As for this part, I have pretty much shot my bolt and said all I have to say. I don’t have anything new or interesting to add. (If, indeed, I said anything interesting in the first place, which is of course always doubtful.)
I’m fine with the latter, but it’s not really all we’re doing, as far as I can see – we’re also deciding which rights the animals are supposed to have in the first place (particularly the right to life). I’m arguing that human morality is insufficient to decide whether or not animals have any rights at all.
Well, I guess you could view it as making a moral judgement on my part; but it’s also a judgement exclusively concerned with a human action, it seems to me. But I believe that the question of morality’s domain is not in itself a moral one – if morality is, for instance, predicated through having to guarantee a somewhat stable society, it can only establish rules for and judgements about the members of that society (including, I believe, how to act towards non-members). I don’t see how it could establish judgements about non-members of that society.
I’m probably just confuzzling myself and everybody else here, so to make it as clear as possible: I simply don’t think that human morality can establish the status of rights for non-human beings. It can’t, therefore, decide that for instance animals have the right to life, and plants don’t (or that each has it to only some degree). It can establish rules for how to approach non-human life forms, but those rules follow from purely human value judgements. Even if our morality dictates that it’s wrong to kill any other being, this wouldn’t strictly be the same as granting the other being a right to life; this would require an external, absolute standard of morality, and the unspoken assumption among those advocating for such animal rights is basically that human morality is that absolute gold standard.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the majority of your posts pretty interesting. 
I don’t have to argue with that. I’ll eat meat, if someone wants to think of me as a murderer… okay…
But isn’t the question of animal rights essentially a question of how humans should behave toward animals? After all, moral constraints don’t apply to animals’ behavior (any more than they apply to the behavior of infants) for the simple reason that animals (and infants) are largely incompetent to apply moral rules. Rights are in general a constraint on the behavior of *others *toward the rights-bearer; they are not a constraint upon the action of the rights-bearer.
It’s not when you call meat murder, for instance – murder being, at least the way I think of it, unjust deprivation of the right of life. And on that right, when it comes to animals, I believe human morality has to remain mute.
But do constraints on the behaviour towards something necessarily imply that something has rights? In my opinion, it is possible to curtail human behaviour without overextending the reach of our morality; but then, assertions like ‘meat is murder’ as it was presented in the OP become nonsense.
Actually, you’re perhaps right, it’s probably not so important a distinction – I do believe cruelty towards animals is wrong, even though I think that this wrongness lies in the intent of the action more than in its object – but that’s not too uncommon a view even within human only morals, punishment for example isn’t really for the good of the victim in the first place, as well.
I don’t believe it’s wrong to kill an animal for food, however. That’s really all there is to it, my overzealous insistence on pointing out what I view as differences in principle notwithstanding.
No, they don’t.
The problem I have with this conception of morality is that it seems, well, sort of amoral. I mean, if causing suffering isn’t wrong, in some sense, because it’s based on a sense of empathy and detesting the idea of causing a feeling that we know we’d hate to experience ourselves, then it just seems like sort of an arbitrary rule. If I tortured a small orphaned child to death in a room and no one ever found out about it, and I never did it again or affected society by it in any way, is it really wrong in any sense, if the simple fact of the child’s suffering isn’t inherently evil in and of itself?
Now, a lot of people really do hold the idea that morality is just an evolution of social rules in place to achieve a certain sort of stable social order (amongst, obviously, humans). And those people, for all we know, might be right. But even if so, we’re all still stuck with this very visceral feeling that certain things are just WRONG and EVIL. We’re stuck with principles that we think must either be universal or else they’re sort of worthless. And the point of most serious animal rights arguments is that we’ve created some very convenient oversights and unworkable exceptions to those principles when it comes to the treatment of beings who, as far as we can tell, have some of the very same capacities relevant to why we object to certain treatments of human beings.
This is a very big debate, much bigger than animal rights, of course. There’s a sense in which we have to ask whether morality really is for just keeping a society running smoothly and basically just mostly justifying what we are ALREADY DOING, or instead whether it has absolute principles that, however difficult, are just RIGHT and should be followed, even though they ask for tremendous changes to be made in our lives.
