Blair on rights: some questions

Blair's recent pronouncements on rights raise some awkward questions.
One the one hand, his talk of amending the human rights act which he passed suggests he is unsure about the extent and content of human rights. But his signing of Pro-Test's petition suggests he's certain  that humans have rights that animals don't; presumably, Blair believes it is morally wrong to experiment upon unwilling humans.
This raises several questions.
1. Is it possible to be dogmatic on the view that humans have rights that animals don't and yet unsure about the precise content of those human rights?
2. What exactly is it about human beings that generates rights for us but not for animals? Norm says:

To say that there are fundamental human rights, you need believe no more than that there are rights...that people should enjoy just in virtue of being human; or, to put the same thing differently, that all human beings, in the very nature of the kind of beings they are, have certain interests in common from which a number of basic moral rights can be derived.

This just raises the questions. What (if any) is the morally relevant unique feature about human nature that generates rights? Do we really know enough about the interior mental life of animals to be sure of a distinction? Do all humans really have common interests to the exclusion of all animals?
3. Blair's view that the rights of criminals should be restricted hints at some kind of social contract view of rights - so breachers of the contract forfeit rights.  But why is the social contract limited to humans? Don't cats, dogs and horses enter into a form of implicit social contract (possibly under duress) with humans? Why doesn't their implicit contract with us generate rights for them? 
4. Is it legitimate to use violence to promote or defend rights? Supporters of the Iraq war obviously believe so. How, then, can they oppose the violence of some animal rights activists? It can only be because their violence is misdirected or ineffective - grave-robbing is just a perversion - or because their premise, that animals have rights, is mistaken. In neither case is there opposition to violence per se.
FWIW, I'm not sure that higher animals and humans are morally different. I suspect the case for denying animals rights is the same as the case for slavery - they look different from us, and it's convenient.
This essay, and the links here, are illuminating.

Comments

[Phil]

"How, then, can they oppose the violence of some animal rights activists? It can only be because their violence is misdirected or ineffective"

Or, boringly, that they believe in the state's monopoly of violence - something of a myth, perhaps (what's interesting is what happens at the margins, from the special constable's clip round the ear to the anti-social football hooligan) but a myth that's very widely believed in.

[dearieme]

But surely most slavery in human history didn't involve "they look different from us"? Anyway, the abolition of slavery was preumably based on "they are in essence much like us" - which surely we don't believe, even of our most beloved cats?

[Bondwoman]

Has slavery really been abolished?

[Alex]

Blair believes it is morally wrong to experiment upon unwilling humans.

I await persuasive evidence for this contention.

[chris]

Dearieme - you're right. That was a motive for abolishing slavery.
One reading of the history of civilization is that its progress has consisted in taking a more inclusive view - of extending rights to the poor, blacks, religious dissenters and women. Why stop here and now?

[Jack]

Why stop here and now?

The question makes it sound like there has been a trend that has only progressed in one direction, that it is clear how it will progress and that getting there sooner is better than later.

Slavery has gone and come and gone again. Not considering black people as fully human was an innovation -- Shakespeare didn't consider Othello to be subhuman -- democracy has given way to the divine right of kings and republics to empires. Who is to say that rats are ahead of robots and computers in the quest for recognition. Even if that is what is to happen and it would be good, at the moment most people can and do distinguish between the rights of humans and the rights of animals. Who would trust someone who upon seeing a wolf fighting with a child would not intervene on behalf of the child?

On a different tack the question is posed as if the recognition of these groups was a noble act of enlightenment and not merely acceptance of market or other forces. Practical British opposition to slavery coincided with developments that made it less useful to the British than to its rivals.

[Robert Schwartz]

Animals don't have rights because they taste good when barbqued.

[dearieme]

Robert: on that argument moles might have rights because they taste foul.

[Shuggy]

We'd be interested to hear how you know that, dearieme.

[chris y]

Animals don't have rights because they taste good when barbqued.

Do you have any evidence that people don't?

Dearieme is clearly right that the abolition of slavery in the 19th century was substantially motivated by a recognition of human unity. But this required acceptance of the idea of human rights in the first place, which was something of a novelty. In most of history, the main source of slaves was prisoners of war, so they tended to be the neighbours of their enslavers and to look and behave much like them. But if you'd suggested to an ancient Roman that he shouldn't enslave the women and children of the city he's just sacked because they had a right to liberty, his response would have been, "What are you talking about? Vae victis!"

Western opposition to slavery before the enlightenment was mainly based on the Christian idea that people, being made in God's image and had immortal souls, should not be treated like animals. So that distinction is way older than recent debates over specific rights. In fact it was argued by some in the early modern period that black slaves should not be converted to Chritianity, because then you'd have to free them.

Absent the religious argument of course, and it becomes much harder to distinguish between Homo sapiens and other species. Because then we are, after all, simply large brained animals, even if it appears that our cranial enlargement gives rise to qualitatively more complex behaviour. We're left with the suspicion that self evident human rights boil down to the prejudices of a group of persuasive individuals at a particular time and place. Not that I'm unpersuaded, mind, just saying.

[cirdan]

If rights arise via agreement, then human persons have, uniquely, the ability to grant rights to themselves and to other animals. But in order to have the right to grant rights, one must have the ability to grant rights. So there is at least one right that animals can't have that humans can.

[dearieme]

Shuggy, I was in the Wolf Cubs.