Inalienable rights refer to rights that never should be broken, not never are broken.
My personal opinion is that species should have a right to exist. Humans shouldn’t take actions that will eliminate an entire species.
I think humans have as much rights as other animals. If animals in the wild can eat each other, than we can eat them too.
Yeah, but couldn’t you argue that infants are given special dispensation because they’re regarded as “sentients-in-progress”? Animals don’t grow up someday to be adult people.
http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2004/12/06/daily1.html
Now…my question is…
Is there enough work in animal rights to base your college degree on it?
“Your honor, I’d like to refer to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of the Jungle, specifically Volume 22, Chapter 7, Section 18, in which he cites Lion v Wildebeest on the issue of equitable access to the local water hole in a manner that is non-prejudicial to existing predator/prey relationships…”
Not all infants do, either. If we only give rights to those creatures that we’re pretty sure will grow up to be sentients (sapients is a more accurate term), then we remove the argument against infanticide.
You might say that infants have the possibility of turning into a sapient being. Sure, but so does a sperm. The whole “potentiality” argument is, in my opinion, deeply flawed. Either a being has rights or it doesn’t. Whether it will have rights in the future is an entirely different question.
Daniel
I believe that animals do have the right to be left alone by humans but that humans have special rights and obligations as the dominant species. The rights include killing animals humanely for food, hunting, and keeping domesticated animals as pets. The responsibilities include not to drive any species to extinction, to protect the natural habitat to the greatest extent possible, and not to kill or otherwise mistreat animals for the sheer pleasure of it.
How about profoundly retarded? People so disabled that they are unable to communicate? People who are very disabled and have never been taught to communicate? People who are not going to grow up and have no potential to become “sentient” - or don’t appear to?
A good friend of mine is a CP patient. Has been since a botched birth. She has no vocal speech, no voluntary control over 99% of her muscles and spends a lot of time randomly grunting and snorting because she can’t voluntarily cough. (She can involuntarily cough when it becomes very severe - this is the only reason she’s still alive.) It was thought for years that she might be profoundly brain damaged also - so much so that, 50 years ago, the standard of care would have been “lock her up and forget about her.” Thank goddness her mother wouldn’t listen to the doctors. Turns out she has just enough motor control to move her head up and to the left. That’s it. But that little movement opened up the door to communication. She learned to spell, and now spells out words with the help of others. She answers “yes” to yes/no questions by looking up. Turns out she has an IQ of 145. 50 years ago, she would have been assumed to be an idiot, incapable of “sentience.”
My point? Perhaps communication is the problem, not lack of sentience. We can never know how much animals know and understand without being able to fully communicate with them. So we’ll never really know who possesses “sentience” and who doesn’t unless we achieve cross-species communication.
In the meantime, I’d rather err on the side of caution. Suffering is rarely neccesary. Food can be produced with a minimum of suffering. Well-designed medical experiements work to minimize suffering.
But I also don’t think anything lower down on the food chain has a right to life. If humans hadn’t come around, chickens and cows and goats and birds would still all be prey to something else. We aren’t exempt from that. We’re prey to viruses and bacteria and parasites. Not to mention the occasional Las Vegas tiger.
I think this question is poorly asked. If you believe that any living creature is born with a “right” to life, then it probably applies to cows the same as it does to people. In the same way, if a lion kills a wildebeast, does that mean one has a right to live and the other doesn’t? I think what the OP meant to ask was whether some creatures have more right to live than others.
In the inalienable rights thread, I argued that we have rights to the extent that we agree to protect them. Specifically, we have them to the extent that we protect them as a society. Protecting each other’s right to life is a sign of growth as a human society. (I would argue that protecting liberty and property equally would be additional steps–but that gets into another discussion.) There is a key connection between humans in that we create a civilization together. We agree to recognize each other’s right to life equally by basically saying, “I won’t kill you if you don’t kill me.” To me, trying to discuss the relative rights of an animal doesn’t make a lot of sense–animals can’t make these sorts of agreements with us.
Which is why if a bear comes upon your camp in the woods, it is of little use to point out to the bear that you have as much right to life as he does. The pig that died to make my bacon this morning had as much right to life as I do, but we don’t have any sort of nonaggression pact with pigs in the way that we do with each other.
That said, I agree that animals (or people) should not be made to suffer unnecessarily, regardless of what rights they may or may not possess. Since most of us agree on this, torturing animals unnecessarily is a foolish thing for anyone in any business to do.
-VM
No. No. Because they’re not humans.
Indeed–but neither can infants or the profoundly, congenitally retarded. Rational Egoism and Social Contractarianism really fall short when it comes to explaining why we protect these two groups.
Any system that fails to account for moral subjects–entities unable to respect rights but able to receive the protetion of rights–contains this flaw. Infants and the PCR are moral subjects.
The question is, what relevant difference exists between them and (say) a rabbit that means a rabbit is not a moral subject?
Daniel
We assume that beings who seem most like us to possess the same rights that we do. To respect the rights of all things who who respect our own, it’s necessary to view rights-possession heuristically: if something is essentially the same sort of being we are, then they are included in the sphere of those who have claims against our actions.
