Isn’t the whole concept of “rights” pretty much linked to the notion of “legal personality”, namely, the capacity to have legal rights and obligations?
Of course, you can colloquially say that a prohibition on killing animals confers a “right to life” upon them, but it is really no different than saying that a national landmark has a right not to be demolished or a forest has a right not to be cut down by any random yahoo who has decided to get themselves some timber. It is not a right - at least in the sense of rights that humans enjoy - but rather a duty prescribing how humans are to interact with an object, thing or creature.
Which ties back to shunpiker & k9befriender just above. We have the power and we have the moral agency. What we ought to do with that and what we actually choose to do with that are completely on us. Not the critters. They’re along for the ride to wherever we take them.
I had a musing with my wife the other day about a topic sorta kinda close to this one. That may be relevant to this discussion
I was thinking about the era when Neanderthal & Homo Sapiens coexisted. Then thought about whether any planet containing two intelligent social species could ever be long term stable. Or whether one species would necessarily out-compete / destroy the other during the very early days of emerging intelligence and emerging social behaviors? Especially if they’re genetically different enough that cross-breeding is simply way beyond impossible.
In other words, *must *there be at most one top-dog intelligent species and then a large band gap to the next smartest critters who’re real dumb by comparison to the smartest? My tentative conclusion was that this was necessary. IOW IMO any starting configuration of species *will *, given enough time, evolve to a configuration with zero or one intelligent species. Never 2 or more.
If so, what if anything does that say about the various efforts to elevate the moral and intellectual stature of those lesser leading species?
Back to the OP … I agree very much with k9befriender’s analysis of your cites. They don’t say what you initially said they say.
Right now in the US we’re going through a renaissance of pets. More and more people have pets, bring them everywhere, and generally treat them much like they would an infant.
Those people may well be all in favor of things like changing laws to prohibit puppy mills, require restaurants to accommodate pets, require airports to have pet relief facilities just like they have smoking lounges, etc.
But all of these things are actually for the benefit of the pet owner, not the pet. They’re not for the pets’ well-being. They’re for the owner so they can enjoy the supposed benefits of being accompanied by their pet more easily.
As to cruelty in animal husbandry, of which there is plenty …
Lots of surveys ask questions that amount to “Would you like a better world?” To which most decent people say “Of course!”. Since free lunches are very rare, a much more informative question is “Would you pay $X for a better world?” for various values of X. And see how many people answer “yes” at the various levels.
I can certainly accept that 32% of Americans would like, in principle, to eliminate battery hens or intensive hog farming. Ask them if they’ll pay $6.00/lb for whole dressed chickens and $5.00/dozen for eggs to get that. I suspect this question will get a different percentage of support.
This latter question is the one that matters. That’s what’s going to drive actual human behavior rather than human yak-yak. I’m not claiming my made up prices are the actual ones that’d result if we banned factory chicken farming. But the $zero price in the “Would you prefer …” question is also an unrealistic price.
In abstract Lockean thought, this is a fatal drawback. Animals cannot enter into contractual agreements with others. They cannot give their word and be responsible to it.
Of course, in practice, there aren’t any “rights” at all, only interests which are protected more or less diligently. The interests we call “rights” are those which are very strongly protected. Other interests (such as the right for transsexuals to enlist in the military) are still under dispute, supported by some and denigrated by others.
In that sense, there will probably never be any significant interest for animals to have abstract rights such as ownership of property, but there is now, and will continue to be in increasing degree, a strong interest in protecting animals from abuse. This is already so strong that animals can be said to have a “right” to be free of abusive harm.
I believe there will be a time when centuries from now we will look back this time and considering ourselves to be barbarians for eating meat and killing animals for other purposes, say research, fur coat,etc . As time has gone by, animal rights laws have been getting slightly tougher. As we move into the future, there will be stiffer penalties in regards to abuse and killing of animals.
It’s going to take a long time, but I think we will get there.
