No way. You should use minimum force and bring the dog to some court so it can have a proper trial and appeals because it is a self-owner and all.
It doesn’t own itself. Mother earth/God/Randomness/the Universe made animals for our use. When’s the last time you saw a wolf thinking about the rights of it’s prey? When’s the last time a wolf thought about self ownership? These concepts don’t exist with other animals, only humans.
You can tell what animal’s are thinking, Dr Doolittle?
Animal’s will violently defend their children, territories, and potential food sources from competition. I think it’s safe to say animal’s have at least some belief in ownership.
Anthrocentrism is all I see in thinking like this.
The issue is that they don’t see you as owning yourself (let alone your property). Do you think a wolf is capable of having a peaceful stroll around a shopping mall?
Yes. There are actually even people who go and live with wild wolf packs. They don’t kill the guy on sight. They will even accept them into the pack given enough time.
The difference between “animals” and “humans” is merely a matter of degree.
At the point you can not control/ dominate/ domesticate them, be it by their own volition or a superior (by power) man made mandate, just like anything else
This one is a toughie. The problem is that it’s impossible to get into the animal mind and tell how much “awareness” there is for any given species.
Even in humans, the line between the irrational (instinctual, reflexive) and the rational (acting) is blurry at times. We can make distinctions between the two because, being human ourselves, we can observe our own actions, and gather that others are similar in thier level of awareness and action. Even with the disabled or vegetative, we can assume that it’s possible because we can 1.) often communicate with those individuals and 2.) have some insight into the workings of thier minds because in the end they’re still human.
With animals, it’s impossible to tell. Do dogs actually conceptualize ownership or territory, or is it just reflexive? Anyone who has some experience with pets can understand that it appears that they recognize individuals, and have concepts of property (This is MY food, this is MY bed), but without actually communicating with those dogs, cats, or what-have-you, it’s impossible to tell if they’re actually acting (in the praxeological sense) or just reacting on instinct.
Has anyone else here read The Probability Broach? It’s not exactly a serious take on things but it does touch on this subject in a lighthearted and interesting way, heh.
What’s wrong with anthrocentrism, exactly? I’m sure other animals typically take their own kind’s side too.
When most people start finding it useful.
Is it possible for you to get into my mind?
Can you see into my consciousness enough to verify that I’m conscious like you?
Or are you simply using your idea of your own consciousness to predict my movements? I mean, you haven’t even seen me in real life, so for all that you know I’m just a computer program. But actually there’s a reason why you think that I’m more than just a computer program: In real life, the only things that you’ve ever seen capable of communicating like this with you are other humans; so, when that changes (for example when you see a program that really does act like you or me), you won’t be able to directly know whether you’re talking to a human or a program. Wait, no, on second thought, you won’t ever be able to know: For example, imagine this: You’re responding to a program on a computer and it seems like it has the intelligence and capabilities of a person. How could you tell the difference between it really being a computer program (whatever that means), or it simply being a computer secretly connected to an input device somewhere else, with somebody writing the responses? Well, if the “program” acted exactly like another person (as far as the writing), we wouldn’t have any way of distinguishing between those two scenarios.
But what does that have anything to do with this question? Well, just like you can’t “see into the consciousness” of anybody else, you also can’t see into the consciousness of non-human animals. So why do we consider other people as conscious? If we can’t verify that they’re “actually” conscious (whatever that means), then why the hell do we act as if they are? Well, it’s simply because it works to do that: If I model your movement as being caused by the same things that I know cause my movement, then I’m able to predict what you’re going to do next (in terms of the movement of your body, or actually in terms of the words that appear on my screen) better that I would be able to without that model. In other words, the fact that I think that you’re conscious isn’t anything but a model. I can’t say anything but that it works to consider you (and everybody else on this forum and so on) as acting beings. It’s a good model to predict a certain kind of sensation that I experience: certain objects in outside world (which is also a model!), such as those of language (the sequences of sounds making up spoken words, the sequences of 2D images making up written words, the sequences of 2D images making up other people’s gestures, and so on), those of other people (the 2D images making up other people’s bodies), and so forth. And, in case the point got lost in the length and all of the parenthetical statements, let me re-state the point of this paragraph: I can’t see into the consciousness of anybody else; all that I can do is find that the best model for predicting a certain subset of the perceptions or sensations that I experience is to consider them as conscious. And I get the idea of their consciousness from my consciousness.
So, with that said, we can’t draw a dichotomy between other human’s consciousness and other animal’s consciousness; all that we can say is whether the model works or not. And (as you mentioned in your post, where you talked about how it seems as if your pets have a sense of property rights) it’s pretty obvious that our model of our own consciousness not only works pretty well for understanding how other people behave, but it also works pretty well (but maybe not as well) for predicting how animals behave. Indeed, as Mises said in Human Action, without our understanding of the category of action, we’d be at a loss to understand the behavior of animals. In other words, saying that it “appears that they have concepts of property” is enough to say that they do have concepts of property. I mean, you don’t have any other reason for assuming that I have the concept of property than that it appears as if I do. You can’t say anything about anybody else (whether it’s an animal or another human) except that they appear as if they’re conscious. And what’s that mean anyway? What’s it mean to appear as if you’re conscious? Simple, it means that considering you as conscious is the best model (or simply a good model) for predicting some of what words I’m going to see (or not see) on my screen in the future.
Animal’s will violently defend their children, territories, and potential food sources from competition. I think it’s safe to say animal’s have at least some belief in ownership.
Ownership can only be seen as useful as a legal term or a technical scientific term that can not cross into philosophic discourse.
On believing, thinking, and action:
“I don’t try to make you believe something you don’t believe,
but to make you do something you won’t do.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
I think this is actually a very easy question, when one considers the concepts of private property rights and natural rights:
The Enlightenment foundation for recognizing these rights is that society is a voluntary association of individuals, all of whom had the choices those “rights” represented, until they joined the society.
A society that violates them, obviously, is not only making itself an enemy of its own members, but from a practical level is turning those members against it.
Really, what that and everything else I say will have in common is “member of society”.
Only the rights of members of society are relevant to the society’s function and limitations.
We can, reasonably, extend “society” to include humanity, the way the Bil of Rights actually limits ALL US government actions against ALL human beings, “citizen” or not…
So the real question would be when animals become members of the society.
Note that a madman or child is NOT treated as a member of society, except insofar as it’s expected he’ll achieve competence at some future point.
And that’s really the limit for whether we COULD include dogs, or lawyers, to be part of society. They need to be able to show complete competence, responsibility for their actions in society.
Dogs, clearly, are not going to be competent within the lifetime of any existing dog. Lawyers…that’s arguable, but for now we should exclude them, just in case.