovereignty ............................................................................ 70 5.1 The Concept of Property ............................................................................................................. 71 5.1.1 Right to possess .................................................................................................................... 72 5.1.2 Right to use .........................................................................................................................
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