Suppose we grant the claim of many philosophers that-animals have fights. Suppose further that animal fights are, on occasion, in conflict with human fights. Most would agree that the fights of persons trump the fights of animals: if the circumstances make some rights-violations inevitable, better that the animal's fights are violated. However, how such a trumping mechanism can be devised without junking the concept of animal fights altogether is not clear.
Thus, philosopher Michael Levin 1 points out that if, say, an animal has only 1/100 the rights of a person, then to violate the person's fightsincluding the fight to life -would be morally preferable to violating the fights of 101 animals. This is an intolerable consequence to all but the most radical animal fights theorists.
The problem arises because we are measuring rights using the standard model of arithmetic which allows that fights are additive. In practice, however, we are unwilling to allow the additivity of fights. Maimonides, 2 for example, maintains that to hand over someone to be killed by a terrorist holding 100 hostages is wrong even if we can be certain that the terrorist will kill all the hostages just as threatened. If animal fights are at all like human fights, we would also not wish to regard them as additive. Furthermore, a standard model not only allows for the additivity of human fights and the additivity of animal fights, it treats human and animal fights as commensurable, so that given enough animal fights, human rights will be overwhelmed.
The simplest non-standard model based on infinite cardinal numbers avoids all these problems. Let property rights be indicated by the natural * The author is indebted to Elliot Brownstein, Michael Levin, and Peter Smith for their helpful comments, and dedicates this essay to Thomas and Linda Burzesi, two strong proponents of animal rights.