Animal rights?

Economics Political Theory
41

Babies do not have rights since they do not have the ability to reason yet. I have already explained this. My position is consistent. Yours is a slippery slope.

So what? The only way we know we have violated the rights of another is if they can consent, and they withold their consent. If your premise is only that someone’s rights are violated if they did not consent, then all parents should be punished for making their children do all kinds of things their children do not consent to.

Children are the property of their parents. I admire your passion for the rights of animals, but they do not have any. And children get rights once they claim them. Until then, they in essence do not have any.

That is why we have courts, to judge the violation of property rights. There are people called interpreters you know?

Self awareness is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether one has the ability to withold consent.

Again, how do I get consent from a wild elephant to to hit it, kill it, or to take its food? How about to ride it?

Because they have no rights. They can neither grant nor withold consent. They can only follow their instincts.

42

All humans have right to life by essence of being humans and because they have the potential capacity to consent. Therefore babies have right to life.

Children are not property of their parents but they wouldn’t be able to survive without their parents without the neccessary skills. So they just become de-facto property of parents. They can run away but then it just means that they lost their only life line.

(Unless they’re brain dead, which mean they are practically dead anyway)

43

Capacity is irrelevant. What is relevant is ability. If a baby has not developed the ability to reason yet, and as such to give consent, then it does not have rights.

Unless you can tell us how we know a baby has consented to death.

44

I suppose this might be a bit ridiculous- but for the people like “player” which want to extend many rights to animals- what reasoning is there not to give those rights to other living things- namely plants? Did a flower give you its consent to be plucked out the ground? Did a tree give its consent to be cut down? Do animals deserve more rights than plants solely because plants are for the most part do not move on their own?

45

Mainly we need to eat them. It would be problematic if animals and plants have right to life. So let not give them any right at all so we can eat the and use them. Yes, it sucks for the animals that get eaten, but reality is curel.

46

You don’t take it serious. It feels like a giant waste of time, maybe it could be better to talk to the walls…

Here we have a ‘commenter’, who just jump in without reading what I have already written!

I explained the basics for not taking away rights for animals (we are NOT god, we are not the ones giving rights as if we were kings, we just acknowledge the fact they have rights and we do the oh so difficult task of not murdering them without a cause).

The basics were the same as us, SELF-OWNERSHIP, SELF-AWARENESS, SELF-IMPOSED-GOALS, with the limited mediums they have.

They do control and own their own body, they are aware of who they are, they recognize in mirrors, they feel all kinds of emotions, feelings, just like us.

They choose actions, where to lay, in the dark or in the sun, which grass or food to eat, where to risk a difficult battle taking into account their families, their food reserves…

So please, do not embarrass yourself with ‘haha, what about the plants..’ Please, lot of words, time and network band witch has been wasted, so please read before posting. I did read rothbard views on animal rights and previous debates, (among many more interesting things in these great site). So, all of you, do your homework.

And you talk about consent, when did the chimp gave consent to be caged and experimented upon?

You talk about morality, how is torture for fun moral?

You talk about ethics as a way to avoid conflict and live all happy each achieving his goals without harming others, how is the slavement of animals ‘ethic’?

47

Maybe it isn’t ethical after all. I don’t believe it’s ethical to do anything you wish to an animal. But that doesn’t make it enforceable in a free society at any rate. Even in a state, laws protecting animals are purely arbitrary; there’s always room for more or for less. There simply aren’t any reliable mechanisms of prevention/protection, unlike in the case of humans.

48

No, there are many relevant senses of culpable, e.g.legally culpable. If you automatically interpret culpable to be in the moral sense, that’s your prerogative.

Not at all. I am asking for Player to provide his basis for recognizing rights or not. He refuses to recognize culpability in animals for a lack of rationality, so I am asking how he then goes on to call for rights for them. I’m not the one interpreting the behaviour of animals from a moral sense, I am asking why Player is doing so. Have you read his posts?

49

Sure, it is your prerogative and you are going to have to pay the premiums to support it.

If you want to qualify and sub-dvide culpability, fine. If you want to design a business model to put on the market for security and dispute arbitration services that subdivides culpability into “moral” and “legal” and whatever qualifiers, go ahead. If you get a lot of customers, you have proven your model sufficiently. Until then, you can not say that many people would care to pay an arbitrator do examine disputes as precisely as you want them to do.

I am asking you to explain your qualification: What does morally culpable mean as opposed to just plain culpability?

You are the one who brought it up. I ask because I can not imagine a person paying premiums to arbitrate the moral responsibility of an animal’s actions. However, I do see animals acting to defend their own property.

So, the bottom line is that animals either have rights or they do not have rights by virtue of the fact that we choose to recognize those rights. The concept of “animal rights” is simply a human choice. No more and no less.

50

Morally culpable, as in should someone be culpable regardless of whether the legal system currently permits for it at present. Not my fault if you’ve not done philosophy in your entire life, to be able to recognize why I qualified the term, instead of clumsily assuming legal culpability to be the same as culpability in general. It has NOTHING to do with actual enforcement of rights, as this is at the victim’s discretion anyway. So stop confusing the matter. You’re just begging the question by saying recognizing rights in animals is a matter of choice. That is what I am asking Player to explicate. You think it’s a matter of human choice, fine. I don’t care. I wasn’t soliciting your opinion.

51

OK. I will take your word for it. I am convinced by your argument.

52

It seems to me, animals have no rights.

Neither do humans, for that matter. Rights, natural or otherwise, are imaginary.

If I do not kill you, it is because either I am incapable of doing it or have no wish to do so. It is not because you have some invisible quality which I mustn’t violate.

