I don’t think ** Metacom ** has ever tried to claim that. He’s said only that, to paraphrase, that preventing something from pain if it can’t feel it makes about as much sense as giving rights to my television.
The point you (and I) disagree with him on surely is whether it is really necessary to be an adult human to experience pain, and then rights will follow on from that?
Sure, with the following restrictions:
If the toddler was certainly going to die before it developed into self-awareness and intelligence (and you were sure of this), and it wasn’t yet developed enough to experience the fear of death (wasn’t self aware, couldn’t reason, etc.–and you were sure of this too) then I’d say euthanasia is a defensible position (assuming it was your toddler).
I find the idea of cannabalism revolting on a personal level, especially the cannabalism of one’s own children, but I can’t see what harm it does if the child died for unrelated reasons and the act of cannabalism didn’t cause emotional distress to living persons (for example, other relatives).
But this is all purely hypothetical–I don’t think it would possible to meet the constraints I placed on the act.
Yes.
It’s not yet a thinking being capable of some sort of reasoning or experiencing pain. Unlike a toddler or a cow.
Absolutely not. I’m suggesting that a being must have those two traits in order to deserve HUMAN rights.
I’m not going to write a treatise on rights in this thread.
Suffice it to say that one of the criteria (the one that my arguments are based on in this thread) would certainly be: “Is the recipient of this right capable of excercising it?”
Otherwise you end up with “The Life of Brian,” and men with the right to have babies.
The emotions themselves aren’t complicated (except in the case of mourning, and loneliness in non-social animals), but the more intelligent and self-aware the being the more pain they can cause.
Say you have three cows in a field. Every day, they go in to a barn to get milked. One day, only two are returned to the field. Are the two remaining cows going to be able to figure out that the other cow was killed and eaten, that it might happen to them next, and that if it does they’ll cease to exist, just like the dead cow? Are they going to know that the cow will never come back? Is there going to be an emotional void left by the other cow? Are they going to live out the rest of their lives filled with the anxiety of knowing that they too, will be killed and eaten someday?
Or do they not figure out any of that, and just graze and poop?
Certainly, cows can reason well enough to have some fears and simple emotional pain. But the worst kinds of human pain aren’t physical, and they aren’t simple fears; they’re existential anxiety, feelings of helplessness and dependency, humiliation, worthlessness, social rejection, etc. Pains that beings incapable of self-awareness and advanced reasoning can’t experience.
SentientMeat, thanks for your contribution. I think we actually agree on this issue completely, but we’re coming at it form slightly different perspectives. Yours is an intriguing approach because it appears to be attempting genuine consistency.
What I’m still not quite getting though is that you don’t appear to be drawing any distinction between an obligatory right and a freely given privilege. Do you not make any distinction between the two?
There are so mnay logical flaws in that I don’t even know where to begin. Perhaps the easiest way to get to the heart pof the matter is to ask you a hypothetical. I have a computer character here. When I stick a pin into my keyboard the character jumps and yells in pain. To you I assume that is evidence of an ability of a simple algorithm to feel pain, yes?
Cite please. I’ve already provided one reference that specifically contradicts such a claim. Do you have anything at all to support this claim?
That’s because you are engaging in equivocation. The OP and Unregistered Bull are using ‘animal’ in the sense of ‘non human’. You are attempting to apply the biological definition of “member of the Kingdom Animalia. You can’t do that in a debate. You need to apply a consistent definition to the word, you can’t change it whenever it suits you.
Cite please.
Bullfighting is without any doubt cruel to the animals involved. They have their muscles slashed and their lungs punctured and are subjected to a harrowing and painful death, often lasting over an hour. But I find it very hard to believe that every single bullfighter, or even a sizable minority “can not simply restrict that impulse to animals- it escalates and can bleed into human interaction". A claim that all or even a signioficant number of bullfighters are cruel to humans seems ludicrous to the extreme and I won’t let it go unchallenged. I could give any number of other culturally accepted acts of animals cruelty that are in no way obviously a short road to human cruelty.