One question that always bothers me about objections like yours, and I don’t mean to be flippant - so what? I don’t believe that we can decide a priori what a system of rights will and will not contain, and then throw together whatever defense we can of it. It’s very possibly the case that infants and the congenitally retarded do not possess rights. (Though I’d argue they do - just not to the extent a fully functioning, reasonable human does.)
Is this bad? It sure seems bad, but it’s not necessarily. We often feel emotional commitment to things like us but weaker than ourselves; the only person who would want to murder a retarded person is a psychopath who wouldn’t be constrained by a rights argument anyway.
But what separate humans for animals? As I alluded to, our closest evolutionary cousins have everything we have, culture, language, tools, etc. We are self-aware, but apparently so are they. What’s this fundamental difference between us and them?
The problem here is that being “essentially the same” under a contractarian ethic means “being able to respect my rights.” Why should the number of fingers or chromosomes be brought into play? An entity either respects my rights or it doesn’t; if it doesn’t, it’s not part of the contract that means I have to respect its rights.
On the contrary. A parent might decide to kill her infant for any number of reasons. It happens often. Social contractarian theory provides society with no means of restraining her from the act; if we see the mother carrying child #3 up to the bathtub to be drowned, then unless we’re part of the family (and have claims to the children), we’re forbidden from interfering.
Similarly, a person under such a system might decide to kill their extremely retarded relative because otherwise they’re obligated to provide care for the relative. Since that relative is excluded from our social contract, but the killer is not excluded, then we’re obligated to stand by and not mess in the killer’s business.
That’s so what.
Daniel
Um…(and I mean this with all due respect, because I agreed with everything in your first post) HUH? WTF are you talking about!!!
If we see child #3 being taken upstairs to be drowned, we damn well do have a moral and legal obligation to stop it, whether we’re biologically related or not. Mom will go either to jail or to a psychiatric hospital. We don’t allow moms to kill born children. (Don’t go to abortion here, please. Preborn humans are not legally people nor entitled to the legal protections thereof in the US of A. We can debate that elsewhere.) In no way whatsoever are we “forbidden from interfering”
We also don’t have legalized euthenasia of retarded people. So what are you saying?
Oh, wait. Were you saying that this would be the case under the Social Contractarian model, although it isn’t the case under what we have, so therefore we are not, in fact, opperating under the Social Contractarian model?
If so, nevermind. Temporary wooshness.
My response to that question would be that it’s simply because rabbits aren’t humans. Since I’m one who thinks that our ‘moral’ inclinations come from our evolutionary history as social animals - it would be a natural reaction to help other of our own kind. It’s in our evolutionary interest to do so. From that natural inclination – our concept called ‘rights’ could have very well found it’s origin in the empathy we sometimes feel for other humans. Our reason might expand that concept and even, on occasion, take that concept to other, non-human animals.
Whynot, your second post was right. I was showing what the results of a social contractarian system would be if implemented consistently, not arguing that we currently live under such a system.
That may well be true, but it doesn’t provide us much in the way of moral guidance. For example, it’s probably true from an evolutionary perspective that members of our immediate social group are far more important to us than other folks, and that warfare springs from this impulse. Nonetheless, we most of us find something terribly wrong with killing another person because they look different from us, even though that’s probably an evolutionary artifact.
For the purpose of this discussion, I’m going to assume that we behave as free-willed beings and that right and wrong are meaningful concepts. These may be incorrect assumptions, but it’s hard to discuss morality without making them.
Daniel
That’s why the application of reason and the extension of that innate ‘moral’ concept - through reason - takes us the rest of the way. When asking for a “reason” why is wrong to kill a profoundly retarded person under the “social contract” - we seem to have a hard time providing that. That’s because, as I see this, there is no “reason.” The answer isn’t based in reason — but there is empathy, the innate feeling that this is wrong (all else being equal). So, in regards to other humans, there isn’t this “social contract” in the sense of “I will not hit you if you forego hitting me.” We’re already “social” whether we like that or don’t. The “social contract” - so to speak - is already a part of who we are and isn’t a ‘contact’ in the usual sense of the word. So – concern for another, be it genetic kin, friend, or social contact, aren’t ‘reasoned’ responses in that sense, but may be responses that are the results of evolutionary selection as social human animals. Hence - to ask for the “reason” is looking in the wrong place - the wrong motivation.
On the other hand - we are reasoning animals, and as such, we aren’t limited to our animal responses. My reasoning faculty allows me to ask the questions and question my own motivations. I can, in response to this, my reasoned answers, change my behavior toward others. -
You can invite a human relative over for the Holidays, and he/she won’t shit all over the place and eat your newborn infant. Try that with your chimpanzees. They are animals. I realize that animal rights activists (who I dislike more than most criminal humans and a believe to be trully mentally derranged and an absolute cancer on world society) want to see them as human, but they’re animals and therefore normal people with a modicum of common sense see that are dramatically lesser beings.