So I pressume you would be fine with racial slavery - if that’s what the organisation of society is?
The reason we extend the right to life to other non-human animals and not all, is simply. It’s because the reason humans have them - the fact we are sentient - means that other sentient life should have them, not non-sentient though.
Jrgen,
First, to explain why slavery wasn’t productive in the long term: When a human being is enslaved they will be much less productive, as they have no incentive to increase their productivity either by effort or by being creating and thinking of ways of doing so. In fact the slave has an incentive to appear less efficient than he really is, both to frustrate his owner and to lessen his own work burden, as the slaveowner will force him to produce everything that the slaveowner considers the slave to be capable of. This doesn’t happen with nonhuman animals, as they are raised and all they have to do is eat, grow up, reproduce and lay eggs/give milk, or use brute force. All of which are natural processes that the animals cannot really change through behavior. Also, nonhuman animals are significantly less inteligent than human beings, so in many cases they will recognize that the human being is keeping them safe from predators, at least until the human decides that it’s time to kill them, but most animals don’t even realize such a time will come. As such herds of animals recognize their human shepherd as the group leader, exactly like they would an alpha male. In fact, for any animal species to be profitably domesticable, one of the requiring factors is that they must be animals that naturally live in packs or herds where only one animal is the dominant animal, to which all the rest are submissive. Because then the human being takes the place of that dominant animal and the herds follow him. Slaves will also try to find ingenious ways to escape and/or kill their slaveowners, oftentimes even plotting a plan together with other slaves, domesticated animals don’t do this.
The institution of slavery, as it existed in any large scale and was mantained throughout decades or more, was always mantained and enforced mostly by taxpayer money. That is, The State would charge every citizen taxes, and then use that money to pay for the recapturing of slaves that had ran away and to prevent them from being hired by another citizen for a wage, as well as return the slaves to their “rightful” owners. Thus The State was in effect providing a welfare plan for the few rich men who owned slaves, who where usually about 1% of a given population or less. In fact, in many instances The State would pass laws to prohibit slaveowners from setting slaves free. Slaveowners would often arrange a contract with one of their slaves for them to be set free after a certain period where his productivity far exceeded that of other slaves. This arrangement could prove to be much more profitable to a slaveowner than keeping the slave for life at a much lower productivity. The argument The State used to pass these laws was that, while arraging this contract benefited the individual slaveowner, society at large suffered, because once too many slaves were set free, they would then work to free the other slaves through political action. The State also argued that it made it harder to tell the difference between a runaway slave and a freed one.
On morality and productivity: Human beings live in groups, and these groups develop a set of rules, an intersubjective consensus, a “morality” that mostly everyone in the society agrees to abide by, in order to avoid chaos and maximize productivity. If doing something terrible to a third party grants everyone in this society a massive benefit, they will do it.
Yes, it is my point of view that the whole reason this intersubjective consensus develops is to enforce a set of rules that the given society believes to increase productivity (the production of wealth). Please consider that the concept of what is moral and immoral has always changed from one society to another, and even today in different places of the world, and even in different people within the same country. Sometimes even in people within the same family or group of friends. Whether they are correct or not about each and every one of those rules increasing productivity remains to be examined. But yes, it is my contention that the whole purpose of this set of rules is, ultimately, to increase productivity, whether the individuals who profess these beliefs realize it or not.
Different individuals within a society are always pushing for their particular set of rules that they believe to be superior, and the intersubjective consensus emerges in this way, from the bottom up.
On your other concerns: As I explained before, young children turn into adults and so a society should be careful of treating children as inferior beings, because once they are adults they will be just as powerful as anybody else, and they will remember much of what happened in their childhoods, and act accordingly. Sometimes without even knowing that they are doing it. A child’s childhood is what is “normal” for them as they enter adulthood, and they will mostly repeat the same behaviors they have learned. Cows and pigs and chickens never grow up to become intelligent and powerful as an adult human being, thus treating them like inferior beings is appropiate, if it benefits us. Even a 6 year old child is already much smarter than any non-human animal, and thus, much more powerful.
As for a person who is in a comma, other people have made contracts with them to assist them in such a situation to restore them to health and not harm them, and to prevent anyone else from harming them. If these people fail to abide by their contract just because this person is temporarily inhabilitated, other people may refuse to sign contracts with them in the future.
On the mentally challenged people, I pass. It’s too complex of an issue and I don’t have an answer I’m satisfied with.
When a non-human species articulates what rights they think they should be extended, then they should be considered. It needs to be commincated in a form that does not involve guessing at meanings, such as a reaction to pain. Until then, I agree with K.C. Farmer, that it is unworkable.
(Note that I said species, and not individual, so the above statement should not be applied to specific cases of humans.)
So you’re discriminating against an entire species, not just individuals, on the basis that they don’t speak our language.
Of course not, don’t be silly.
If they speak a different language, then all that is involved is for either species to learn the other’s language, and then we can talk about rights.
