Premise 4 pretty much leads directly to the conclusion, all by itself.
And I most emphatically do not accept Premise 4. I believe there is a moral difference between a human being on the one hand and an oyster, an ant, a skink, or a skunk, on the other.
Unless God is a cat. My former pet certainly thought SHE was god. 
Dogs think, “He feeds me, he must be a god.”
Cats think, “He feeds me, I must be a god.”
No, I wouldn’t grant premise 1 to machines that mimic behavior of sentient beings. I agree that the issue of sentience is sticky, but I think it is fairly clear that at least some animals have it and machines as they now exist do not. It is a very gray area though, and I think an important philosophical problem.
I agree with your skepticism of premise 1. While some animals have nervous structures very similar to humans, is their experience of pain really the same as humans? This is a very difficult question to answer. I can’t even say for sure that your experience of pain is the same as mine, much less a different species’. But if we have to stake out a pragmatic position while we figure out a better solution, it seems reasonable that higher order mammals, say chimpanzees, feel pain and suffering in a nearly identical way to humans.
OK, care to offer some warrant to your claim?
Incidentally, the same goes to everyone else who said “there’s clearly a difference!” without actually pointing to the difference and showing why its morally significant.
Zhao the problem I’m having is that you never actually attempt to define where you believe that rights derive from, yet you ask others to explain why they shouldn’t be applied to animals. That’s highly problematic because your entire opening post in essence becomes a massive non sequitur is most derivations on rights are applied.
If for instance I apply the standard that rights are derived only form responsibility and contribution then all your premises are totally irrelevant. They could be restated in the negative and have no bearing whatsoever on a conclusion about whether animals have rights. The same is also largely true if I apply a standard that rights are derived from justice.
Now I’m assuming that you never intended to utilise a non sequitur so I am also assuming that you have some basis of rights in mind, possibly subconsciously, that would make all those premises somehow relevant to a conclusion on animal rights. But you haven’t spelled it out and I can’t for the life of me combine them all into any logical basis for rights. So perhaps you could help me out here and explain where you believe that rights derive from so that I can make an attempt at seeing whether your argument holds up by that standard, but as it is it seems to have no legs at all.
So let’s examine your premises:
Well that’s true, if we include the most severely retarded of humans in our set of “some humans”. After all the smartest of animals at best only exhibit the thinking prowess of a 2yo human infant. Only the most severely retarded adult humans exhibit the mental prowess of a 2yo. And the vast majority of animals don’t even approach the intellectual level of a 2yo human.
So this premise can be more clearly written as “Some animals suffer as severely retarded or brain damaged humans do, and think as severely retarded or brain damaged humans do.”
Well that’s perfectly true of some animals, but it’s equally true of cabbages isn’t it? Or croquet mallets for that matter? After all the most severely retarded humans are anencephalic, they lack all but a brainstem and have no capacity at all for experience or thought. They suffer and think exactly as much as a cabbage or a croquet mallet.
I really can’t see Premise 1 as stating anything but the trivial. It seems to be an attempt at constructing an argument based on a syllogism. Basically it’s saying that because some humans and some animals share a common property of perception and thought then they should share other properties as well.
The single biggest problem with any conclusion stemming primarily from Premise 1 is that it will inevitably need to be applied to croquet mallets and cabbages as well as animals, since they also share the exact same properties with humans
As with Premise 1, I agree with this, but it seems to be a total red herring. The very title of this thread gives that away.
We are never under any circumstances going to be discussing a system where rights are denied arbitrarily are we? We are always going to be discussing whether rights should be denied to animals aren’t we? The species concept can get a bit fuzzy at times and genetic manipulation will doubtless make it fuzzier as time goes by, but right now there’s nothing in any way vague or arbitrary about a distinction between human and non-human is there? Even if we resolve that animals should be denied some or all rights those rights will be given or denied to a very consistently and rigidly defined group won’t they? Is there really any possibility for arbitrariness in defining human and animal here?
