I know this isn’t an econ quesiton, however I think it is safe to say that we all agree that we support a society with an extremley high amount of human freedom. How do you translate this to nonhumans? What rights should they have, or not have? And on what basis should they have less? If it is because they are much less intellegent, what happens if we encounter a alien race far smarter than us. Should we have certain freedoms taken away from us?
Im not suggesting they have the same rights as us, I find this a fascinating and not very talked about question.
Laws are made to protect human rights, not animal rights. Laws against animal abuse should be repealed, as they violate humans’ property rights. With this line of thinking, Michael Vick should also be pardoned. Animal rights are inconsistent with property rights.
Ultimately, can the being comprehend that it has rights, and if it does, can it defend those rights. If either of those questions are no then it has no rights. I may have way oversimplified the Austrian position, but I think that is the gist of it.
If it is not a being with rights than it is either 1. an unowned natural resource or 2. property.
If you don’t accept the previous defination, than you are opening yourself for a whole peck of trouble.
Yes, humans should treat animals with kindness and compassion and commodity animals should be treated as humanely as possible, up to the moment of slaughter. But they ultimately are only property and only the owner has any say in their treatment.
Yes, I think the Michael Vicks of the world are ***holes, but as soon as you treat an animal as anything other than property you create a legal nightmare.
Allow me to play Devil’s advocate here for a minute. With your criteria, even allowing for a beings potential to comprehend and defend its rights, so that children would still be protected, wouldn’t this mean that the mentally handicapped (e.g. severe dementia) have no rights?
“Animals can have rights when they can start fighting for them”.
Although I swear my cat has more liberty than I do, and is more protected under the law than I am. Cats make mighty fine instruments. I here puppy is good to eat.
My opinion is that if someone wants to protect an animal, than they should take on the responsability of ownership. Let folks buy bald eagles too, I want to see how those suckers taste.
Under anarcho-capitalism your private insurance company/defence agency might make you adbide by laws that say you can’t torture animals in order to recieve their services. The same might apply to drunk driving, hard drug use, abortion, or any number of questionable/risky activities critics of libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism often point to as why such a system would cause mass chaos or destory the moral fabric of society.
And even with a state to enforce animal cruelty laws what percentage of people that torture animals do you think actually get caught and punished?
Paraphrasing Nozick and Tom Regan, if I arbitrarily decide to kick my dog, it seems like I do something wrong, and that the reason that my action is wrong is that my dog gets hurt by it. How you want to go from there is up for debate, but I think that to flat out deny animals any moral standing is ridiculous. I don’t know about rights, but it seems like unnecessary suffering (even animal suffering) at the hands of a rational agent is morally significant.
That cruelty is morally repugnant should go without saying. However, property is property.
On the other hand, there ARE things that can be done in a free society.
A very effective example is the free market response to poor treatment of slaughter cattle. Under pressure by animal welfare groups, McDonalds and other end users of meat began auditing their meat suppliers. Animal welfare has greatly improved at commercial suppliers.
In contrast, at the Hallmark slaughterhouse, which sells mainly to schools and other government programs, animal conditions were attrocious, as witnessed in the recent undercover videos. So the government might want to get its own act together before it dares presume to tell the private sector how to behave.
It sounds like a lot of you are accepting the ideals that animals should be considered property in the same sense land should be. Why should there only be one broad definiton of property? Or more interestingly how can we claim complete ownership over them and not accept the idea of slavery? Why should they be declared property at all? Can they own property then? If a kid wanders into a den of lions are we allowed to rescue him, or allow the lions to claim him as property?
You also ask can it comprehend its rights, I would say to a small extent it does. My dog knows the boundries of the yard, he understands he is free to go wherever he wants in the yard, but the yard is the limit. He also understands he can’t go to the bathroom in the house.
I believe one could argue that anything with a measure of free will should be able to utilize it to its most maximized extent, as long as it doesn’t infringe on another’s free will.
Well, i dont think there is any reason they couldn’t be enforced with the same effectivness as other abuse laws…
If anyone’s intrested in knowing I am a meat eater, and I’m not someone throwing blood on fur coats…However I do think we have to extend to them a lot amount of protection than they have.
its disgusting! Maybe I don’t know what the Austrian position is, but I know what Locke says! that we have rights because of our intrinsic value as human beings. that we are created in the image of God, and that we are only slightly lower than angels. this is the reason.
there maybe something to being able to comprehend and appeal for rights, but defense of them is not necessary, that would vindicate many totalitarian states, Lincoln, slave owners, and murders. “because you are a slave and unable to run away, you have no right to be free” is that what you are saying?
now let me answer the question. Animals do not have rights. but humans ought to have common decency. so that we would not prosecute michael vick under the force of the law, but that society would scorn him and he would be ostrasized, he shouldn’t be put in jail, but the sentiment ought to be held by individuals that he would not be welcome virtually anywhere except in his own home.
but it is no crime (and I mean on a moral/decency level) to ride a horse, keep a dog as a pet, rope a calf, or butcher a hog. It is in how it is done. I have livestock, and I work cattle, I tag their ears, brand their hips, castrate the males, preg check the females, and the vet does a fertility test on the bull. because that is how the world is. but no one takes a sense of pleasure out of it, we aren’t torturing the poor defenseless animals, but the fact is they are just animals.
It is on issues like this that the simple redneck in Oklahoma or Texas has more insight than all but a small handfull of the elite intellectuals.
I think Rothbard handles this in ch 9 of Ethics of Liberty.
and here’s an idea, maybe the rights of animals and the ethical treatmment of animals should be left to those with animals…? as in individually.
