Rational thought is deliberative thought. What, exactly, would moral agency consist in if it did not have a deliberative element?
Rights don’t exist in a vacuum–instead, rights are the flip side of responsibilities. A human has a right to own a gun or use a recreational drug (to take a controversial point), but he also has the responsibility for his actions with that gun or drug. Is the gun secure when he’s not using it? Is he driving while under the influence of the drug?
Animals can’t have rights unless they, too, can take responsibility for their actions. If my dog bites a human, can I say that it’s not my fault that he got out of the yard, and only the dog should be punished? How could the dog make restitution for the bite? Can the dog be compelled to pay the victim’s medical bills?
Again, to echo some of the others, that doesn’t mean that animals don’t deserve some level of respect, just that rights are a specifically human (or in the case of non-humans, rational) trait. Criminal law for cruelty to animals doesn’t make much sense, but social peer pressure and ostracism against animal torturers does make sense.
Well, any being with the capacity for rationality has rights. Whether any animals do is an empirical matter. If any are discovered to possess rationality, then they have rights as well. Likewise with aliens should any exist. However, I’m not aware of any animals that possess rationality. Even the most intelligent animals, certain primates and dolphins, can’t really be said to have it as far as I know. Being able to memorize 100 signs and when to use them is not rationality. Remember, rationality is not simply IQ. It is the capacity for abstract thought, for self-reflexivity, for comprehending right and wrong, for free will. As for whether it is arbitrary: well, it goes all the way back to Aristotle and most classical liberals and libertarians in some way or other use it as their standard. Why not use other types of thought? Because they are not fundamental; rationality is that essential characteristic of man that makes possible such things as creative thought.
IQ is one measure of mental ability. There are others, often arbitrary and you can bet that if you base rights on how well someone exercises their capacity for reason then you won’t be able to sustain libertarianism in theory or in practice. How do you measure free will, by the way? And why do you separate it from rationality?
I wasn’t tying it to IQ either. But you seemed to be (see above).
To rights in general:
All property should be well kept in order to maintain its own value. Mistreated animals and humans should be percieved as vulnerable to the same degree of depreciation as houses, automobiles, and land.
To ownership of property:
I think the same shall not own the same, accepting that the same shall be permitted to own the different so long as the different is not owned by another. A house cannot own a house, the same as a man cannot own a man nor a dog another dog. If the dog or house be superior in might to the man then they shall be permitted to own him, accepting that the man would be worth more well kept.
Hell, if it matters enough to all of us, we could even starve him to death by refusing to sell or give food to him.
In Chapter 21 of Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard insists on 4 faculties that justify why humans have rights and animals do not: 1) reason, 2) consciousness, 3) communication and 4) ability to partake in the division of labor. If you have these 4 faculties, then it is illegitimate for me to initiate aggression against you and your property. If you do not have these 4 qualities, I can kill you (assuming you are not already someone else’s property).
Now this is very black-and-white, and I would like to see shades of grey. Can we not imagine beings that have some but not all of these 4 faculties. Or beings that score 50 out of 100 on whatever test you may have devised to ascertain the presence of these faculties?
In 50 years, genetic science will be able to make crosses between humans (who possess these 4 faculties) and chimpanzees (who do not). There will be humanzees with 2 human grandparents and 2 chimpanzee grandparents, 1 and 3, or 3 and 1 respectively. Surely we will have to grant them non-zero but non-full rights.
Maybe humans will have the right to expropriate 50% of the production of humanzees under their control, but not to kill them? Or something like that.
So we need to devise a continous mapping from faculties to rights. And the question is: how can you defend that the one mapping you advocate is in some sense “better” than any other mapping?
In context, I don’t think he is putting these forth as four separate things. They are all aspects of the same thing, namely the first he mentions in the sentence.
“No other animals or beings possess this ability to reason, to make conscious choices, to transform their environment in order to prosper, or to collaborate consciously in society and the division of labor.”
See also the previous sentences: “[Rights] are grounded in the nature of man: the individual man’s capacity for conscious choice , the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. In short, man is a rational and social animal.” (My emphasis.)
These all depend up on the faculty of reason and are expressions of it. Rothbard is an Aristotelian/Thomist. The social dimension of man is a necessary consequence of the rational dimension.