Now I suspect that Premise 2 was simply poorly phrased, and it perhaps should have said “ A system of rights should be consistent; it should not give and deny rights for arbitrary *reasons[I/]”. But that’s absolute bollocks. I doubt that even you agree with that Zhao. As others have pointed out we deny rights routinely for arbitrary rasons. We deny the right of life to the severely brain damaged (Terry Schiavo). We deny the right of life to those who inconvenience others (late term abortions), we deny the right of freedom to people who don’t meet our arbitrary moral standards (people jailed for having sex in public). We deny the right to property to people based on arbitrary geographic or occupational standards (preferential taxation laws).
The list is endless. Every time that we enforce any law we are denying a freedom, and the reasons we do so are necessarily arbitrary. They are based on specific axioms, and all axioms are arbitrary. Whether the axiom is that people fucking on park bench are disgusting perverts or that animals aren’t equal they are all ultimately equally arbitrary.
You might make a case that we could argue a rational basis for a law against murder for example, and thus murder laws aren’t arbitrary. But the problem is that they ultimately rest on arbitrary axioms.
So I reject Premise 2 out of hand. As written it’s poorly phrased and confuses arbitrary awarding of rights with arbitrary reasoning of rights. Any inequality of dispensation of rights between humans and animals can never be arbitrary because the distinction between humans and animals is not arbitrary. Even when re-phrased to encompass only the reasoned basis of this discrimination it is still clearly untrue. All systems assign rights and privileges based on arbitrary axioms. “All men are created free and equal” is no less arbitrary than “Animals are less than men”. So clearly the basis of all systems of rights is arbitrary, the exact opposite of what Premise 2 asserts.
Zhao I have similar misgivings about your other premises, but this post is already too long. If we can resolve these two, which seem to be the most glaring problems in your argument, then we may move onto the others.
Premise 1: True, though not completely.
Premise 2: Patently absurd.
Premise 3: True, though we do it anyway. “Weaker” is not clearly defined.
Premise 4: Morality is, as far as we know it, a human concept. Thus, we may only visit our morality on animals, rather than equate ourselves with animals and their morality, which is impossible to determine even exists.
In actuality, the purposeful killing of any animal can be considered morally incorrect if you apply similar moral standards to animals as you do humans. Animals, on the other hand, are inherently innocent and devoid of malice (as far as we know) and negative intent, so were an animal to kill a human, it would, in concept, be morally neutral.
The problem with affording some rights to some animals is that two things occur that are likely unintended.
You attempt as a human being to ‘overrule’ the dominion of nature and/or creator (which ALWAYS has bad results).
More harm will come to animals overall due to their contact with humans, both intentional and not.
The ideal situation regarding animal rights has already existed, thrived, and been extinguished in the culture of the American Indian. Learn and apply those lessons to your premise(s) and I think the middle ground is reached.
To address the quote in the OP:
As a negative utilitarian, I suggest that attempts to distinguish states of “happiness” are doomed to failure for many decades or centuries yet. Suffering, on the other hand, is far more easily distinguished neuroanatomically. Animals have the same nociceptors as us, connected to similar cognitive modules - there seems no reason why breaking an animal’s bone should not be every bit as painful as one of mine. And so, direct torture of animals can be said to cause neuroanatomical suffering, which under negative utilitarianism is “bad” and ought to be minimised.
However, as LHoD points out, there are many other ways of making a human suffer which animals simply do not have the cognitive capacity to be affected by. Depression, stress and grief can be caused in my human brain by someone telling me, convincingly, that my mother has died: animals cannot. More importantly, stress and suffering can demonstrably neuroanatomically arise in my brain if you were to convince me that there is a very real probability of me or my loved ones dying in the near future: indeed, I would choose a period of torture over a strong probabilty of outright death any time. This suffering causation mechanism is just not there for animals, but if their death would cause suffering in a human (eg. pets) then the same definition of “bad” can again be invoked, this also forming the basis of the “badness” of killing the severely disabled, comatose or desert-islander, who are all someone else’s loved one (and, heck, I could become disabled, comatose or marooned in unfortunate circumstances, and so I set forth a social contract now which alleviates such worries. I simply cannot become an animal.)
