Humans have more right to live than baiji dolphins

Great Debates
41

The point is that ‘uman rites’ is a phrase that has been hijacked.

Rights are a social concept - apart from a cat that I had executed for gross disloyalty and sh/itting in my shoes, I know of few animals that have ‘rights’.

Think Contract

Me, I am right into earthworm rights, rodent rights - and the rights of a moderately sentient human being to get rid of a bunch of morons with the IQ of Cherie Blair.

Get this into your skulls - ‘rights’ are a contractual concept

If you met a ‘natural’ human being he/she would eat you.

Now digest this, it is old and obvious, some ‘human beings’ are not ‘social beings’.

It is so old and obvious that I despair of the current generation who insist on saying that wolves have ‘rights’ to enter the flock.

Were I born a wolf, rather than a sheep with the ability to kick arse.

Can someone here explain the difference between a ‘social being’ and a ‘uman bean’ ?

I need to go eat - and I feel nauseous that I should have to think about ‘rites’ on the SDMB

42

Let’s compare extinction to just regular old death for a moment. I have the right to exist without being killed by another person. Ignore the idea that I’m some sort of murderous monster who deserves to die, nobody is complaining that smallpox is “functionally extinct”. If I’m minding my own business, nobody gets to take my life away.

However, this right, as universal as it is, has to be balanced by the rights of others, not just to live, but to live their lives in a reasonable manner. People need to be able to leave their homes unsupervised. They have to be able to argue with their spouses without the police intervening. They need to be able to drive cars over 10mph and own chefs knives and baseball bats.

Unless you clamp down on society with an insane level of monitoring and restriciton of freedom, some people are going to die at the hands of others. It’s just going to happen, and you can’t stop it without completely destroying our way of life.

Did these dolphins have the right to not be made extinct at the hands of man? Sure. That right still needs to be balanced with our rights to live our lives the way we want. Sometimes bad things are going to happen, especially with irresponsible people/governments. There is only so much you can do to prevent extinction, a goal of zero extinctions is only slightly more reasonable than a goal of zero annual murders in New York City.

43

The OP’s premise is dishonest.

We can discuss rights even if we agree that they are human constructs. They are constructs, after all, born out of our morality.

While I don’t hold dolphins to be as morally important as the life of humans, that doesn’t mean that I concede that they can have no rights to life at all. The OP tries to shift between a descriptive evolutionary point of view and a normative one based on rights without acknowledging that one does not trump or alter the other. That’s nonsense. The “objective” view of things doesn’t trump or add much to the debate over the normative issue, and yet Bricker is trying to use the objective view to effectively and sneakily bypass the debate over rights entirely.

44

Scrreeeeeeeee! Screeeeee-ah-screeeee! ScreeeScreee!
The translation for cetacean is a bit fuzzy, but it has something to do with “your blowhole”…

45

No. It’s utterly and completely useless to try to define “rights” as you are suggesting. Rights are meaningless unless they have a remedy attached to them. It is absolutely without meaning to claim that dolphins have rights of some sort, and expect me to agree. Where did you find these rights? In what authoritive source – a source that both you and I accept as an authority, mind you – are these rights defined and described?

46

Your argument is doggedly legalistic. You state that rights are meaningless and/or nonexistent unless some legal structure supports them and will offer “remedy”. You are certainly welcome to your definitions, but you render the very idea of debate meaningless. Most people are not lawyers, and are not obligated to accept your definitions, and are free to consider “rights” in a larger context. After all, no one is suggesting that dolphins be registered to vote, though some have been “drafted” into the armed forces (Cue Aerosmith: Flipper’s Got A Gun…)

After all, our Fuck You Note to George III declared* human* rights to exist in a condition where no legal remedy existed, being “self-evident”, and asserting that denying legal remedies to assert such naturally occuring rights was an inherently justifiable cause to revolution, which might otherwise not be legitimate.

47

I am willing to extend the definition of remedies to practical ones. We had no legal right, perhaps, to declare ourselves independent, but we had some New Englanders with flintlocks and a pissed-off attitude willing make it happen.

I acknowledge as much when I discussed the “right” to survive as being self-evidenced by surviving, and the lack of such a right being equally evident by getting extincted.

Any other defintion of “right” is pissing in the wind. You may passionately insist an imagined “right” exists; I can equally passionately deny that it does.

48

Does this mean I don’t have the right to live because there’s no remedy for me being dead? I’m sure it’s all well and good for the living to have my murderer put behind bars, but they weren’t the ones wronged, I was.

49

Bricker, Dolphins don’t have any “rights”, any more than you or I have “rights”, except what you and I and 300 million of our closest frients agree we have.

Dolphins don’t have a right to live. Can we get that out of the way? It is irrelevant.

I am a human being. I don’t want river dolphins to go extinct. And you come in and appear to claim that since dolphins don’t have a right not go extinct, my desire for dolphins not to go extinct is irrelevant. Darwin, or God, has decided that since everyone dies, it’s great that these dolphins should die too.

It is irrelevant that dolphins don’t have rights, just as it is irrelevant that you and I don’t have rights.