That comment sounds like PETA nonsense.
It can be, but then so is bed wetting. So what’s your point? That bedwetting is immoral? That it should be punished? You are confusing cause and effect.
It’s a bit wider, too, because we can include proper housing and other humane/inhumane things under it. Raising a calf in a veal-box may not cause pain, but it is probably inhumane. (If it was a very nice box with scented virgins and chocolate, fine, whatever. I tend to qualify things a bit much in debates, because everything can be qualified.)
Okay. So. Currently, an animal has no right to life. It can be slaughtered at any age appropriate, if a food animal, put down if needed if a pet, and shot if wild.
Actually, wild animals have more protection towards a right to life than domesticated ones, come to think of it.
Are the three grades different, ethically? Pet, Food, Wild? We treat them so.
An animal is not a computer programme, so the analogy is irrelevant.
(until we get far better AI anyway…)
For a start, rubbish.
Emotional pains are far more frequent, so we tend to suffer from them.
I am in no way convinced that this shows that people would not rather be depressed than be in a torture chamber. Emotional pain often is somewhat bearable; physical pain beyond a level, really isn’t.
But your cow example doesn’t show anything of the kind - it shows that cows don’t comprehend what is going on, not that if they did that their pain would be less. And so I repeat, when they can comprehend - say an animal whose mate dies - there is no real reason I’ve seen so far why they need a great deal of abstraction to have this hurt. Often our most painful or emotional experiences (again, say, death) are connnected to our most primitive of instincts.
Zhao,
You say that you don’t want to get into any specific derivation of rights, which is understandable. The problem I still can’t overcome however is that without such a basis your key principle; that they not be handed out arbitrarily; we need a good reason for deciding where to draw the line; is worthless. It is in itself arbitrary. I can refute it in its entirety simply by saying “rights can be handed out arbitrarily; we never need a good reason for deciding where to draw the line”. It’s as simple as that. Lacking any logical basis you have been forced to make an arbitrary decision that rights shouldn’t be arbitrary, and that in itself is an arbitrary decision regarding rights. Your argument is self defeating. Until you deal with that you really have no argument at all. You can’t get around presenting some sort of basic axioms or reasoning for that claim. Otherwise it’s just an axiom in itself and one that even you don’t agree with. As such your argument demolishes itself.
Well I could and would if I thought it would achieve anything, but the problem is that at this stage the discussion is so broad that it would be pointless.
My only response is simply that Premise 2 as it stands is an attempt to utilise an undistributed middle. You’ve attempted to take the most brilliant animals and the most retarded humans where there is some overlap and use that to construct an argument that the two groups are or should be the same. It’s a totally irrelevant argument because the two groups are not the same despite sharing common properties at their absolute extremes.
Of course I disagree. Humans aren’t machines, we are social creatures with emotions and morality and codes of social behaviour and reinforcement. The approach you propose would reduce us to the level of machines. Our society has decided that my children shouldn’t have to witness two people going at it like dogs in a park and that is the right of our society, and all praise democracy for that. I have inbuilt standards of decent behaviour and conduct that are partly biological and partly cultural and in no wise logical. And I like that. There is no way that I or almost anyone else is going to support the idea that every standard that society sets has to be consistent.
I have standards and I don’t create most of them, they are merely part of what I am. The idea that I (and our society as a whole) shouldn’t have those standards is ridiculous and demolishes the whole basis of democracy. We decide what we can and can’t tolerate as living human beings, not as functioning machines. At some point some things become intolerable to the entities that are humans and we deprive the minority of the right to that behaviour. To suggest that humans have no right to be emotional or else that they should be forced to subvert that emotion when exercising their democratic rights is anathema to everything that I believe in.