And so, ultimately, if an animal is born, separates from its mother at the appropriate age (since too early a separation can stress both the offspring and mother), lives its life without pain or undue stress in humane conditions, and is killed instantly in a neuroanatomical state which is not stressed by the scent of blood, the warning calls of its bretheren or any kind of mishandling, I ask: Where is the suffering, exactly?
Thus I say that animals have the right to be free of suffering but, unlike humans, killing them causes no such suffering, in them nor in the rest of their species.
To clarify, I say that animals have the right to be free of suffering caused by humans. Animal rights activists would do well to roam the African veldt in search of cows literally being eaten alive in such a state of stress that their heart mercifully seizes.
I could provide any number of references that flat out contradict that statement. For example:
James D. Rose,The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes and the Question of Awareness and Pain, Reviews in Fisheries Science, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 1-38.
A suggestion that animals have “similar cognitive modules” to humans seems to be obviously absurd. How can even somehting as closely related as a starfish be considered to have the same “cognitive modules” as a human?
Apologies, Blake, I should have stated that I was speaking of some animals, not all animals, when I suggested that breaking their bones would be largely as painful as breaking mine. (Although I am also aware that the smaller cortex the less painful it may be: my point is that there is no reason to think that at least higher vertebrates don’t find torture painful).
I agree that mammals probably find torture painful. The problem then becomes one of relativism. You said that under your brand of utilitarianism any negative epxerience is undesirable, but clearly that has to be countered somehow. Otherwise you couldn’t collect taxes off Bill Gates because paying taxes has negative consequences for him. I’m assuming that negative consequences have to be weighed against their benefits somehow, otherwise we could never enforce any behaviour on anyone ever.
That being the case we have to somehow judge whether the pain felt by a mouse is less than or equal to the benefit I derive from poisoning it to stop it destroying my magazines. And as you pointed out that’s damn tricky for all sorts of reasons. Pleasure is hard to quantify, as is the benefit of me having a copy of “People”. But the pain amouse experiences is also difficult to quantify.
While it’s doubtless painful it’s hard to say how painful for the reaosns you;ve already covered. I suggest that mostof the pain a human feels in that situation is due to mental effects including. Humans have a realistion that we are going to die coupled with fear of our own mortality and feelings of longing and anxiety at seperation from those we care for. Our highly developed concept of time and knowing how long the physical pain has gone on for and how long it might last also makes the pain worse. Humans have also evolved to confront and solve problems or have others solve them for us, being powerless in itself is stressful to humans
Its impossible to guage to what extent those things are true of animals, and as a result it’s impossible to empathise animal pain without gross anthropomorphising. Yet presumably we need to somehow evaluate the level of pain to judge whether it is justifiable, even under your utilitarian philosophy.
Which all seems to put us back at square one WRT which basic rights animals have or can even benefit from.
Incidentally, Blake, even the fish question is not so cut and dried:
(ibid). I don’t think that my statement that the nociceptors themselves are equivalent and that the cognitive modules are similar (to a varying degree as we descend the evolutionary ladder, of course) was so unforgivable, but whatever way you’d like it rephrased I’d probably agree with.
Agreed, but ultimately so is everything.
Ah, but I would not suggest that “negative consequences” were necessarily suffering: A better word would be inconvenince here, I suggest, unless I left Bill in such dire straits that his very physical or mental health was compromised.