The reality is that I have preferences about how I want to live my life. I don’t like being tortured, I don’t like being stolen from, I don’t like having soldiers quartered in my house without provision by law, and so forth. And when you and I talk, I find that you have similar desires…not identical, but similar enough that we can agree to a long list of things that we agree not to do, or let other people do, in return for the guarantee that they will not be done to us. And it turns out that when people make these agreements, we get a pretty argeeable society to live in. People have tried other arrangements, but they haven’t worked out nearly as well.

Now, people are saying, “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t exterminate these dolphins?”. And for some reason, you call foul. “I never agreed not to exterminate dolphins! Therefore, your desire not to see dolphins exterminated is irrelevant next to my indifference to dolphin extermination.”

But that’s preposterous. Yeah, dolphins have no right not to go extinct, but that doesn’t mean that you or I have no right to try to prevent dolphins from going extinct! It doesn’t mean we can’t complain about actions or inactions on your part that are causing dolphins to go extinct. It doesn’t mean that laws enacted by us to attempt to prevent dolphin extinct are by their very nature unjust, even if they require you to do things you wouldn’t otherwise want to do, like not dump toxic chemicals in a river that flows through your property. Or our requirement you take down those giant dolphin-impaling spikes you put up. Or prohibit your weekly to-the-death dolphin-fighting tournaments.

Things like clean air, clean water, wilderness, and wild animal and plant species HAVE to be regulated as a commons, we have no choice. Sure, it would be neater if people could dump toxic chemicals on their property and the toxic chemicals never leached across property lines. It would be nice if we could use water that entered our property however we saw fit…except water doesn’t work that way. It flows onto our properties and then flows off, it rains down and evaporates off. It is impossible to treat water rights as simple libertarian property rights no matter how much we might wish to, because water useage on one property cannot help but affect water on other properties. And the same with air…we all have to breathe, we all absorb chemicals from the atmosphere and dump chemicals into the atmosphere by the simple fact of being alive. Private ownership of the air is simply impossible.

And it is the same with animal species. Yes, it is possible for individual animals to be treated as private property. But there are billions of unowned animals and plants on the earth, and to treat them all as either private property or as having no legal status is impossible. People hunt, but they don’t own the animals they hunt. People fish, they don’t own the fish they catch. People swat insects, they don’t own the insects they crush.

So wild animal populations MUST be regulated as a commons, there is no way around it. And so we have the thicket of wildlife regulations, public lands, and so on. And we also recognize that there’s a difference between the life of an individual animal or plant, which is always finite, and the species itself, which need not be. There’s a difference between killing one buffalo, and killing all the buffalo. There’s a difference between grazing your sheep on the commons, and your sheep eating the last blade of grass on the commons. And enclosure of this commons into private ownership isn’t feasable.

But then you come on and make the argument that the rights of humans outweigh the rights of dolphins. But so what? I’m a human, and so is my wife, and we don’t want dolphins to go extinct. Now what? What exactly was the point of your argument? If all rights are human rights, why can’t I insist you don’t kill off every last river dolphin? And thus protection of endangered species isn’t a universal value, but a human value, just like my right to insist you don’t toss trash out your car window, or toss burning objects out your car window.

50

Well, useless to you. Then you’d have to actually formulate an argument. Heavens.

The same place we both decide to in common acknowledge rights in human beings: discussions of morality. Rights are a legal construct we enshrine based on some moral view about what sorts of things are valuable. You may not agree off the bat that there is anything valuable about the lives and experiences of dolphins, but you cannot simply declare that there is no discussion to be had about it.

In short, that is where your dishonesty here lies. You have attempted to completely bypass the debate over what rights we think various beings SHOULD be afforded by reference to an “objective” reading, where of course there are no rights (because, duh, rights are a NORMATIVE concept, not a descriptive one). I also detect a sort of theistic sneering at the idea of the descriptive evolutionary view, which, given that its based on the goofy confusion of secular science with moral values (or the supposed lack of them), isn’t a pretty picture, all told.

51

You are putting words in my mouth. I said “we need to preserve biodiverity”, which we do. And you are taking the concept I put forth too literally in a way, as others have eloquently pointed out. (It isn’t a “legal” concept, more of an “ethical” concept I was putting forth, enlightened self interest too.) You hold forth the idea that a species survives or doesn’t based on it’s ablity to do so, but ignore the fact that our species is proving that it cannot survive in the ecosystem and is continuing like a juggernaut on it’s “lemmimg march” to extinction.

We pollute our own air, soil and water which we need to continue to exist. We cannot undo the pollution we have done, and we continue to shrug and keep doing it. Most of the population cannot survive without artificial aid, we exist largely in an articial climate. (Air conditioners, heaters, and even plumbing for places like deserts and such. We also need vehicles to transport our food supplies, there would be problems if we had to rely on horses again to get food where it was needed.) The modern conveniences that we need for daily life contribute to polluting the global ecosystem, and I’d say it builds up, a cumulative effect. We, as a species can’t make the cut, and it is a fluke that we continue to apparently thrive. The very things we now “need” to survive, are our eventual undoing. I don’t see a sudden Epiphany wherein humankind gives up air conditioners and heaters and lives more naturally, so future generations are stronger and more hardy, do you?