But you miss the point entirely. There are a plethora of non-arbitrary differences between humans and animals. Genetic to begin with. Dentition, jaw structure, we are the only truly bipedal placental with all the anatomy that goes with that. I could give you a thousand criteria, any one of which would indisputably classify an organism as definitively human or non human.
There is nothing arbitrary about the distinction between humans and animals, and that is one of the biggest failing in your argument. This is not like a distinction between black and non-black under apartheid where there really was a line drawn ion the sand and many individuals straddled that line anyway. There is no arbitrary line-in-the-sand distinction between human and non-human. The distinction is rigid and natural and real and objective. Maybe 100, 00 years ago it was arbitrary, maybe in 100 years time it will be arbitrary again, but right now in the real world it is not in any way arbitrary.
Any inequality of dispensation of rights between humans and animals can never be arbitrary because the distinction between humans and animals is not arbitrary.
I agree that arbitrary was a bad choice of word, and that is precisely why Regan chose it. It has a feeling of being meaningful and objective while in this context it is provably meaningless and has no objective existence at all.
The trouble is that your argument hinged upon the premise that determinations of rights not be arbitrary. Your argument was not that determinations of rights should not be amoral. Those are two totally different and distinct arguments. Why is it relevant whether there are any moral distinctions between human and animals when I am addressing the premise that implies no real and objective and non-overlapping differences between humans and animals?
This seems like you are trying to shift your own argument. Now that we’ve proved that the distinction between humans and animals is non arbitrary and hence Premise 2 is demolished entirely you seem to want to add the qualifier of ‘morally’ non-arbitrary. That’s shifting the goalposts to another stadium. Another continent. If you want to do that then state it quite clearly and admit that premise two doesn’t stand as originally stated because the distinction between human and animal is not arbitrary. Then we can move on.
No, it is perfectly relevant.
See how pointless baseless gainsaying is in a debate? Would you care to actually engage in argument rather than just saying “No, it isn’t”?
Bob said that he can establish that cattle feel pain because their reactions to pain elicit a response that mimics the human response. I pointed out that an algorithm can also mimic the human response and so by that argument we are forced to concede that an algorithm can feel pain.
Can you explain why that argument is invalid? To me Bob’s argument is nothing but classic anthropomorphisation, he’s simply projecting human sensation onto animals because the response appears the same.
More unsupported unexpanded, unreasoned gainsaying.
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It’s not just saying “Rubbish” and “Irrelevant”
But far more people commit suicide through depression than as a result of torture. I know reliable accounts of anyone anyone who has ever killed themselves to avoid torture or pain (as opposed to avoid revealing secrets under torture). I know of countless reliable accounts of people killing themselves due to depression and anxiety.
Your argument doesn’t seem to tally with the facts
Cite please.
What evidence is there that primitive animals even understand the concept of death? It seems that of all animals elephants may be the only ones that even vaguely comprehend death. What evidence is that that even ‘advanced’ animals like apes understand death or that our pain and emotional reaction to death and grief are in any way primitive?
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” – Ralph Waldo Emerson (my source: dictionary.com → word: hobgoblin 
)
[1]LOL. He doesn’t feel the pain the same way. For one thing, a bulls alot tougher and dumber. Cattle are whipped, poked, and hot shotted alot. Some are dangerous; some aren’t. I worked on a livestock scale at an auction house when I was in junior high. I’ve had a brindle heifer try get me for no reason. And have I had to hit a Brahma cross bull really hard on the hip with fiberglass rod to get it to even move off the scale. Apparently, you don’t know much about animals.
[2]So your a monkey or dog or maybe chicken? None of them? What? You’re a human. Well, I’ll be damned.
[3]It’s not an insult; it’s the truth. It would be like not calling a Klansmen a racist.
By stating that a cow is not a human, therefore your right to eat it outweighs its right to life, you’re assuming that a cow does not deserve the same right to life that a human deserves. Which is the contrapositive of the very argument you’re seeking to disprove.