I think people need to be careful when they get too close to this debate. A lot people here, as I noted, really do seem to take the view that animal rights is de facto suspect precisely BECAUSE if it were true, then it might have major impacts on how we all live our lives (and sometimes even seemingly minor impacts are treated as if they are asking absurdly too much).
This attitude is found in a lot of the arguments about how animals don’t care about the suffering of other animals or how vegetable production also kills and harms animals. All of this is true, but it doesn’t have any real bearing on the question of whether harming animals is objectively wrong… unless there’s some belief that the natural world is ordered (by God?) precisely such that moral choices are easy and rarely ask for much sacrifice.
I don’t happen to believe this. This was actually the reason for my previous example about a world in which it happened that humans had to eat each others brains to survive. Such a world would be full of miserable, upsetting, and difficult choices.
A similar example is Peter Unger’s dilemma about the drowning child: the idea that we’d consider someone a monster if they didn’t save a drowning child for fear of getting their 50$ clothes wet, and yet we don’t consider people monsters for not sending 50$ to save the life of a child dying of starvation. If you buy the truth of Unger’s argument, then it has HUGE and troubling implications for how we live our lives (i.e. we spend money on things that even we don’t care that much about, like a shitty movie, instead of using it to save another human life). Some people try to argue against him precisely by pointing out how burdensome and difficult life would be if we took his kind of moral obligation seriously.
But that’s really a dangerous matter. Before making such arguments, you really have to think seriously about just what it is morality is for, and whether our moral feelings really are sincere, or just postures made for social convenience. Unger could still be wrong for other reasons, of course, but I always find it troubling when people do seem to consider the degree of personal burden a moral principle relevant to the truth of it, without realizing what a big and troubling issue that is in and of itself.
I think you’ve misunderstood me – the actions of torture against the child are, in my view, evil in and of themselves as having the singular intent to cause harm and suffering, even independently of the child’s actual suffering. We run into far greater problems if we make ‘suffering’ the base line for applying moral principles – it’s been pointed out before in this thread (by DrCube, I think) that then we’d have to accept that there’s no basis for ascribing moral rights to coma-patients in a vegetative state.
Even if that’s true, in making up rules about which animals/life forms are deserving of moral protection, don’t we just create even more convenient oversights and unworkable exceptions? Is there really any metric you’d be willing to apply that can objectively decide what life deserves protection, and what doesn’t? One that doesn’t just boil down to saying, ‘well, it’s more similar to us, so it’s worth more’? (I mean, one could just as well derive an evolutionary success based morality, in which the criterion for moral value is evolutionary success, i.e. longevity of the species; of course, that puts us somewhere near the bottom of protect-worthy life forms, and cockroaches somewhere far above us, but it’s not any more arbitrary a metric than sentience or what have you, and at least the evolutionary successful lifeforms have proven themselves worthy, in some sense.)
As for the rest, I don’t think an absolute morality is workable (even with god, because then you’d have to contend with the question of whether god himself is bound by this morality, which doesn’t solve anything, or if he dictates it, which wouldn’t make it an absolute morality as much as just the whims of a supreme being).
I think laws are really just for keeping a society running smoothly. Laws are there to protect members of society. When intelligent aliens come from outer space to our planet, the metric used to judge whether they should be protected or killed will depend not on their intelligence or capacity to feel pain, but on their contribution to our society and perhaps eventually their acceptance into it.
Morality shouldn’t really enter into the law except insofar as to proclaim that harming other members of society is wrong and should be minimized. This is why murder is against the law but not deer hunting. We already apply our laws to protect some animals based on their contributions to society: we protect endangered species under the assumption that biological diversity is important to us, and that extinction may leave a hole in the ecosystem with unpredictable consequences. We also protect higher apes, pets, and dolphins under the assumption that they provide some benefit to society, even it those benefits are intangible. These types of arguments should be debated publicly, and I thoroughly expect that the list of protected animals will grow as society progresses.
This is why comparisons to slavery and the Holocaust aren’t apt. Blacks and Jews are recognized by us today as valuable and capable members of society, and their mistreatment therefore was a cost to society as a whole. Society progresses, time marches on, and people tend to grant rights to those who weren’t considered members of society before, though not without a struggle: Women, minorities, commoners, serfs. The point has been reached now, where all humans are considered part of society, and therefore all have rights that should be legally protected. There will always be ambiguities at the boundaries, yesterday it was slaves, today it is fetuses.