52

See followup post below!

To clarify, I feel that Bricker missed this post of mine, when he made the comment in my above post. In the MPSIMS thread I did say “we need to preserve biodiversity”. I stand by that idea, and yes I know that biodiverity includes evolution, and “natural” extinction. I contend that the extinction in question wasn’t precisely natural.***** Our eventual extinction by our own ignorant arrogance won’t be entirely “natural” either.

***** [SUB]The dodo bird I’ll grant, was more natural than the Chinese River Dolphin.[/SUB]

53

I absolutely reject the notion that our air conditioners are any less “natural” than a beaver dam. I don’t imagine you are wringing your hands at the plight of the beavers, who only survive by drastically altering their environment for their own good – and, I might add, in so doing make the environment unfirendly to species that had lived there before.

We, as a species, ARE making the cut, and are continuing to survive quite handily, doomsayers such as yourself to the contrary.

54

The difference being the beavers can’t affect the global ecosystem on a large scale, nor are their behaviors willfully/knowingly contrary to their species survival. In fact, if given time, a species will adapt and change behaviors that once were beneficial but are now a liability. The problem is, now they aren’t getting the chance to adapt because humans have speeded up the extinction process. The fact that we humans know what we are doing is bad for our continued survival, yet we continue to do it proves that the species won’t continue to survive as the trend goes on.

55

I have every confidence that, had you thought but a moment longer, you wouldn’t have said that. An air conditioner? Electric motors? Exotic industrial chemical compounds?

Imagine whatever you like. While not wringing my hands, I would much prefer than the beaver continue, simply because more life is better than less. And, while it is true that they alter the environoment to the deteriment of stream-dependent lifeforms, they enhance the environment for pond dwellers. Zero sum games are unnatural.

Just like the yeast in the wine goes along swimmingly, population soars, success is everywhere…until they die from the alcohol they excrete.

56

Bricker, the argument posited in this OP is very different from the original argument you made in the other thread. You’ve taken one position from the other thread and rephrased it as a bit of a false dillemna that few would disagree with. Your original position was “why should we mourn the extinction of a species, even one we make extinct? Species have been going extinct since the dawn of time, no species has a right to be free from extinction.” The vastly more defensible argument phrased in the OP is more akin to “who has more right to exist, humans or Baiji dolphins? Choose one, show your work and cite relevant legal authority.”

To change gears for a second, take by way of example a story I read in my Environmental Law casebook in law school about the (arguably) oldest known living thing on Earth. Not a giant tortoise or a mighty sequoia, but a gnarled, scraggly little tree found in the western U.S. called the bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva. The oldest known specimen, named “Methuselah,” is close to 4,800 years old, meaning it was a seedling when the base stones were being laid for the Great Pyramid at Giza. It’s not the oldest known to exist, however, there was one older, the “Prometheus tree.” In 1964, an excited graduate student could not obtain a core sample to date the tree because he kept breaking his coring instrument, so he asked the U.S. Forest Service for permission to cut it down to count the rings. Permission was granted. The tree was 4,900 years old, meaning it had taken root around the same time as the first human settlement in Athens. He had just killed the oldest living on the planet.

The tree could have been hit by lightning, or as the student himself said, crushed by the next rock to roll along, but the fact that it could have happened by other means doesn’t make humans any less culpable. It’s admittedly nonsensical to speak of the tree’s right to exist as trumping the student’s legal right to cut the tree down, or whether much younger trees used for lumber should have any less right to not be cut down, or the tree’s standing to sue. It’s more something that causes your soul to rebel. My reaction is more akin to the destruction of something sacred, like when a very literally-minded iconoclast smashed Michelangelo’s Pietà with a hammer in 1972. The loss of the Baiji dolphins is the same, except we can’t reconstruct them. They’re gone. We as a species are making the cut, but we’re reaching an evolutionary stage where we could be thinking about being more than just predatory omnivores. Maybe we should start viewing ourselves as stewards.

57

Well said. You’ve managed to explain in part why I mourn, and given a description to the role I’d like to see our species play in our ecosystem.

58

I suppose you could say other living creatures have a “right” to exist in that we as sapient beings are able to choose to destroy or cultivate. Beavers can’t really be blamed for buildings dams - we can.

59

Why not? If every decision is based on its utility to humans … oh, yes, the ecosystem can win some too. Maybe IT has rights, then?

Nowhere have you mentioned the flip side of rights, to wit, responsibilities. Do we have any responsibilities to preserve ecosystems on any basis other than their economic utility?

Perhaps you’ve heard of environmental protection regulations? Been a big thing in government circles for decades now. The US even has a cabinet department devoted to it. You could look it up sometime.

Or you could simply lay off this penchant for trying to cram every argument into the rules of a court case. The world is a helluva lot bigger than that, and the world of morality and rights and responsibilities to our fellow citizens and the world in which we live is a helluva lot bigger, too.

60

Oh, what the hell, screw the dolphins. They should have planned ahead and evolved some immunity to ship propellers and raw sewage. But they didn’t so it’s their own fault they’re dead. Humanity, fuck yeah!

That’s about what the OP amounts to.