I don’t think it demolishes itself, but I agree that it needs some backing. This a good principle for several reasons: first, it is a check against tyranny. If we agree that rights cannot be taken away without a good reason, it prevents the majority from depriving the minority of rights. Second, our goal in determining who has rights should be fairness and equality. These are the values of American Democracy. Fairness demands that rights not be arbitrarily denied.
No, you’re oversimplifying it. There are many different groups of humans and many different groups of animals. Some of the humans overlap with some of the animals in terms of cognitive ability and pain perception. Since we want to give rights to those humans, we ought to give rights to those animals (if our standard for giving rights is based on issues like suffering and conciousness).
Well, this is an interesting point of contention. I’m certainly not suggesting that emotion is evil. I’m suggesting that rights ought to be a rational construct. I think I am the one in the mainstream on that one.
Oh come on. You really believe that I was arguing from the beginning that animals and humans are indistinguishable? That’s the least charitable interpretation of my position possible.
Of course I was talking about the distinction of moral categories. That is not only clear from the context of the OP, the redundant Premise 4 made it crystal clear. It is the only reasonable interpretation of the position.
Moreover, Premise 2 doesn’t say the distinction between humans and animals is arbitrary. It says rights ought not be given out arbitrarily, so this last part of your post doesn’t address premise 2.
I’m going to be away from board most of Tuesday.
Now. Right to Life. If animals have a right to life, we should stop slaughtering them for food. Instantly. Simple enough, right? And yet, throughout history, this has been considered an extremist view, limited to the Jainists and certain Vegans.
Why is this so, if it’s such a simple philosophical construct? Why do animals deserve this right to life, as it seems not to match the various philosophies of the rest of the world?
I suppose we could break it down into various philosophies. What was the greek view on animals? The buddhist? The jewish, christian, and moslem? The shinto? The native american? The shintoist? The african?
Each of the major and minor cultures must have had a reason why it was acceptable to kill for food. And I’m sure that people have thought deeply on this concept before. So what did they think?
The right to life, for another perspective, is a Lockean Natural Right. Why do humans have natural rights? Why do animals not? What is a natural right by the original definition?
That’s probably true, but you still haven’t established where those rights derive from so I can’t really see the relevance. All you have done is arbitrarily decided that the majority shouldn’t deprive the minority of rights, which puts you right back at square one. You have made an arbitrary decision regarding who allocates rights and how. At this point it’s looking like turtles all the way down.
You’ve moved from arbitrarily deciding that “decisions on rights should be made in a non arbitrary way” to arbitrarily deciding that “the majority shouldn’t deprive the minority of rights and the best defence against that is to ensure that decisions on rights should be made in a non arbitrary way”. But you still haven’t actually moved any further away from an arbitrary decision on how rights are to be decided.
It’s still self defeating because your own statements that incorporate the belief that rights shouldn’t be subject to arbitrary decisions are themselves arbitrary decisions regarding how rights are to be allocated. You need to produce some standard for deciding rights decisions that isn’t based solely on your personal preference. Otherwise any statement you make will be demolishing itself even as you construct it.
OK, this is now getting somewhere. The values of American Democracy ™ isn’t arbitrary, It was decided by hundreds of millions of others both living and dead. It’s a definite non-arbitrary basis for a decision.
Now we need to look at whether American democracy actually supports the concept of fairness and equality in a manner which is applicable to this discussion. And frankly it’s hard to see how anyone could believe that it does. Do you really believe that the founding father’s believed that sheep or monkeys should be treated equally and fairly to people? I can’t see any evidence they did, and given that they were often farmers and landowners themselves I see a lot of evidence that they did not. And there has never been a referendum, constitutional amendment, plebicite or even significant public opinion thathas differed form that view.
So it would appear even at a cursory glance that American Democracy does not value fairness and equality. It values fairness and equality for people and only for people. More precisely it values fairness and equality for American people. And there it ends. It is a gross overstatement of the values of American Democracy to say that it values fairness and equality being applied to all people and all things.
