Does an animal hold any natural rights? If a hunter kills an animal in the wild, is it aggression? What if the hunter absolutely had to eat the animal in order to survive?
As far as I can tell, natural rights applies only to people.
If it applied to animals… animals would be violating other animal’s natural rights all the time. Does it apply only to mammals and reptiles? Why not bacteria? (Not that any of this is an objection to them having natural rights, but just an observation)
Human animals violate other human animal’s natural rights all the time. It doesn’t follow therefore that natural rights do not apply to people.
I have only thought about this subject fleetingly, but it is of great concern to me. If I recall correctly, in The Ethics of Liberty Rothbard claimed that animals do not have natural rights because they cannot petition for them. That chapter just about ruined the entire book for me because it displays a clear lack of imagination on the Murray’s part. Of course an animal cannot petition for its rights in the same way as a human: it is not a human, and anthropocentric concepts are not applicable when dealing with non-human animals. In the same way that we understand humans to have a specific nature, we must understand that non-human animals also have their own specific nature, and we shouldn’t judge them by human standards. They can’t petition for their rights like we can by declaring it self-evident, but they are perhaps declaring it in their own way when they defend their property, ie. their bodies, when under attack by another animal. Try poking a panther with a stick and then try to claim that it is not defending what it perceives to be its property.
“Does an animal hold any natural rights?”
Some on this site like to state that animals don’t have any rights because they cannot reason as humans do (though this is a scientifically unproven assumption and also assumes that reasoning behaves like an on-off switch); others base it on the belief that animals aren’t conscious and therefore have no rights. Yet others believe that there are varying degrees of consciousness and reason, and some animals (such as dolphins) should be afforded some rights due to their high degree of intelligence.
“If a hunter kills an animal in the wild, is it aggression?”
Well, how is it not aggression? You just killed a living creature. Whether or not the aggression was justified is a moral and ethical question, though 
“What if the hunter absolutely had to eat the animal in order to survive?”
Well then, unless you are willing to let yourself die of hunger in order to preserve moral principles, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong. Even if it could be proven to be objectively wrong by some moral standard, you’re still going to eat that animal in order to live, because you personally value survival over death by starvation.
But you can justify any aggression using that logic. “If I don’t steal from my rich neighbor, I am going to starve and die.”
The entire notion that a being can be denied rights because the cannot petition them seems to me to be an advocacy of positive rights that are based not on natural rights that are intrinsically linked to a being’s essense, but rather rights based on a being’s ability to claim them. As a result, it would be completely sound for me, via this line of reasoning, to state that the state gives its citizens rights due to the fact that it defends their capability to claim those rights, or that a defenseless man has no rights because he cannot defend himself.
Also, there is a problem linking the rights of man with his rationality due to the fact that it would exclude marginal cases like the severely mentally retarded, and result in them essentially being equivocated with animals for all legal matters.
Humans first. Always.
Anyone who has spent any reasonable amount of time in the wild would understand this instantly.
Nature, and its animals, are merciless, remorseless, and deadly; hence our evolution and migration as far away from these things as possible.
This doesn’t seem like a good argument to me.
Luckily, you don’t have to think your strawman arguments are good arguments… [8-|]
Haha [:D]
Seriously though, why should it be humans first? I agree with you for the most part, but I am just trying to get to the intellectual root of the matter. To an outside observer, humans are merciless, remorseless, and very deadly. Even if we dismiss overt examples of human violence such as war, look at what goes on in a slaughterhouse. How are we any less deadly than the animals? I think the fundamental thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to recognize our capacity for violence, and choose the (much more productive) alternative.
Bingo. We are aware of choice and we can make choices.
To a degree, animals can make choices too, but these are typically motivated by instincts for survival. Humans can supplant their instincts- sometimes because it will be to our benefit, and sometimes because we wish to be lead to our demise.
They can not have rights because you can not reason with them and get them to respect our own rights. If you were to grant them rights then you would have to put them on trial when they trespass over your property or eat a human. Do we grant a hippopotamus that has killed a person habeas corpus rights and a hearing before a judge? Do we proportionately punish a fly for crapping on our desk and imprison it for a few hours under a jar? What exactly would this accomplish?
Naturally we do. Haven’t you ever heard of a Kangaroo Court? [A]
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist…) [8-|]
Sure, if you equate being out in the wilds and having a choice between killing an animal and starving to death to living in modern society. Exactly in which situation in the real world is there a simple, binary choice of stealing from a rich neighbour or starving and dying? If such a situation existed, would you really argue that the rich neighbour’s justification for his desire to not part with, say, a loaf of bread, is superior to the starving neighbour’s justification for his desire to live? I don’t think there is an objective answer to that question.