When the time comes that animals or aliens prove themselves to be valuable members of society, then we will (hesitantly) grant them the rights that members of society should be granted. I’m not arguing this won’t ever happen, I’m saying it hasn’t happened yet. When it does, it won’t have anything to do with their capacity to suffer or think. Nor ultimately, will it have anything to do with morals at all.
Your personal morality may prohibit the harming of any animals, and you are justifiably allowed to do whatever you can to prevent that harm, including becoming a vegetarian and lecturing others on animals rights. But hunting and keeping livestock are net benefits to society, and I disagree that laws should be put in place to prohibit them.
But that’s the problem: how is the intent harmful if I’ve become “enlightened” to the fact that the effect itself is not? What is the purpose of judging me based on my actions in the first place without any discussion of why some actions are good and some are bad?
It seems to me that the very acceptance of your argument undermines any means for the intent to be wrong any further: since I now know that the act itself isn’t bad, me choosing to cause harm and suffering is just a posture I’m taking for, I dunno, the heck of it. Who cares? Why care?
I often encounter this when arguing theodicy: apologists often end up defending a theological idea that pretty much paints all earthly misery as simply an elaborate illusion by which it is only our actions and choices that matter as guides to our goodness (but misery itself isn’t bad, because God causes plenty of it, and that’s not bad). But this framework doesn’t seem to work in my mind. If I become wise to the illusion, and hurt people indiscriminately, I’m no different, and no worse, than an actor playing the villain in a play. My actions aren’t wrong anymore: and since I’m wise to the illusion, my choices aren’t based anymore on the idea that what I’m doing is actually causing anyone real moral harm. If only everyone else would realize that we’re all actors in a play, we could all cease to worry about why one person does harm, and other does not: it’s all just an interesting drama, right?
First of all, I don’t think I argued, or at least didn’t mean to argue, that suffering is THE only moral capacity of importance. The whole point of why I think we do and should treat animals and humans differently, morally, is that we have capacities that they lack (most importantly the ability to have anticipations of and hopes for a future existence)
And plausible objections have been raised to all of those complaints and worries about suffering as a guideline in any case. In the coma patient instance, for example, we’re still talking about capacities: the issue is whether those capacities are still there or retrievable or not.
If they aren’t, then we’re talking about brain death, in which case we really DON’T ascribe rights about suffering or staying alive any further, because the person in question no longer has the capacity for suffering or even life.
If they are, then we have what is essentially a more extended version of sleep. But this is generally dealt with the idea that suffering exists not simply in present experience, but also in anticipation of larger harms that might occur and steal away other things that are important to us. If you kill someone in their sleep they might well not suffer (though their loved ones would). But anticipation of this happening would cause great moral harm and anxiety and all sorts of other elaborate protections. We have the capacity to not want to die or be killed like that… based on ideas and hopes and dreams for the future, as well as understanding how and what sorts of situations could lead to that happening to us and others (and fearing for ourselves if we see it happening to others).
Animals generally don’t, which is why I don’t think killing them instantly really deprives them of anything.
We’re not “making them up” we’re trying to apply basic moral principles and values consistently. The fact that there will be lots of gray areas, uncertain cases, and so forth is pretty normal for morality in general, isn’t it?
I’ve already noted some suggestions: that rights and moral treatment should be based on relevant capacities. We don’t give infants the right to vote, do we? And why not: because they don’t have the capacity to actually understand or participate in political society yet. Likewise, isn’t the level of capacity for suffering relevant to whether or not its okay to cause suffering? I mean, there has to be some set of reasons why its okay to perform an autopsy on someone when they’re dead but not alive, right?
This is a bigger question than we can probably deal with in this thread, and I honestly myself don’t have a certain position on it. I’m not sure I know what an “absolute morality” really is or means myself.
And yet… and yet… I seem to have this idea that someone who rapes a woman really IS doing something universally and unavoidably detestable.
REALLY? I have a hard time believing that. So if these aliens play no real part in our society, but are just as intelligent and capable of suffering as any human, no one will feel evil hunting them for sport, on a whim?