And as such I can’t see how it could possibly form a basis for rights in this instance. We might just well proclaim that American Democracy values capitalism and free enterprise and that since animals won’t engage in those activities they have no rights. It’s a mockery of the true values of American democracy and a gross distortion of the truth.
But as I demonstrated above, if we apply this standard then we are also forced to extend the same right to cabbages and croquets mallets.
Do you believe that we should extend the rights to citizenship, life and state sponsored healthcare to cabbages and croquet mallets? If not then quite clearly you yourself do not believe your own argument. You obviously have some other criteria beyond suffering and consciousness that come onto play here.
Your argument is absurd as you just presented it because without changing a single other word or altering it any way I can substitute “vegetable” for animal and the outcome is inevitable: cabbages have a right to citizenship and healthcare. That is self-evidently absurd and so the argument is absurd as it stands.
I know that you are very much in the minority.
Do you really think that a majority of people would vote that we should make it legal to have anal sex on the sidewalk outside a school at recess? Do you really think that even a sizable minority would support that? Hell no, most people wouldn’t support that being screened on public television. The idea of actual anal sex on a public street is considered that to be indecent by the vast majority of people.
Yet there is no rational reason to deny people the right to have sex on the sidewalk (beyond holding up other pedestrians I guess. So at worst they should be charged with loitering or a similar misdemeanor.
Yes you could contend that it might corrupt children and so on, and yet there is nothing rational about such claims, they are totally lacking in objective evidential support and about as rational as claims that white children would be corrupted by schooling with blacks.
Yet I can’t imagine that you would suggest that the majority of people would support legalising public sex acts. Therefore quite clearly the majority of people don’t support the idea that rights ought to be rational construct. Maybe they say they do, but if you asked people if we should legalise public sex they’d say no, and if you asked them to give a rational basis why not they couldn’t. It’s simply ‘indecent’. It is an act that doesn’t meet contemporary social standards.
And I see nothing wrong with that. As I said above, people are social animals with all the concomitant emotions. A human society has every right to decide that something is offensive and indecent without having to rationalise it. Offense is an emotion. It can’t never be rationalised even if it has a rational cause. If a majority in a rational society decides that behaviour is offensive they will deprive others of the right to participate in that behaviour.
I really can’t see how you could believe otherwise, or that people would never support laws based on offence and decency, both of which are subjective and irrational by their very nature.
No, it is merely the literal reading.
This to me seems to be a recurring flaw in your argument. You state something as though universally literally true at one juncture and then at the next juncture you apply it selectively and figuratively. Your argument is seriously contorted and inconsistent as a result.
Allow me to show what I mean.
So you meant to say that “A system of rights should be consistent; it should not give and deny rights based on arbitrary moral distinctions”.
Well that’s great. But what exactly is a non-arbitrary moral distinction? How can a moral principal not be “Determined by chance, whim, or impulse”? We are talking here about the moral distinction. We are not discussing the practical distinction.
I can see how a practical distinction between murderer and a non-murderer can be made (count the number of people killed, if n>1 then the person is practically distinguished as a murderer. I can see how we can distinguish it based legal distinctions and so forth. But how can any moral distinction not be arbitrary? How can any moral choice be “determined by… necessity, reason, or principle”?
Under what circumstances would it be “necessary” to declare a murderer less moral than a pickpocket? Under what circumstances could we “reason” that a murderer is less moral than a pickpocket? Under what circumstances could we establish a “principle” that declares a murderer less moral than a pickpocket? (OK, maybe a religious principle, but clearly you are not arguing that. Note that we are not asking under what circumstances we might dictate a practical need to rate the risk or cost of murderer over a pickpocket. We need to know when we might need to determine his morality only. Whether he is more or less moral, not more or less dangerous or costly.