53

  1. Please try to keep posts relevant to the topic at hand.

  2. Search the old threads before posting something like this. The issue of the existence of rights, especially, has been discussed ad nauseam.

54

If you look at this topic from a biological standpoint.. you are an organism that does one of two things…

an organism that produces food for itself by way of the sun or an organism that consumes these organisms (directly or indirectly).

Humans and all animals are of the later. Knowing this, I cannot put a preference on what I eat. I can either eat the organism that produces it’s own food or eat the organism that ate the organism that produces it’s own food. Regardless of what I decide to eat I still killed an organism because that is what I am… a killer.

55

You need to rationally assume consent or nonconsent in certain situations. This follows an argument from induction, where you must realize how you feel about a certain scenario, and assume that other humans are like yourself and analogous to you, and therefore how they would feel in the same scenario.

Example one: There is a woman who is passed out. Is it safe to assume that she consents for you to have sex with her while she is passed out? No. Why? Because you are a human, and you have sexual preferences which are different from hers and everyone elses. You have to assume that she would not consent as she cannot see you and cannot measure you up to her preferences.

Example two: You are a starving, and you come across a rich person’s mansion. On the window sill there is a pie which is being left out to cool. Is it ethical to eat the pie, and then talk to the owner of the pie and offer them compensation for it? Yes, because if you were in the rich person’s situation you would likely be glad to have saved a starving person’s life, and the rich person could hammer out a deal with you as far as compensation goes.

The problem with animals is that you cannot communicate them and they are not analogous to you so it is impossible to assume consent or nonconsent.

Also, your position should deal with this negative argument. Let us assume that there are three species, humans, cows, and lions, and they all have a right to life.

Does the lion have a right to eat a cow? If not, how would that be enforced? If so, is that not inconsistent with the cow’s right to life, and shouldnt the human also have a right to eat the cow?

56

And if you in the place of the woman would rather get laid then go for it?

57

Because you might die if you don’t get laid…? [^o)]

58

  1. I started this thread. The very first question I asked was, “Do animals have rights?”

  2. I’ve read the old threads. So what? I feel like talking about it some more. I posted this topic because I was hoping to discover what I suspected were the broader implications of an answer to the question. The debate about natural rights was threshed out pretty well about a hundred years ago. So what? Does that mean there should be no more discussion on it? It’s something I’m trying to better understand, and sometimes it’s better to learn through active discourse than only reading what else has already been said. I wasn’t around to send letters into Liberty, I wasn’t around for those old threads on this site. I’m around now and I came here to talk about it, and that’s why I started this thread. Why rebuff me for discussing the existence of rights, but not for what I asked in my original post, which is a topic I’m sure has also been discussed elsewhere ad nauseam?

Now… to continue with the already disjointed topic…

As I stated before, rights are imaginary, therefor animals cannot possess rights.

However, supposing rights do exist at all, I see no logical barrier to those rights being possessed by anything, living or inanimate. So, precisely what would be the most fundamental of those rights, and why should we be concerned about the rights of non-human things? If I’m concerned for the rights of other people, it’s because I want them to be concerned for mine. I can see no such agreement or contract existing between us and non-humans.

59

This comment is interesting because there seems to be a link between rights and the ability to claim and defend rights. Animals deal with the world on a very base level. The strong survive. The weak are eaten.

If I stand in front of a hungry bear and say, “Halt! I have a right to my life.” then will the bear turn around and leave? No. The bear does not have the capacity to understand or respect rights. You do not have a right to life as far as hungry bears are concerned. The only way you will survive is if you can defend yourself. In this situation, a person can say that he has the right to defend himself.

The question I keep asking myself is whether humans have rights. When a human murders another human nothing happens to the murderer. There is no lightning bolt from god; no instant death. Humans create rights and from these rights they derive rules like “Thou shalt not kill.” Other humans might say that killing in self-defense is permissible. After the formation of this rule, the people get together to enforce the rule. Murderers are then assigned a punishment that is forced upon them. The murderer could respond by saying, “I have the right not to be punished.” The enforcers of the original rule could then claim that the murderer gave up the right not to be punished by committing the crime. At the end of the day, the murderer will be punished if the rule maker has enough force at his disposal to exact the punishment.

Humans are capable of treating each other like animals. If I stand in front of a hungry human and say, “Halt! I have a right to my life.” then will the human turn around and leave? No. It is hard to distinguish an encounter with a human from that of an encounter with a bear. However, humans do have the ability to understand and respect rights.

A system of logical right-based rules does seem to be an attractive alternative to a “Lord of the Flies” scenario. As far as animals are concerned, I tried to talk to my cat about how we need to respect each others rights. Unfortunately, when I came home from work yesterday I learned that he tore open the couch. My property rights apparently do not matter to my cat. Why then should I care about whether my cat has rights?

60

I will try to explain “rights” again. If someone has something and gives it to you, is it considered “theft”? No. Why? Because they gave you consent to take it. If someone has something and they do not give it to you, and you take it, is it considered “theft”? Yes. Why? Because they did not give you consent. If you kill someone who asked you to kill them, have you wronged that person? No. Why? Because they gave you permission. If you kill someone without their consent, is it “murder”? Yes. Why? Because they did not give you consent. So, the only way we know if we have done something wrong is if another person did not give us permission to do something to themselves or their property.

Animals do not have the ability to grant or withold consent, as such, we cannot do any wrong to them. Defending themselves is not evidence of them witholding consent, since there is no way for them to give us consent. They can NEVER EVER consent to being put to death, tortured, or giving us their property.