Do Fish Have Rights?

This is "Moshe," a black bass living in local waters of Central Pennsylvania.

Moshe is on the "Catch & Release Program" so he was able to pose for this snapshot, but for only a second. Then he was returned to the pristine waters in a place that this writer will, of course, not be too specific about. (It's kind of like the human "witness protection program," but for fish.)

Human ethics seems to ignore any rights of beings like Moshe. All animals, it is argued, belong to humans, either as individuals or as a common possession. Few philosophers have attempted to explain this viewpoint, it is just accepted as a kind of founding stone of moral philosophy. I think, but can not demonstrate, that the whole notion of nature as a possession of one species has its origins in monotheistic religions. But for traditional reasons, Moshe has no intrinsic rights, if you buy this line of argument. He can be eaten (and believe me, there are few meals to compare to fresh bass fillet), he can be moved to other waters by State Fisheries Officials, and he can be repeatedly "Caught & Released" as a sort of recreational activity for humans who live in packed, city conditions and need a little Nature in their lives to remind them that they are still alive.

It seems that rights are something granted to new recipients because of the convenience those grants offer the broader society that will enforce those rights. And this gets complicated very quickly. To get rights, a thing has to be both dangerous enough to pose a threat to broader society AND it has to be reasonable enough to participate in the mutual enforcement of rights, once it has joined the collective of the right holding, broader society.   Just look at two examples:  the lion and the porpoise.  A lion is very dangerous and poses an extreme threat to the village peoples living near their wild habitats. But a lion is not granted rights because even if those rights were given, the lion would remain dangerous and would continue to prey on the villagers. So a lion is hunted.  In a parallel way to this argument, a dolphin may be more intelligent than many people. But since a dolphin poses no threat to people, there is no motivation on human beings' part to respect any rights of dolphins.

Rights are granted to someone because they are both dangerous AND have the cognitive abilities to respect those rights of others. So humans do have rights.  Violent criminals forgo many of their rights because they have proven unable to be reasonable.

Some of these rights are protected by law and some are so self evident that they do not even need defense. For example, what if someone were to walk into a room full of people and take possession of all of the air in the neighborhood? Air and Water can not be possessed by individuals and sold back to other persons. That would just not be right because it would not be good for the broader group! To further protect Pennsylvanians, the Pennsylvania Constitution (Article 1 Section 27) makes clean water and air a right of all Pennsylvanians and a responsibility of the Commonwealth leaders to protect.

Since only a small percentage of Earth's water is in a form that can be used by people and Moshe, we must protect what we have. It may be worth ten minutes of your time (for your grandchildren and their grandchildren) to look into this "Hydraulic Fracking" process. We can either have a few years of cheap heating by Marcellus Shale natural gas.(To be precise, the gas company will have cheap gas to sell us and even to export at market prices.) Or perhaps Moshe's great great great grandchildren will still be around for your grandchildren, who also may need periodic reminders that they, too, are still alive.