I can not for the life of me see when we would need to make such moral distinction, or when we would be able to reason such distinctions, or when we would be able to find a principle to guide such distinctions. Given that how can any moral distinction fail to be arbitrary? Any time that someone is designated less moral than his fellow man that has to be arbitrary because, organised religion aside, any standard of morality is intensely personal.
Now of course maybe you do have some guiding principle or line of reasoning that allows you to determine that Richard Nixon is more moral than OJ Simpson. Or maybe you have some line of reasoning that you can use to determine that, or maybe you have some circumstance that forces us to declare Simpson to be more immoral. If you do them you need to share these. But if you don’t then you are making arbitrary moral judgements and assigning rights to those people based on those arbitrary moral judgements.
It does address it as it was stated because the rights aren’t being given out based on arbitrary distinction. The distinction on which they are handed out is rigid: Homo sapiens in one category and non-H. sapiens in the other. That’s as non-arbitary as you can get.
As I said above, your argument is contorted because of this loose usage of language. If I said that I was going to give my sexual favours to women but not to men would you say that my choice of sexual partners was totally arbitrary? Or would you say that I was rigidly discriminating in favour of women? In exactly the same way if I assign rights to humans but not to non-humans that is a rigid disrimination. It is not an arbitrary assignment in any way.
It is only you alter the wording to say that rights shouldn’t be given out based on arbitrary ‘moral distinctions’ that my position no longer addresses your argument. But I’ve addressed that alteration above, and look forward to seeing an example of a non-arbitrary moral distinction.
1- I think the key is “feel pain the same way.” Exactly what is it about human pain and suffering that makes it superior to that of other animals? I think it’s a bit arrogant to assume that because we really don’t understand exactly what they feel, that they have no right not to be hurt. Why do people need cites on this? Have they never heard the yelp of a dog in pain? Have they never experienced a pet that grieved over the loss of a companion?
2- Biologically, humans are members of the animal kingdom. Your DNA is closer to that of a chimpanzee than the DNA of a gorilla would be. To illogically place a chasm between humans and other animals is a false premise of the debate.
3- You are incorrect. Your quote:
is entirely inappropriate for this forum. I’m rather surprised that a moderator hasn’t thrown a flag on this. You simply do not refer to people that have different viewpoints as mentally disturbed.
I am perfectly well aware of what Bob said. I am also prepared to debate, if you are. And as you gave a frankly, quite silly, analogy, I felt no real need to respond to it in greater detail.
I’ve discussed this before in this thread I think, but I’ll go into it in greater detail. Please tell me why it is fair to compare an animal to a computer programme.
The crucial issue here is evolution, I feel. The same process that created animal life. When my friend screams in what sounds like pain, I assume they feel pain. When an animal screams in pain, I assume they feel pain. Why on earth wouldn’t they? What would be the evolutionary advantage in them not feeling pain?
When my TV screams in pain, I don’t think its experiencing pain. Its simply relaying the latest episode of 24, playing back a recording. This is exactly the same issue as the computer programme example. It is nothing like the case with an animal.
Cheers
The sentence I was responding to contained no evidence, just presented a proposition as fact.
I, on the other hand, you might have noticed, actually did have a few extra sentences which expanded the point…
Are you suggesting that roughly a similar number of people suffer from torture and from depression?
I’m not also convinced that your correlation between experiencing intense pain and desire to commit suicide works. One of the side effects of depression is a feeling life is worthless and thus a wish to end it; torture on the other hand perhaps might induce a wish for revenge or to make life worthwhile. That doesn’t neccesarily say anything about the pain experienced.
I refuse to give a cite that people get very emotional over death I’m guessing your arguing with the idea that fear of death is a primitive emotion (although I was more thinking of death of mates, family, to be honest) - and if you don’t think that the desire for survival is an essential primitive emotion felt by most creatures, then fine, the desire for reproduction. Sex, I think I can assert reasonably uncontraversially, sums up a lot of our strongest feelings. It derives from our most primitive natural desires.