And we may well get it wrong, but to throw out such an approach entirely would be to make the perfect an enemy of the good. Mice and magazines are on a far back burner compared to the grave and demonstrable physiological stresses that livestock suffer in their brutal lives: As in all kinds of other politics, the negative utilitarian suggests that we seek to identify and tackle the most like candidates for suffering first. I eat animals, but from sources which (insofar as I can trust their claims) reduce the ouright suffering and stress which those animals demonstrate.
I agree even more. That’s my biggest problem with Premise 2 of the OP. Any system that allocates differential rights is based on some sort of relativistic and hence arbitrary standard.
But here we have just climbed onto the thin edge of the wedge. Bill Gates doesn’t suffer very much and we call that very limited suffering inconvenience. Further down the scale a struggling family feels even more stress because they have to pay taxes and eventually we come to peasant in Thailand whose tax is literally the food out of her mouth. But it’s all a spectrum. There is no clearcut point at which someone graduates from inconvenience to suffering. Yet we still enforce taxation on people with financial problems, even forcing them into bankruptcy and suicide on occassion. Clearly taxation causes suffering yet just as clearly it must be maintained.
So at some point your philosophy must accept that suffering is justifiable mustn’t it? The question then becomes when is that point, and how is it decided.
That seems awfully harsh. You are effectively saying that anyone that disgrees with you is evil.
That’s all well and good and I tend to agree, but does it get us any closer to deciding whether animals have any rights? You could have reached the same conclusion even if you belived they had no rights.
After all the poor have no right to your money, yet you may still give to charities despite that. In the same way animals need not have any right to freedom from pain in order for us to decide not to inflict pain on them needlessly.
Irrelevant, pain is not the standard by which morality is determined.
“Irrational consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” I really wish I could remember who said that. For me to accept the consistency arguement I would have to agree that a man is a horse is a duck is a cow.
This only matters if we accept that a man is a horse is a duck is a cow.
Only if we accept premise #2.
Which animals and which rights? I know we can’t stop ursines from bearing arms but what about the right to life?
Marc
Yes, as it is with everyone’s, ultimately. But the perfect need not be the enemy of the good.
I say that two people may disagree on what constitutes a minimisation of suffering. But “evil”? No, I would not call someone who disagreed with me “evil”.
Call it what you will, we discuss here what I suggest should be minimised (“suffering”, as imperfectly and approximately correlated with a neuroanatomical metric) and the means by which this might be initiated. If I’m “giving animals rights”, so be it. If I’m not, amen also.
As an aside, I suggest that the portion of government money which goes towards the poor is not “mine” in the first place (ie. taxation is not theft, tax evasion is theft) - it is the rent I pay to everyone else for the privilege of calling the remainder “mine”.
So they don’t suffer? They feel no pain? Tell you what, find yourself a bull and walk up to him and stick him with a straight pin. If they feel no pain and don’t suffer as humans do, you should be just fine.
True about suffering except in the lowest forms of animal life. Thinking as humans do is reserved for the higher orders of mammals (primates and sea mammals), except of course to a much lesser degree. Agree with the premise.
True.
With some notable exceptions such as the Nazis, this has been recognized for generations.
But there is no moral reason why the frog should deny rights to the fly. Natural order recognizes no rights. We can eat cows not because of any moral right, but simply because we can.
Within limits. Humans are entitled to survive and eat animals like any other predator.
This goes against every biology text I’ve ever seen.
It is possible to debate issues without insulting those that believe differently. You should try it sometime.
But really it’s not about animals having rights in a positive enforceable sense. It’s about us and our conduct.
The other way to phrase the question is: should there be restraints on the conduct of people towards animals? Should people be inconvenienced?
Again the question is no more than a preliminary to a discussion on the inequality of animals, the sanctity of life and respect for integrity of the body, amongst other issues.
Very broadly, a ‘restraint on conduct’ would aim to protect a quality we can observe or measure. Cruelty, pain, extinction.
Secondly, how far should the inconvenience to people extend? Diet, Clothing, Aromas, Starvation, Predation?