I am ready to accept that these are all expressions of the faculty of reason.
Nonetheless, it seems a bit unrealistic to assume reason is an on/off switch like “being pregnant”. There must exist degrees of reason, ranging continuously from the cockroach (none) to Murray Rothbard (full). Similarly, there exists degrees of aggression, ranging from taxing 1% of production to smashing the skull. Then what is the mapping?
I can conceive that, in the near future, a genetically enhanced chimpanzee could score 50 out of 100 on a reason test, still falling short of full human-level rationality. This feat would be sufficient to earn the chimp the right to not get killed outright, but still not full human rights. Where would the threshold be?
Let’s not confuse reason with intelligence. One might say that intelligence comes in degrees in all living things. But at some point there is a qualitative, not merely quantitative, leap that allows for the capacity of reason.
I agree that reason should not be confused with intelligence.
But the notion of a qualitative, discrete leap from non-reason to reason is puzzling to me. For example, an infant is incapable of reason at the age of one month, but a 21-year-old adult is capable of reason. Yet the growth from one state to the other is continuous. There isn’t one day, or one thing he says, or one test he passes, where all of a sudden, that’s it, he has acquired reason.
Just to be crystal clear: I am not trying to say that infants have the same rights as animals. Infants have more rights than animals because they will one day become fully-grown humans. My example refers only to the faculties of infants, not to their rights.
Let’s assume for the sake of the argument that 5-year old children show some signs of reason but are not completely rational/reasonable. Then what would be the rights (if any) of a race of genetically enhanced chimpanzees whose mental abilities are stuck forever at the level of a 5-year old human child?
I fail to see how reationality is more fundamental than creativity…
no im seriously not. I think you could have abilities simply due to your physical prowness/abilities…Which would be totally dissaosciated from IQ.. Seriously I a not basing it IQ or reason. I think Lepords shouldn’t have a speed limit, they should be free to run as fast as they want…That freedom to use their ability to be quick has nothing to do with IQ or reason.
Seriously? Perhaps you could explain creativity to me without reference to rationality then?
It seems fairly uncontroversial that creativity in humans is an aspect and expression of rational agency, of the faculty of reason.
Amen.
Rightly or wrongly, how we behave towards animals is the same as how we behave towards our fellow man: it is all depends on the context and environment. We treat animals like slaves when they are domesticated. We treat animals in the wild as if they had rights.
We do? Even when we hunt them?
I don’t see how other animals that lack the capacity for rationality can be said to have rights. On the other hand, their lacking rights does not preclude us having obligations regarding them or obligations to them. For example, animal cruelty, while not something that should be a crime, is something that generally should be frowned upon.
Well, now, ability is a funny, and relative thing. If you have a spear and I have a gun, can you defend your rights? What if I’m in a flying machine? What if you’re just a frail woman and I’m a powerful man?
Correct. We expect animals to fight back.
I am not saying we respect their rights. [Nor am I saying that people commonly respect human rights either.]
In contrast, we treat oranges and apples as if they did not have rights. We do not expect the vegetables to fight back.
I am not trying to be humorous. I am seriously trying to create a parallel.
Flip things around: it would be prudent to treat a person who does not respect human rights as you would treat a wild animal.
As I said in my previous post, I probably oversimplified the Austrian position. Particularly the part about “ability to defend.”
The ability to fight back, or actually fighting back, or our expecting something to fight back, is not a source of rights. Animals don’t have rights because they fight back or because we expect them to fight back. Our expecting them to fight back does not mean we treat them as if they have rights.
Non-humans, on a species-by-species consideration, have exactly the property rights that they can claim for themselves and acknowledge to others. Since all non-humans lack the ability to reason abstractly enough to form a language, they are not, in principle able to claim and acknowledge property rights. Therefore, the concept of property rights has no meaning to them, which is to say, they can have no property rights.
On the question of aliens who are smarter than us, they will recognize that humans are rational, with language, and an ability to claim and recognize property. Therefore they, as justifying beings themselves, will recognize that logic dictates that they must accord humans the same rights they accord themselves.
We can’t communicate with them, so under this reasoning why should we have property rights? Anyways I think we would all understand that a lion has claimed a certain territory if we came to close to it. In fact, he would be communicating with us in that respect… The idea that they need to speak the human language is arbitrary.