As our colleague Wesley Smith points out over at National Review‘s The Corner, Charles Krauthammer comes out firmly for human exceptionalism, and makes the needed distinction between animal welfare and animal rights. Well, good for him. Writes Krauthammer:

No. I’m not joining PETA. Indeed, I firmly believe that man is the measure of all things. Sometimes you have to choose. I cringe at medical experimentation, but if you need to study cats’ eyes in order to spare some humans from blindness, do it. (Though not to test cosmetics.)

If the Delta smelt has to die to conserve 1.4 trillion gallons of water for the parched humans of California, so be it. If the mating habits of the Arctic caribou have to be disturbed so we can produce 1 million barrels of oil a day — on a drilling footprint the size of Dulles Airport in a refuge the size of Ireland — I say: Apologize to the amorous herd, then drill.

Sage as ever, Wesley observes:

That is the correct approach that starts with the unique value of humans and our duties to ourselves, while concomitantly prodding us to recognize our obligations toward animals, i.e., the human exceptionalist approach.

Proceeding from that understanding, we can debate proper practices and methods, issues about which reasonable people will often disagree.

Humans have duties, animals don’t have rights. We won’t go wrong continuing to keep that distinction sharp and clear.

Exactly.

I wonder about one thing, though. Krauthammer is also on record as denouncing intelligent design, in terms as harsh as they are ignorant (“today’s tarted-up version of creationism“). ID, as readers of ENV will know, is the idea that nature, including the evolution of life, gives empirical evidence of purposeful guidance by an intelligent agent. If nature does not offer such evidence, from planets on down to proteins, it’s not obvious on what basis you assert the exceptional status of human beings. What are the possible justifications?

The justification of our superior intellectual endowments and unique moral ones? Yes, those would impose obligations to ensure animal welfare. But a right to consume and use animals? That’s less clear.

Then perhaps on the basis of religious faith in a creator who set man at the pinnacle? Oh, you mean a faith that is totally unsupported by objective indications that a deity was involved in shaping man or the rest of nature? Because in the absence of a justified inference to design, that’s what you are left with.

Krauthammer may have updated his views on ID, or his ancestral Jewish faith. I don’t know. Last time I checked, his position was this:

“I believe atheism is the least plausible of all theologies.” Krauthammer follows the “kind of theology that [Thomas] Jefferson and Albert Einstein had, which is a recognition of the mystery of the universe and that it is impenetrable,” but remains “skeptical of the notion of some interventionist being in human history.”

That kind of agnosticism is, to me, worthy of respect. However, it does leave you in a position where your grounds for saying that “man is the measure of all things” are a lot less compelling than they might otherwise be, drawing not the empirical or the objective but ultimately on what I’ve called a “pre-religious intuition.”

Given the choice, I would rather have the evidence than the mere intuition.

Image: Arctic caribou, by Dean Biggins (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) (US FWS, DIVISION OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, WO3772-023) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.