I think it’s anthropomorphing nature to either say animals are here for us OR that we are a part of the ecosystem.
There’s no plan behind nature, “it” doesn’t care if the planet becomes sterile.
But earlier you said animals are here for us. That’s a moral, “should be” statement, and it’s not enough defense of that statement to say we’re able to subdue animals. Otherwise it would be fine to beat my gf because, after all, I’m bigger than her.
Maybe. I’m reading a fascinating book right now that’s causing me some soul-searching.
His argument, that I’m having a hard time justifying my resistance to, is that a being earns its *obligations *by its ability to reason. It earns its (possibly limited) rights by its ability to suffer or enjoy. At a bare minimum, it earns the right for us to consider its capacity to enjoy or suffer as we decide what to do.
A lion killing a hunter is not committing a moral act because lions have no reasoning and hence no moral obligations. A hunter killing a lion is committing a moral act because hunters have reasoning and hence have moral obligations. What moral obligation does the hunter owe the lion? This is where it gets interesting. We can debate exactly what is owed, but a categorical “Absolutely nothing under any circumstances, period” is almost certainly wrong.
Why does all this matter and matter deeply now? This is why:
Though I’d substitute “AIs” for “robots”.
Here’s the book: Amazon.com. It’s not about animal rights. It’s about the future of humanity as we begin to develop both genetic engineering and AI. Both are tools that will change our relationship with Nature profoundly.
And will change our relationships with each other. The present ructions about race relations in the US make clear that US/Them is a real and deep-seated feature of human nature, and once someone or some group is declared untermenschen or animal they’re screwed. By whichever people (or machines) who declare themselves the ubermenschen.
Very soon wealthy people will be having designer babies. What will they and their next-generation super-super offspring think of the rest of us? I have a pretty good idea and I don’t much like it. Once we do have sorta-smart AIs it won’t take long in human evolutionary or societal terms for them to get a lot smarter than we are. They’re already a lot faster than we are.
Will or should animals be “equal” to humans? Probably not. But in a world where humans are the *only *thing that matters *because *they believe that *only *the topmost creatures matter, what happens when there’s suddenly a new topmost creature and it’s not ordinary humans? We *are *going there. So it seems like a smart idea to consider the problems that *will *arise and do something about them before they’re an existential crisis.
Perhaps paradoxically, learning how to treat “lesser” critters better will help us understand how to create a world where humans come in various obvious layers of capability and AIs are at several levels in the mix someplace too.
LSLGuy - these are questions I’ve been pondering for over a decade now. The creation of artificial intelligence will be a game-changer, but it is not the only one. Another, perhaps more relevant factor will be the creation of super-intelligent animals.
Most people already feel squeamish about eating intelligent beasts such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans (although there are a few cultures that do eat them in the form of ‘bushmeat’). Similarly there are only a few cultures that are happy about eating dolphins. A significant number of people would extend this sense of disquiet to the practice of eating dogs and horses. I find this significant, because most of these species are the ones which could become the subject of intelligence-enhancement in the next few hundred years.
Dolphins are already extraordinarily intelligent, and chimps and other primates have a range of sophisticated linguistic abilities. Given sufficiently advanced genetic or neurotechnological augmentation, it is not a stretch to think that we might be communicating intimately and at great depth with these species within a few centuries. After that, a few more centuries and we could be talking to dogs, horses, and maybe even pigs (a food animal known to be smart, or at the least, cunning).
I can foresee a fairly distant future when large numbers of mammal and birds are augmented enough to hold intelligent conversations with; what would that imply for the meat trade? Perhaps technology could also achieve the opposite of intelligence in certain selected species- a food animal that is guaranteed to be non-sentient? Or maybe like the ‘Dish of the Day’ in the *Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, *a sentient food animal that wants to be eaten?
Most likely the meat industry will become largely separate from the lives of actual animals, and we’ll be eating entirely cultured meat tissue. But that is also a very long way off in the future, no doubt.