Again, as humans we have an intrinsic value, lions, dogs, and cattle do not, it is because of our value that we have rights, and also why it is morally acceptable to own a dog, but not morally acceptable to own another person. it is a blaspheme against God that someone made in the image of God, would have his will subjugated to such a degree.
Until we are able to clearly see what makes an animal ‘human’ or not, there will always be grey areas which, in my opinion, make this discussion pointless. I think its extremely immoral to suggest that no nonhuman can have rights, or that rights are predicated on the ability to abandon nomadic life and homestead property. I’m too realistic to think that people will respect the rights of other beings unless its in their self-interest to do so.
I think the relevant criterion is “that a normal specimen of the kind of being this is (species) have the potential/capacity for rational thought.” At present, the only kind of being we can be certain has this potential/capacity is a human being. Then I think the best way to handle children, the mentally handicapped, and similar cases is that these people have rights but that depending upon the nature of the case there might (or will) be someone with temporary (children) or permanent (severely mentally handicapped) trusteeship whose right it is to exercise some degree of control over that person’s life in order to, in the case of children for example, protect them and raise them to be competent adults. I don’t like the theory, held by some libertarians, that children are property of their parents until they come of age. Since control and ownership can be legitimately separated, one might say that parents own an alienable temporary right to control their children for the purpose of protecting their rights and raising them to be competent adults, while the children have otherwise full self-ownership from the beginning.
I am glad you stepped in an answered that, because I really didn’t have a solid answer for that question. I am still learning some of this stuff on the more esoteric portions of libertarian/Austrian thought. Your answer sounds reasonable to me, however.
Is this not a form of collectivism, something the liberartian should be ardently against? You are grouping the mentally handicapped with the mentally competent purely because we are of the same species, with no justification for why this should be so. Surely if we are to be consistent individualists, we should disregard the first part of your statement and only use the “potential/capacity for rational thought”, if that is to be our marker of whether or not a being has rights.
No, it’s not a form of collectivism. Aristotelian metaethics is decidedly not collectivist. In Aristotelian ethics, the good for that person is determined in part by the kind of being he is, the universal aspect of his nature. He is a human being. The good for a person is highly individualized, however, being determined also in part by particular aspects of his nature: his inborn talents, social context, and personal choices. Each person’s ultimate end/good is unique.
When we talk about rights, however, we’re talking about how we should treat other people qua human being. We’re talking about a universal principle that holds true for everyone equally. This means that it has to be grounded in man’s universal human nature, the essential characteristic being the faculty of reason. I don’t see what’s collectivist about this.
Why should human biengs not have rights just because their ability to reason is deficient (for whatever reason, be it the immaturity of childhood, mental retardation, being in a coma that there is X probability one might come out of, or be it the immaturity of an irresponsible adult)? In the last parenthetical case, we surely don’t want those in power to be able to say that the capacity for reason of some (most, all) adults is deficient and so legal paternalism is justified. In the other parenthetical cases, does it seem intuitively plausible that human beings with one of these conditions should have the legal rights of animals and inanimate property, that is, none? Actually, in all these cases it seems we can say that they do have the capacity for rational thought, it is just deficient to varying degrees and for different reasons. Are rights dependent upon how well we can exercise our rational capacity? I think not.
See above, and see some of the work done by Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas Den Uyl, Roderick Long and Henry Veatch.
It seems you’re arguing the fact that the mentally hadicapped or the coma victim has the same combination of DNA to justify giving them the same rights… This seems non seqitur to me… A slight difference in molecular structure doesn’t seem like it should justify inalienable rights… I would rather go by what the entity is/was capable of…
It might seem silly but I want to ask that if a more “supirior” race comes to earth, will we allow them to treat us the same way we treat animals?
I don’t see what’s collectivist about it at all. I think you’re confusing the meaning of these terms. What is collectivist about an ethical theory that absolutely upholds individual rights and that holds that an individual’s ultimate end, while sharing some universal characteristics at the general level, is ultimately unique?
I would also point out that your referencing DNA and molecular structure is reductionist. We’re not talking just about biology here. We’re talking about the rational faculty as such - not a particular level of ability with that faculty (genius, poorly educated, retarded, child, stroke victim, etc.), or whether it is currently being used (asleep or in a coma). By the way, I would appreciate it if you answered the questions I posed in my previous post regarding basing rights in level of ability rather than in the human faculty as such.
So, what… If you lapse into a coma, no more rights? If you are less intelligent, less rights? Have an IQ below some arbitrary number, no rights
Not with my criterion. However, your criterion would appear to commit you to that.
I see two problems here. One is that I have heard some animals do show rational thought, however not show rational behaviour. I’m no biologist but couldn’t there be a speicies that is in fact capable of rational thought, however is still so low in intellegence that on the most part it acts much like other animals? Also I don’t understand why this should be the deciding factor. It seems quite arbitrary. Why not use creative thought, or the other types of thought (I dont know what they are). I think the only logical basis to determine the rights of a entity is by measuring its free will, and its ability to excersize it.
Concerning the quesitons in your previous post: Level of ability is a general term, but yes I guess my method would agree to that. For a very crude definition: If something has the ability to do it, it should be given the freedom to do it… Obviously this is general and there are exceptions i.e theft, assault etc…
No, thats the thing, I am saying it should be dissasociated with IQ. I guess maybe there would be correlation, however not a causality relationship…
I dont think so…On this thread I always played devils advocate, however the only position I took was to measure it by free will…So I dont think it would
If my posts are becoming an annoyance in their skepticism let me know…I always found there such thing as too much socratic questioning… I might be guilty of it.