So still, you’re discriminating against an entire species, not just individuals, on the basis that they don’t speak our language.
No.
Language barriers can be overcome.
But you are. You are saying, since they don’t speak our language, or any other language, I will discriminate against them.
Spoken language has nothing to do with it, there are many ways communicate, but some form of communication is required. So far, no other species has succeeded in establishing such communication with humans and articulated what rights they want.
So I suppose in that regard, you are right. If another species is not able establish some form of a “common language” used to communicate what they think their rights are, then yes, I will discriminate against them by not giving them the same rights I do to humans.
Another criticism of contracts - they lead to the above.
Please explain, I do not understand your point. I am new here, did I commit an AE philisophical blunder?
Maybe a slight clarification is needed. There is also an onerous on humans to attempt such a dialog, so let’s try this:
My guess is he’s assuming rights are inate to sentience, and the fact that they are not represented as such in contract law is evidence of some sort of legal/ethical flaw of contracts.
Not so much innate. Instead, my reasoning is that the reason we have these contracts, or moral principles is because they have meaning; namely they affect our lives in a positive way - in short, the reason we have morality is because we are sentient. If you don’t think that is the case, then consider this: would we have the same moral principles if we didn’t feel pain, and were incapable of sentience?
I highly doubt we would, and so from this reasoning, I think the only outcome is that we apply at least the right to life to other animals who are sentient, or at least feel pain to some degree.
Thanks for the good reply, but I still have some points I would like to make.
Regarding slavery. First of all, it is true what you write, about the state subsidizing slavery. I do believe that the recapturing of escaped slaves would have been both cheaper and more efficient if it were handled “privately”. But still the state provided many incentives to keep slaves that simply wouldn’t have been there in its absence.
And what you write about slaves being less productive than free men is of course true. But you have to realize that here you are talking about technical productivity. A free man is more productive than a slave in the same sense that a new knife is more productive than an old one. But as Mises pointed out in Human Action, the most technically productive means are not always the most efficient means. If your most valued end is consuming a sliced cucumber, then a using new knife is a technically more efficient means to achieve this end than using an old knife. However, a new knife is generally more expensive than an old knife. And, just as importantly - and just as relevant to the problem of slavery, using an old knife to slice up a cucumber is - for the individual we are considering - a more productive endeavour than using a new knife to slice up tomatoes.
The slave owner considers the psychic costs and benefits of using slaves to attain his most valued ends and compares them to the psychic costs and benefits of utilizing other means to attain those ends. Even if each worker produces more corn when they are free compared to when they are slaves, the question of interest to the slave owner is for whom they produce corn. A person who has no saved resources whatsoever, but a lot of guns, would benefit from a system of slavery. His guns give him the ability to utilize slaves as an improductive means to produce corn. But were slavery not an option he would have no resources to pay free workers. Producing corn would be much more expensive for him (in the psychic sense) if he hired free and technically more productive workers. For a risk averse individual as him, having to take a loan to pay the salaries of his workers involves a huge psychic cost. And if he owned slaves in the past, he may have to pay a very high “compensating wage differential” to compensate his workers for the disutility derived from the fact that they work for a (maybe even their own) former slave owner.
And if the answer to the question “for whom?” is that they still produce corn for him, how much more corn, and at what price? How he values the extra corn produced goes hand in hand with how the ultimate consumers value some extra corn. If he is not able to sell the extra corn at a decent price, the slightly higher costs of hiring free men that produce much greater amounts of corn may not be worth paying for.
So yes, free men are more productive than slaves in a technical sense, but they may not be more productive to the person employing them as factors of production, just like a good shovel that someone dropped in the woods is less productive to A than a old and rusty shovel used by A to dig a ditch.
Regarding morality and productivity. I pretty much agree with you on this. It is essentially what I was trying to explain with my cannibal tribe examples. That ethics and morality is shaped by the context, and that ethics and morals directly counter-productive to the preferences of the majority of the individuals (or at least the most influential group of individuals) in a society is very unlikely to develop in the first place.
That said, we always have to stress that it is the production of utility - rather than the production of material goods - that we are considering when we are talking about (non-technical) productivity. And this utility may be derived from non-material abstract ideals. It does for me. We develop concepts such as justice partly because we value the growth in material wealth the enforcement of justice may bring about, but also because concepts like justice and virtue hold value value in themselves for us. Now, how this initially came about can be debated. It can probably be traced back to the material services they yield, but where we are today, these abstractions clearly produce utility for humans, independently of these material services. If they didn’t, I would not invest my time and energy in this argument.
Regarding “my other concerns”, I would like to respond to Olinda Spider.
@Olinda Spider
Why does this apply to species and not to individuals? Isn’t this a form of rather arbitrary collectivism? Not all individuals have “articulated what rights they think they should be extended”, and only individuals are able to articulate such a thing. A species is merely a group of individuals, and a species can never do anything. Only individual members of a species can. Thus, as a species can do nothing, it can’t articulate what rights it want. Nor can any single individual ever claim to speak on behalf of the whole species. But let’s put this collectivist concept of rights derived from membership in arbitrarily chosen groups (or species) to the side for now.