I’m sorry about the neccisity for cites in this discussion. As I’ve already admitted, I’m very much learning here. My knowledge of biology is not great and I would welcome any further references. Your factoid about elephant death was very interesting, for example.
2 things - first, yes, it is possible to distinguish between animals and humans. It is also possible to distinguish between men and women. This does not mean for the most part (Monty Python rights aside…) that they should have different rights. Of course, you must know this, so I fail to see why you keep claiming that difference is enough to grant different levels of rights.
Secondly, you seem to be claiming that all moral systems are arbitary. To which I can only say, huh?
No, they are not.
Some are, of course - there are intuionist schools of thoughts. And maybe from that point of your intuition says its okay for to kill animals or Asians whatever you like, and yeah, of course I can’t argue with that.
But of course there are other systems of moral thought, highly popular systems, such as consequentalism and in particular, utilitarianism. Which is what most of this discussion seems to be taking as - a fair, and in my opinion - logical assumption.
I really can’t see how you think this is an effective argument. If I was to come into a Gay rights thread, and claim that it was moral intuition that all Gays should be locked up, then I would be rightly flamed to hell and back. Morality can, and should, be based on logic.
But being in a torture chamber isn’t just about the physical pain–that’s only one relatively small component of it. For a being intelligent enough to comprehend it, there’s also feelings of helplessness, feelings of humuliation, anxiety about impending death, anxiety about permanent damage being done and its impact on life, uncertainty over how long the experience will last, etc. Physical pain is a surprisingly small aspect of torture; historically, degradation, emotional abuse, humiliation, etc. have always played an enormous role in torture.
An animal in a torture chamber would feel the physical pain, but the other kinds of pain would be either non-existant or greatly diminished depending on the animals intelligence.
I remember well going to the “Museum of Tolerance” in Los Angeles with my class in Junior High; after going through their exhibits we had an encounter with a holocaust survivor. The one thing she impressed on us the strongest about the experience was that the physical pain was small compared to the humiliation, the loss of family, the uncertainty, degredation, and other emotional aspects.
They can’t comprehend it, because they’re not smart enough to understand what’s going on, so it’s meaningless to talk about their emotional pain in that situation because they can’t experience it.
They need to be able to be able to understand that death is permanent; they need to be able to remember the loss; they need to have a sense of identity (to know which individual it was that died); they’ll need to care about their mate (lots of animals don’t–there love life is “wham bam … Have fun with the kid, I’m on to the next female.”) Those aren’t simple concepts.
We’re humans. We’re important. Animals just aren’t as important. Pounds kill thousands of dogs and cats everyday. And even among some AR people, this isn’t the equivalent of a human genocide.
So what? This isn’t about biology.
So racism is a sane view point as well? AR supporters simply support another form of bigotry.
Let’s also look into premise #0 - Humans have rights
Do they really? Is anyone really able to enforce human rights? My premise #0.1 The more able anyone is able to enforce human rights, the more able anyone is able to take away human rights.
This mental defective has a question:
I assume we are important because we have something unique (like complex emotions), not just because you decided so (because that’s meaningless). If an alien race colonized the earth, and this race was very much above humans in terms of thought processes (they had to eat 5 persons per meal just to power their alien brain), do you think they would be more important than humans?
I have purposely avoided replying, preferring to give the question some thought before reading the thoughts of others.
While the pro arguments have merit and at least some internal consistency, I think it must be rejected for practical reasons.
If animals had rights, then the most extreme of HR positions would have merit. I say that again, the most extreme HR positions would be true.
If we accept that (say) all vertebrates are morally equal, we would:
So, we see that a practical application of the HR argument is simply a prescription for a massive restructuring of the world’s economy, culture and environment. It would call for war, blood and destruction on a massive scale.
Sorry I cannot buy it. Better animals die than people. Argue all you want, that is the choice and there is no reasonable middle ground.