I don’t really know what to say about this. It doesn’t seem that you take morality very seriously (i.e. that when you think something is evil and wrong, trying to stop it, including trying to make it illegal, become imperatives). You’re treating it as if moral ideas aside from a few pre-agreed upon arbitrary ones which make up laws, are merely preferences that are a matter of taste, rather than actual rights and wrongs.
I think abortion is a good example. The question of whether a fetus is deserving of the same moral consideration and protections as a person is not a mere matter of indifference or personal taste. It MATTERS one way or the other. I’m pro-choice (well, its more complex than that), but I sincerely don’t understand the idea that pro-life folks are being rude and annoying by pestering me and the law to change because they happen to think what they judge to be as immoral as murder is a big deal.
Eating is the transfer of energy from one thing to another. Whatever gets eaten gives its self up to another. If carrots and fish had vocal cords ,we would have more trouble eating them. But a carrot is just trying to grow ,thrive and reproduce. We abort that system and kill it and eat it. It is all a kind of murder.
By “playing no part in our society”, the aliens will have either left our planet for good, in which case the point is moot, or else they will be actively harming our society in one way or another. That may not mean they deserve death, but they will predictably NOT be granted many of the rights that members of our society enjoy.
Morals really ARE just arbitrary preferences and a matter of personal taste. How else would you describe them? Outside of the Golden Rule and the maximization of liberty, society should not concern itself with morals.
For example, I am opposed to dishonesty in all its forms, and I have high standards for what I consider “honesty”. In my mind, advertisers and politicians are pretty much all liars. However, I don’t call for the prohibition of advertising or the restriction of dishonest speech. I feel that society has set reasonable standards for “truth in advertising” and libel and slander laws, so that harm to others through dishonest speech is minimized (though it still occurs), while the harm of restricting liberty has been kept at bay.
Alternatively, I know a guy who believes that children who die before the age of 12 will always go to heaven no matter what, while he is supposedly in real danger of going to hell. He has said that he would have no problem sacrificing his child to save his own life, because his son will go to heaven and he can spend the rest of his life repenting and trying to meet his son in paradise. If this guy’s morality held sway, children’s lives would be cheapened to the point of worthlessness in the eyes of the law. If, for example, he was asked by gangsters to kill a bunch of kids or they will kill him, should the law base itself in “morality” and acquit, or base itself on the protection of society and hand out the maximum sentence?
I should rephrase this, lest I be misunderstood:
Society as a whole should not concern itself with the morals of individuals.
Obviously, morals are important to us as individuals. However, they shouldn’t be taken into account when introducing legislation. Everyone has their own flavor of morality and there is no such thing as morals we all can agree on. Except for “stay out of my business” and “cause me no harm” which is what I believe our laws should be based on. Let people do whatever harmless things their hearts desire, while only restricting those actions which harm other members of society or society as a whole.
You’re not thinking this through: if it were established that animals actually felt no suffering and are mere unconscious automata, complicated chemical reactions, yet nothing more, then a hurtful act against an animal would not be evil in and of itself, because there’s no harm being done. Yet, under this knowledge, a cruel act would not be possible, since cruelty carries the express intention of harming its object, of causing pain and suffering. This intention is what I argue to be morally reprehensible. I don’t see any moral framework that condemns cruel acts against, say, chairs – because it’s not possible to act against a chair with the intention of causing it to suffer.
You’re contradicting yourself – if your acts cause no harm, you can’t “choose to cause harm and suffering”. Because your acts don’t actually cause harm.
The key thing here being, again, that your knowledge of the illusion, which apparently means that you can’t cause any ‘real’ harm (though I’d argue that harm is harm as long as it feels like it, illusion or not), precludes you from wilfully causing harm, since, well, you can’t actually cause harm, it’s just an illusion.
Really? You want to make moral value assessments based on ability? A sort of moral meritocracy? Do you have to first demonstrate your capabilities before being granted moral rights – say, take an exam --, or can they be rescinded if you for some reason loose them?
And where do those basic moral principles come from?
Well, that only shows that you have a functioning moral compass. But one should always take great care when trying to generalize from individual perception.