Rights do not arise out of the articulation of what rights individuals want, but rather out of the articulation of what rights a group of individuals is willing to extend to others. It is from this misconception, I think, that the opposition to the rights of children, the handicapped and other species stems. If we adhere to the idea that rights are to be formulated by the object of an action, rather than the subject, then children, handicapped, other species, and individuals with a strong aversion against communication can never have rights, because they can’t or won’t formulate them. Same applies for many highly intelligent humans. They could have rights, but they don’t because they never articulated them. If we recognize that rights are something we extend to others, rather than demand from others, then there is no limit to what rights we may extend and to whom we may extend them. Slavery did not end because slaves articulated their right not to be slaves, but because free men argued that such a right should be extended to them by others.
The reason we have morals, contracts, laws, etc. is to establish the expected behavior of individuals among a group or between another individual. It forms a basis of human organization. These represent the conscious methods used to organize. Beyond these are subconscious methods that fall into the realm of spontaneous (unplanned) order. Each individual does what is in their best interest, and in spite of this others benefit. As individuals, we really can’t grasp how this process works let alone plan for it.
Attributing human subjective value toward non-humans is pointless and emotional. Humans don’t treat animals humanely because of the belief that animals are equal to humans, they do so because of the moral values shared among humans who feel that animals deserve to be treated humanely. Declaring rights based on pain, sentience, reflex, etc. is utter nonsense.
Racial slavery? Really? First off, what’s a race? Second, are people of said race human or non-human? If they are human, then I think I’ve made myself pretty clear.
Putting it like this makes it clear that innate rights for animals is also another argument from divinity or myth.
@K.C. Farmer
I don’t understand your first sentence. What do you mean by “attributing human subjective value toward non-humans”? I agree with the rest of the quote completely. And it has to be stressed that humans don’t treat other humans humanely because they believe that all humans are equal either.
And the same is obviously true when it comes to innate rights for humans.
Jrgen,
On slavery:
In order for owning slaves to be profitable, the intersubjective consensus must be that slaves are the slaveowner’s property. Other members of the society must not take opportunities to hire a runaway slave, and must instead turn him in to be returned to his owner. Thus they not only have to give up profitable opportunities, but they must also pay some cost in recapturing the slaves and returning them to their masters.
Since slaves are significantly less productive than free citizens, the benefit the society as a whole (excluding slaves) gains from trading with the slaveowners is much smaller than what they would get from trading with the slaves themselves. And when you add in the cost of enforcing slavery, it becomes clear that slavery isn’t profitable in the long term for the given society. It can redistribute wealth within a society though. And this is why in almost all instances of mass scale slavery throughout human history, it was The State that enforced it.
The basis of social interaction is individual human action, which is based on subjective value. While Objectivists may strive to become objective in their thinking, they still practice human subjective value in their actions (just to get that out of the way). It is through the process of human action driven by subjective value that we derive human rights (i.e., property rights), morals, laws, etc. This falls under the concept of Methodological Individualism. It is only through human-to-human social interections using methodological individualism that we get to rights (which rejects the natural/divine rights argument).
Now if you’re assuming to attribute the process of human action driven by human subjective value to non-human species, then you’re trying to project what is human onto the non-human. This just doesn’t work. The same goes the other way around. While we may begin to understand another species behavior, we can only relate to it in terms of human behavior.
Now if another species had the ability to practice methodological individualism, a prerequisite to deriving rights, then that species could be said to have rights within that species. The only way humans would be able to really know this would be via a form of communication that both species could understand and comprehend. If these conditions were in place, and the other species held a position that they had their own rights, this still would be insufficient to declare that one species is obligated to observe the rights of another species. An inter-species agreement would be required, where both sides voluntarily agree to abide by the conditions set forth, and each species would require agreement within their own species.
Claims such as one species has more rights than another, or less rights than another, or equal rights are baseless. There is no method of comparison. All that can be claimed is that species X asserts rights and species Y asserts rights. To accomodate the resolution of any conflict of rights, if each species agreed to recognize the rights of the other, there would have to be some form of inter-species contract or law. Any such contract or law, essentially an agreement, could also not violate the rights of each respective species.
A vegan declaring that cows have rights is an emotional appeal. It’s equivalent to saying that cows, while we aren’t watching, have the ability to practice methodological individualism, the ability to communicate with other cows, organize, and establish contracts and agreements which demonstrate they observe the property rights of other cows. Most animal rights advocates attribute suffering as the source of minimalistic sentience (feeling), and stress for fair, reasonable treatment of animals. This in no way is the same as human rights. Some animal rights folks do push a more extreme position, and assume animals have the same rights as humans. In both cases these are emotional appeals.
I believe those who favor the fair treatment of animals have the right to practice what they believe, but they have no right for force other people to do the same.