The “marginal cases” argument seems to be a big challenge for meat-eaters. It goes as follows: let us assume that having morally relevant property P at level more than or equal to level L is what justified the recognition of moral rights. But then, whatever P is, either 1) L is so high that no non-human animals will have P at the required amount, but many humans will also not be qualified as having P at level L, or 2) L is so low that all humans reach the threshold, but so do many non-human animals. Either way, we are completely unjustified in treating many non-human animals differently from many human beings.
The first response to the marginal case argument comes from Cohen. Cohen says that morality only arises within a community of moral agents (defined as beings who make claims against east other, and who respect claims made upon them by others), so moral rights can only arise within a community of moral agents, namely human beings. Marginal case are members of this community, so they bear rights; non-human animals are not member of this community, so they do not bear rights. Therefore, even humans incapable of moral agency get moral rights while non-human animals do not. In Cohen’s own words, “it is not individual persons who qualify for the possession of rights because of the presence or absence in them of some special capacity, thus resulting in the award of rights to some but not to others. Rights are universally human; they arise n a human moral world, in a moral sphere.” (Cohen, 393).
Another response comes from social contractualist Carruthers. Carruthers says that our moral rules are chosen by rational agents behind the “vile of ignorance” (Carruthers does not directly use the phrase, though he certainly appeals to the concept in his reasoning), and the contractors must choose rules they are actually willing to live by which would result in a stable society. We as humans have deep connection to marginal cases which can include their infants and senile, so contractors would resist not granting the marginal cases full moral standing. But there is no such concern for non-human animals. In other words, for the stability of the society, a contractulist view would have no trouble including all marginal cases human morally while excluding non-human animals.
Let us now analyze these two arguments and choose the more plausible one. Cohen’s argument suffers lots of problems. One problem is that our intuition tells us that morality should not be an attribute gained by simply being in a certain group. The question Marginal Case Argument poses is why we would have a moral fence surrounding all and only humans, and Cohen’s response merely reemphasizes that we should simply build that fence, given that only we humans can build the fence. That makes Cohen’s response circular in nature, or irrelevant at best.
Additionally, Cohen’s claim that “Animals cannot be the bearers of rights because the concept of rights is essentially human”, even not as a response to the Marginal Cases Argument, suffers a fatal problem. Let us ask: do humans have rights because humans created the concept of “rights”, or did humans create the concept of “rights” because humans inherently possess them? The former option is not ideal. Most of us probably would not like that what we see as our inherent rights are only arbitrary man-made concepts that can just be taken out of the dictionary and obliterated tomorrow. If it is the latter, then we should ask why only humans have rights. Is it because we possess certain features that animals do not? Anything we give as the answer to this question would again suffer from marginal case argument.
Carruthers’s contractualist argument is the more plausible one, because it solves Cohen’s problem of grouping all and only humans as a moral community. All the essentially pieces in a contractualist theory also appeal directly to our intuition---it makes sense to us that we would want to grant marginal cases moral standings, while not to non-human animals. In a sense, contractualism takes human sentiment into account in a way that no other theory does. And I want to reassure that human sentiments should be relevant in a moral theory, since humanity is morally relevant (an example to support this would be that patricide in human beings is seen differently from patricide in animals).
Does Carruthers defeat marginal cases argument? In terms of the result, it does. It successfully grants moral standings to all human beings and none of the animals. But it is important to see that it achieves this result without directly responding to the marginal cases argument---to directly respond to it means to come up with a property P and a level L that would directly prove it false. Additionally, for anyone who wishes to give out P and L, I say that it is unnecessary. Marginal cases argument assumes a very rigid structure through which morality ought to be derived and granted, but that is only one out of many plausible ways we can make sense of morality. Marginal cases argument would be senseless if we deny there being any “threshold” for possessing a moral standing at all, which is what Carruthers does.
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