Animal rights?

Economics Political Theory
81

“maybe an even better example is that animals never, ever commit suicide. They try to live no matter what. They cannot go against that instinct.”

That’s just enough! This is a thread about animal rights and people here know nothing about animals!

Dogs die of sadness when their friends die, they stay days and nights near their former human friend in cemeteries, they die of hunger.

I left because everything was already said, it was just a matter of reading.

The question about consent is ridiculous, a human in some virgin land in some lost forest doesn’t speak your language, how the hell are you going to understand his or her consent? Maybe, listen, this is important, maybe they give consent physically? by.. moving away from you? maybe, by screaming? trying to fight back? Go into a ‘chemical research lab’ or even simpler, a zoo, and see if the chimp or the elephant likes to be kicked and tortured.

Just explain why animals like mammals and birds who do control their own body, mind and are the owner of their lives, who experience the same feelings and emotions like us should not be left alone and instead be enslaved by force against their will and making them suffer and restricting their lives and freedom of movement to a cage when they haven’t done anything to you. This a victimless crime, the cow and the chimp have done nothing to you but you initiate the use of force to put them in cages for your amusement. You are a disgrace to the libertarian movement.

Until animal rights are clearly understood and the mainstream position on animal rights changed, until then, the libertarian talk is corrupted and hypocrite. And it’s a shame.

How can you argue or convince anyone about the rightness of your ethical system when it defends slavery? when it defends torture?

How can you convince anyone of a logical, step by step system of ethics when it cannot explain basic rights like right to life as long as you don’t harm others? How many other ‘exceptions’ are you going to make? Well, animals, yes, they can be tortured and have no rights, because they are no like us, but only them! Sure…

82

Maybe I stated that wrong. When you don’t want to consent, you cannot decide to consent. I didn’t mean I “could” say it about you, I meant I was saying it about you. It’s completely true.

83

Of course I can. I think we are just debating semantics. Animals can follow instinct, that is it. We can us reasoning to override our instincts and make a choice.

Maybe it would be better for me to say humans have the ability to choose, animals do not.

84

And all they are doing is following their instincts. As far as I know, a starving dog will never eat its master. A cat on the other hand, as far as I know, will always eat its master. In neither case did the animal think about it and decide. They just followed their instincts.

85

No, you can’t. If you consent to something you are choosing your highest order preference. You want it. If you choose something else, it’s because you want that more.

So you are saying that animals have rights because they can reason, not because they have the ability to withold consent then? This, of course, there is no way to prove though.

By the way, I don’t think animals have rights either, I just don’t agree with your reasoning to get to that point.

86

But that is the point, it was a choice. Animals do not have a choice, they can only follow their instincts. I have a choice as to whether or not I want to consent. animals do not.

I do not know how you got out of that that I was saying animals can reason. Animals cannot reason, therefore they do not have rights. They can only follow their instincts.

You are getting hung up on the fact that animals show consent or not. That is not my point. My point is that animals cannot choose whether or not they consent, they can only follow their instincts.

87

Prove it.

I didn’t, I just screwed up saying what I meant. I meant to say humans have rights because they can reason.

How do you know this?

88

How do you know this?

Because he believes he is a god, and he is only a socialist.

He enslaves billions of animals, because he knows what’s best for them.

One day some animal may get killed by another animal and to ‘save’ that, he kidnaps all of them and put them in cages to be butchered or experimented upon. Because , what could happen if a lion eats a cow! It’s better if we put all the cows in industrial slaughterhouses, that doesn’t save the problem, like socialism it was never about that, it’s just a redistribution of wealth, in this case, very sad, the only property animals have, their bodies, is taken away from them slowly for the benefit of immoral and indecent people who only says.. what about the lion! if he eats a cow! while he has billions of cows in cages… simple immoral redistribution of wealth, by force and with lame excuses, business as usual.

89

Do animals have rights? Well, it depends on the animal. The Human animal has rights because it can understand the meaning of them. Even a little kid can grasp simple rules of moral conduct like don’t steal from others or hit or any other initiation of aggressive behavior toward another. Oddly, a couple other species seem to exhibit a similar set of behaviors, specifically chimps come to mind.

So, if the animal can think (first and foremost) and can grasp through that process of thinking what are the components and consequences of rights, then yes it can rights. Now, the question I have is this: is moral consideration different from rights?

90

You are shifting the burden of proof. You are asking me to prove the impossible. Since it is impossible to prove a negative. The default position is that they do not have the ability to choose. It is up to you to prove that they can.

Regardless, it is self-evident. If not, tell me, how are we going to address the rights of animals? If they have rights, then humans would have to be punished for killing them just like killing another human. If animals have rights, then they would have to be punished for killing each other, just like they were killing a human.

Either they can choose, or they cannot. If they can, then they should have all the same rights as humans. If they cannot choose, then they do not have any rights.

91

In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development. - Lloyd Morgan 1903.

92

I’ve already given an example showing their ability to choose. Your claim is that choice is made instinctively instead of through reasoning, a claim I see no way to prove or disprove, since we have no way of knowing what is going on in an animal’s head (or a person’s head for that matter) when they make a choice. We can only observe the choice made.

Again, I agree with you, just not the reasoning you used to get here.

93

why dont we leave this one to the biologists and psychologists?, for any given species if it is rational then an example of it we will assume has rights ,if not then we assume it doesnt.

94

If they followed their instinct, then they did not choose, if they cannot choose to not follow their instinct.

I am not a scientist, but I am sure that it is pretty well documented that animals can only follow their instincts and do not have the capacity for rational thought. Again, to claim they do have rational thought would be to assign to them all the rights that humans have, which means punishing humans for killing them, and punishing them for killing other animals, for the crime of murder.

95

I guess I’m confused by what you mean by instinct. Say I tell my dog to sit. If we are at home in the backyard she’ll obey, but if we are somewhere that sitting is actually important (such as the vet) she often takes that opportunity to ignore me. I have no idea what her thought process is, but I get the impression she is weighing her desire to please me with her desire to do something else (such as sniff another dog’s butt). It is not at all instinctive for her to sit on my command, and she has to choose to do it or not.

96

Look, you keep ignoring me. If we assume it has rational thought, then we have to assign to it and all other animals all the rights and responsibilities of adult humans. If you are going to argue that animals have rational thought, but do not get all the rights and responsibilities of adult humans, than you are being inconsistent. You are arguing two opposing viewpoints, only one of which can be right.

97

I guess this is what I’m missing. I was under the impression there was some debate about the origin of our rights.

98

We are. But they are self-evident, logically speaking. They stem from the fact that as humans, we have the ability to reason and communicate our reasoning.