Whatever your answer is, the fact of the matter is under most circumstances, such a binary choice simply does not exist. In real society, there are charities and welfare. In proposed an-cap societies, there would be private charity, and even should it come down to the binary choice, at most the guy would have to repay the loaf of bread + some damages at some point in the future. Small price to pay for continuing to live.
This is a good point. This is why binary situations of stealing from a neighbour or dying can be avoided, mainly because so many people are concerned with situations like these and actively work, through various channels, to prevent situations like these. It is much more productive if the starving neighbour can be offered work or even just private charity rather than being forced to steal or die.
The neighbour himself will likewise try to exhaust other ways of procuring food for himself, which is backed up by observation and evidence in the proliferation of beggars (gaining food through pity rather than through force) and food banks (voluntary charity rather than theft). Not many of these beggars end up assaulting people for food (though some do for other reasons such as mental insanity or drug addiction).
Isn’t that argument a little like saying that the native americans cannot have had rights because the white settlers could not reason with them and get them to respect their own rights?
Why is it required that we be able to “reason” with an animal in order to afford them some rights? Under which value system is “reason” the primary determinant of whether a life organism should have rights or not? Why can’t we use something else, such as the capacity of intelligence, the degree of consciousness, or the capacity to feel pain, as a determinant?
What objectively makes “reason” a superior qualification, other than your own value judgment? Even if reason was unequivocally the correct yardstick to judge by, why do you assume that reason behaves like a binary switch, and all humans everywhere possess 100% of perfect reason and all non-humans everywhere all uniformly possess 0%?
Who says that we have to put them on trial? Where is this written in stone? Why is not possible to simultaneously grant some protections to animals without correspondingly having to treat them identically to other humans?
I’ll offer a fairly conventional utilitarian argument: The nature of the “animal rights” that most advocates seem to focus on are intended to increase “welfarist” rights that minimize animals’ suffering rather than anything comparable to civil rights and liberties. This means that the ability to make informed and rational decisions and conceptualize any theory of “rights” is irrelevant to the manner of rights in question anyway. It is enough that they possess sufficient levels of sentience to suffer from certain actions. As put by Jeremy Bentham:
Human infants and the severely mentally disabled are acknowledged to possess “rights” in regard to their intuitive interests in the avoidance of suffering (primarily in the realm of physical pain), and since various nonhuman animals possess awareness and sentience levels that rival or exceed those of those groups, it is only arbitrary speciesism that excludes them from having rights.
Moreover, I am going to suggest that the ethical nature of animal slaughter and consumption is dependent on external factors. A hunter’s aggression against an animal he hunts is more justifiable if he depends on hunting for survival, since he has no other means of food consumption and his greater levels of awareness and sapience grant his life greater moral value than those of the animals that he hunts. This is quite different from the nature of the animal slaughter industry, which depends on a wide network of factory farms and assembly-line slaughterhouses to feed a population that could likely survive with less or even no meat, meaning that the suffering imposed on animals in their preparation is greater than that which would be imposed on the population at large if their meat supply were diminished as a result of abandonment of more inhumane methods of slaughter.
As for animals consuming each other, there’s a critical difference in that animals generally need to eat each other in order to survive as part of an evolutionary pattern that is not found in mass animal slaughter in industrialized society. If we could maintain their survival and prevent these consumption patterns, we should, but we cannot. As mentioned, their incapacity to understand the concept of rights isn’t a justification for a deprivation of them, just as a mentally disabled human striking another without comprehension as to the violation of the NAP that it involved is not a justification for striking him or permitting violent abuse and slaughter of the mentally disabled.
No. Indians being humans have the capacity to understand what rights are.
Because reason is required to understand what rights are. It is not that we do not want animals to have rights. It is that they do not have the capacity to have them.
We can grant them all sort of protections yes. But we can not grant them rights. Those are two different things. But if we were to pretend they have rights when they do not it would lead us into all sort of absurd situations, like prosecuting a bear for eating a fish. Also we could not enforce protections for them without breaking the rights of humans. Any protection granted to them must be voluntary.
Yes, but does a panther knows that he has a right to his property? I would say it only knows that it has property, but no more than that.
Well the very fact that we can not judge them by human standards means they do not have the rights humans do.
Well if it would be a question of communication only then they would have rights. Potential extraterrestrials with capacity to reason would have rights even if they would be unable to communicate this fact to us.
But if animals can not petition for their rights because they do not have the capacity to ever determine that they have rights then they in fact do not have rights. We can treat them as if they had some rights out of kindness but that is not the same thing.