By your definition machines and dirt have autonomy. Maybe you should stop digging.
That does not make them slaves. And my pets can do whatever they wish as well. I have put many efforts into making sure they can do as much as they want, but safely.
No they are not. An animal in the wild has a defined territory that it fights to defend (with it’s pack in some cases). If it walks out of that territory it risks being injured or killed. It has to constantly look out for bigger predators, and constantly be searching for smaller animals it can kill and eat. In particular small feral cats and wolves were not Apex predators, so their lives were constantly at risk.
And you’ve ignored the point I made earlier, you’re saying it’s about “consent and freedom”. Ok so my cat consents to come in the house when I open the door, I don’t pick him up and carry him inside. And he’s showing consent when I let him out and he freely chooses to come back. How do you respond to that?
Well, not exactly. Tell that to the Beta and Gamma males, stuck off on bachelor hill, desperately waiting for the Alpha male to get old enough for them to chase him away and take over the females.
(Come to think of it, tell that to the females. A great deal of animal reproductive behavior is out-and-out rape.)
You’re not helping. It’s not rape because animals aren’t human. If it was rape we’d be obligated to catch and imprison all those rapists, on top of all the animal murderers and thieves.
I didn’t make that claim, someone else claimed they don’t. But you asked about “the autonomy of the animal”, so you need to prove they have it.
And anyways, you haven’t addressed what I said about my cats. Should I give her leave to eat as she pleases, knowing it would harm her?
Hey, you have dogs – do you allow them to eat chocolate?
The OP won’t understand you. Try this instead:
“Hey, you have enslaved dogs – do you deny their autonomy by forcing them to not eat chocolate?”
My dogs actually have MORE autonomy than most people, by this standard. They have a dog door and go in and out (move, whilst I often have to sit at a desk and work), they sleep whenever they want (have you tried taking a nap at work when things got boring? doesn’t usually go over well), and they have more freedom to select places and times to poop than people do. As to eating, yeah, I select their food but I do the same thing when I decide to cook a meal for someone and serve it to them. I picked it.
Machines don’t have autonomy, they are dependent on us. Also both dirt and machines have no will
They are still dependent on you for food and everything else. Even if they leave.
As for the wild they are free to do as they wish, there are just consequences for those actions. They may be at risk but they have full autonomy.
Would you answer my questions, please?
This makes no sense, if my cat decides to walk out in the street and go his own way then he’s not dependent on me, he can scavenge or beg for food at street restaurants (common cat behaviour over here). The fact he doesn’t do that and chooses to come back again and again, shows he is consenting to be dependent on me.
Give it up and go play with your dogs, you’re just repeating yourself now and your argument never made sense in the first place. Slavery by definition only applies to humans, and we already have laws against animal cruelty.
Why does it only apply to humans?
Your questions are irrelevant to the overall fact that the cat still depends on you for food.
Where do you get your food?
Because the definition of a slave is “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them”. Pets are not “a person” so aren’t slaves, end of argument.
And if you really want to try and argue that animals should be treated as people, then as was already said, they should also be tried for murder if they kill another Animal, so that doesn’t work. Are we done now?
I have a feeling you’re playing dense for the fun of it… No, not being able to take a sh!t on my boss’s desk does not infringe on my freedom anymore than not being able to walk into a stranger’s house in the middle of the night does not infringe on my freedom of movement. And yet, being locked in a box does infringe on that. Hard concept to grasp?
I never claimed that animals are slaves or anything similar, so I don’t see a point in arguing that they are - which you seem to want me to do.
My initial (and only) claim was that animals can grasp the concept of basic freedom. Put it in a box and it will feel abused. So you making up hypotheticals of me taking a dump everywhere is just dumb and uncalled for.
What makes slavery a moral wrong?
To my mind, it is the humiliation of forcibly treating a conscious being as less than it is - like a piece of property.
A human can understand abstract notions such as ‘freedom’ and can feel horror at their lack. If you make a person a slave, how you treat them (kindly or cruelly) is only one aspect of the moral wrong you do the them; even a slave kindly treated has the mental ability to understand what they have been deprived of, the wrong done to them. Even a kindly treated slave can and very often will strike out for freedom.
Animals, by all evidence, do not possess this ability. Animals can understand kindness and cruelty all right, and animals with the intelligence of dogs and cats can certainly react and communicate pleasure and displeasure. But there is no evidence whatsoever that they understand such abstract concepts as ‘freedom’. That simply does not appear to be part of a dog or cat’s mental universe. They do not understand that they are “owned” like property, because that too is not part of their universe.
Animals such as dogs and cats understand concepts like family, domination and submission, and territory. That’s the way they appear to look at the world. To a dog, its owner is a dominant member of its family and so it will guard the family’s territory; to a cat, the family property is part of its range.
These animals cannot be slaves, because they do not know what slavery is, and it is consciousness of one’s own enslavement that makes something or someone a “slave” as opposed to a “pet”, “livestock” or “property”.
And who do you depend on for your food, your clothing, your shelter, your transportation, your education, your entertainment, your income, your relationships? Unless you’re a hermit who lives on a deserted island, you depend on other people for much of what you need in life. Does that make you their slave?
Meh, by Machinaforce’s definition every human being is a slave because we are “forced to obey” our employers, or the police or the government. I am not free to go do whatever I want, I have a bunch of laws and societal conventions that restrict my behaviour, so obviously I must be a slave.
There has never been this utopia where Animals frolic freely without being forced to obey their pack leaders or live in constant fear of predators.