Follow this link and you’ll see that humans are doing the same things you claim chimpanzees would do in a human house. Who’s the animal now?
Lesser beings in what way? I asked a simple question and you come back with rhetoric and circular reasonings (they’re animals because they act like animals). Again I ask, what’s the difference between humans and animals? Why is there a fundamental distinction between the two? I’m not arguing that one doesn’t exist, but rather where’s the line that separates them?
Actually, I’ve got a lot of respect for this intuitive “argument” (in quotes because it’s more of an assertion than an argument); it’s what keeps me from firebombing McDonald’s.
The disparity between my intuition and what seems logically correct to me is, on this issue, vast. I’ve not yet encountered a logical argument that supports saying that I’ve got more obligation to protect the life of a human than I have to protect the life of a bunny rabbit. But my intuition practically screams at me that I have such an obligation.
I participate in these threads hoping to find the logical explanation for my intuition. Until then, I gotta accept that my intuition, like yours, tells me that such a difference exists.
I use to think their only right was “the right to try to survive”. but after reading a book about some guy who spent about 2 months in a liferaft at sea, I am now convinced of a suspicion I had all along that they have no rights as we understand them, they are here for us humans.
( the book was about a struggle of survival, at 1st this guy has a fully functioning spear gun as was able to catch food, but after the spear gun broke, and by all rights he should have died, the fish basically sacrificed themselves so he can live.
To me, this just isn’t all that strong of an argument. Let me ask you this, what are the chances that a baby human will grow up to be an adult rabbit? Or that a baby bunny will grow up to speak human languages? As for someone who is so profoundly retarded that they cannot learn to speak OR understand that killing other people is bad (and this is pretty severe retardation), I’m not convinced that exercising their right to live is doing them much good. You’ll have trouble matching this person up with very many of the standard definitions of what it means to be human.
I don’t think I made my distinction clearly enough. From my standpoint, the rabbit and the retarded all have the same “right” to life that you or I do, in the same way that the gazelle has the same right to life as the cheetah hot on his tail. It is for this reason that I’m not in favor of killing animals at random. However, it is one thing to acknowledge a right to life; it is another to agree as a group to actively respect and protect each other’s right. The respect for a right to life and the effort to defend it species-wide is a product of civilization. A brief look around at nature shows that it isn’t something that is obviously “natural”.
We protect the infant out of respect for the fact that he will grow to be a human fully capable of participating in society–and out of respect for the just vengeance of his parents. We selectively respect the right to life of various other species in acknowledgement of the fact that this is how the food chain works, and we are members of it.
I DO believe that a respect for the right to life should definitely make people feel that killing animals for no good reason is morally repugnant. Killing them for food is a good reason, and one that the animals, if they could speak, would understand as they way the world works.
In my opinion, the difference is purely one of perspective. We are humans, and other humans are unique to us from any other species. To a newly arrived space alien, the right to life of a rabbit vs a human may not, in fact, seem to be of more or less importance.