Some of these questions lend themselves fairly easily to a principle around which a right can be formulated e.g. ‘no unnecessary pain’
Others though are less easy to deal with and a corresponding principle is less easy to formulate. When does inconvenience to people merit eating animals?
The other take on the question is moral. Rather that considering animals to be agents worthy of merit, one can consider conduct by the person to be destructive and demeaning to the person and to merit sanction solely for that reason.
Although it’s obvious, it bears mentioning, I think, that we aren’t the first to discuss this question .
I think premise #1 is too ambiguous to debate and build up your other premises on. What, exactly, do you mean by suffer? Do you mean the ability to feel simple pain? Do you mean the ability to feel anxiety due to the anticipation of imminent physical pain? The ability to feel existential anxiety? What, exactly?
Suffering is a very broad term that encompasses a great deal of emotions. I think the type and degree of suffering an animal is capable of experiencing depends a great deal on the animal; a starfish may only perceive simple pain, and may not be conscious enough to care. A dog can obviously perceive simple pain and feel some limited forms of anxiety (“Oh shit! Metacom plugged the Dremel in! He’s gonna attack my nails! I’m gonna hide under the kitchen table; he surely won’t notice a 100 lb dog there!”).
I think that suffering beyond simple “Ouch!” depends on how developed the animal’s mind is, in terms of existential awareness, and intelligence (the ability to remember events and infer things from them). The key difference between how an animal suffers and how a human suffers isn’t in the sensation of physical pain but in intellectual and emotional suffering. If a being isn’t aware enough of its own existence to know that it’s going to die, then ontological questions aren’t relevant to it: it’s free from a fear of death, and it will never experience that kind of suffering. If a being can’t figure out that getting hit by a car can kill it, then it’s not going to feel nervous about walking across a freeway, and it’s not going to feel guilty or stupid if it gets hit by a car–there will only be the sensation of physical pain.
Left Hand of Dorkness’s “drowning dog” example is a good one. If a human was dropped in the middle of the ocean, it would be able to figure out that there was no hope. It was going to drown and die after a protracted period of suffering. The resulting anxiety from the anticipiation of death and protracted suffering and the feeling of helplessness greatly compound the physical suffering: mere exhaustion isn’t that horrible a thing, endurance athletes and others voluntarily subject themselves to it frequently; but when you remove the voluntary aspect and add the specter of death it becomes terrible.
A dog, in a similiar situation, will feel the physical exhaustion, but, in my opinion, it won’t feel the emotional pain in the same way a human will. It won’t be smart enough to figure out that it’s going to die in several hours if it doesn’t find land; it isn’t self aware enough to fear death when exhaustion approaches. It will struggle more towards the end, and experience some terror, but only when it becomes exhausted and the pain of drowning becomes imminent.
Ultimately, I think that humans are special, in that I think we’re far more intelligent and self-aware then other beings, so I think we suffer in ways that animals can’t. But I think that some animals can feel a subset of our emotional suffering, to an extent determined by how developed the animals mind is.
What does this all lead to? I think we should minimize the physical pain that animals feel (within reason; some discomfort in animal husbandry, grooming, etc. is acceptable, just as some suffering is acceptable with humans) and should minimize the emotional pain that they feel to the limited extent that it’s possible for them to feel it.
I feel no guilt eating a nice steak.
This is the crux of it for me. There are behaviors that we can not tolerate in our fellow humans, whether they are directed at animals or other humans. Allowing cruelty to animals allows an outlet to behavior that is simply unhealthy.
People that are prone to animal cruelty can not simply restrict that impulse to animals- it escalates and can bleed into human interaction as well. Isn’t animal cruelty one of the indexes used when profiling criminals, especially of the sociopathic/psychotic type?
So I support animal rights, but only in so far as I think it serves humanity’s self-interest. The minimizing of suffering should be a goal of everyone in a civilized society, and allowing either indifference or enjoyment of suffering of any sort is counter productive.