Soylent Green is…PEOPLE!
Actually human meat is quite similar to cow meat in texture and nutrients
Can’t you think of any reason why you shouldn’t eat people other than it would be illegal to do so?
I would say that killing somone who has these intellectual capabilities, so long as there is no chance that they can ever become anything more than a cow, is ok.
Other than hygienic reasons, no. At least nothing beyond ingrained taboos.
Re: Terri Schiavo and guardianship; her feeding tube was pulled. So a) Was the right decision made, in terms of having her breathing tube pulled? b) If it was then what would be the difference between pulling her feeding tube and pulling her feeding tube and then turning her into chili con carne?
For the sake of argument let’s assume that it’s certain the individual is unaware (PVS), and will never recover. I’ll even through out ones that have the mental level of a cow out of the equation; we’re just talking about people who are in a PVS, who are unaware. How do they still have rights? And if you’re talking about guardianship then why does the guardian of a pig that has the capability of a 4 year old permitted to kill and eat it, but not a guardian of a human being with no awareness whatsoever? Does the fact that you have human DNA automatically qualify you for rights? If rights are based on property then is your body really your property if you have no awareness of it?
You’re an awful man.
What would be worse; eating somebody who willingly consented to it, signed a contract and everything and was of sound mind and body, or an animal with at least enough awareness of what was going on to bleat or oink in fear as it was dragged to the slaughterhouse?
This is quiet a surprising stance you’ve taken on the topic Stranger. Wouldn’t you say?
Yes.
People, like all animals, don’t intrinsically have rights. And that applies regardless of mental capacity. However that doesn’t mean such actions should be permissible.
No.
Very basic fallacy. Suffering is not limited to physical pain; it’s any sensation perceived as unwanted by its recipient. And rights certainly are related to suffering; the basic utilitarian premise is that the practical purpose of rights is to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. That’s actually the basis of rights in a deontologist framework too, as support for “inalienable” or “natural” rights would not have evolved if they did not produce satisfactory consequences.
Do you remember what I said about Austrian arrogance? Part of that is the belief that if there’s any disagreement with their assertions, it must be caused by unfamiliarity with the literature. That plenty of us could have read The Road to Serfdom and simply found the anti-socialist case insufficient doesn’t generally pop into their heads; it’s always a matter of us either not having read the work or not having understood it properly if we did.
The same is true here with your reference to The Ethics of Liberty. I certainly read Rothbard’s analysis before; I simply found it lacking and overall, an extremely poor text and one that is not ethically sound. Let’s eviscerate it, shall we? 
This is only an example of his misconceptions at work. I’m not familiar with any advocate of animal rights that posits that animals should have rights equal to those of humans; the utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer, for example, merely argues that animals should be entitled to equality of consideration, meaning that they should not be excluded solely on the basis of their species and any comparison between them and humans must analyze their awareness and related sentience levels rather than DNA.
Hence, Rothbard is merely attacking a strawman. It is telling that he does not quote or reference any major animal rights advocates that claim that humans and all other animals are completely equal, instead claiming that it is “a growing fashion to extend the concept of rights from human beings to animals, and to assert that since animals have the full rights of humans, it is therefore impermissible—i.e., that no man has the right—to kill or eat them.” This is not true, and not the stance of the majority of the animal rights movement, certainly not of major theorists like Singer or major organizations like PETA.
This is a very straightforward naturalistic fallacy. Ethical justifications for acts cannot be derived from their “natural” occurrence, or there would be no justification against humans’ killing, assault, and rape of each other. Moreover, as to animals’ aggression against each other, this is partially more justified than human aggression against other animals because of the fact that animals generally need to kill and eat each other in order to survive while most humans living in an advanced, industrialized society have no such obligation.Though I agree with the assessment that animals cannot understand conceptions of rights, the nature of the welfarist rights that they ought to receive does not require human levels of comprehension, and their lack of understanding is not a basis for denying them rights anymore than it is for the denial of rights to a human infant (he addresses this later, poorly), or as the subject of this thread notes, to a mentally disabled human (he does not address this at all, mainly because there is no ethical defense).
Let’s quote more of this Rothbard text:
So he’s plainly not a pure speciesist, though the reference to the division of labor is ominous. European economic culture established itself violently in America and was imposed upon the “inferior” economic culture of the indigenous population. Perhaps this is what he has in mind?
Fine. But he’s merely trying to justify his earlier naturalistic fallacy here, I suspect, which was flawed anyway since there are numerous animals killed by humans that do not assault them or even engage in carnivorous behavior. And if he seeks to insinuate that there is some parallel between this theoretical Martians and animals on Earth, that is equally fallacious since animals do not require human blood to survive and would not engage in a systematic campaign of predation against humans, which is why humans in advanced industrialized society generally have little to fear from animals.
Perpetuation of his earlier strawman, clearly.
If he’s concerned about preventions of the development of future human adults, than I’ll presume that he also took an objection to contraception? I doubt it. But a more direct response to this is that a potential X is not equivalent to an X and therefore does not have all the rights of an X. We have an intuitive understanding of the difference between dropping an egg into a pot of boiling water and dropping a live chicken into a pot of boiling water, for example, as a chicken possesses sensory capacities that cause it to endure intense physical pain from being dropped in, whereas an egg does not. The same is true with the case of the infant and the normal human (I’ll not say adult human as our current standards of “adulthood” are flawed), as normal humans possess capacities (such as the reasoning capacities that he was quite enamored with earlier in the passage) that infants do not. Therefore, they are not entitled to the same rights.
And the question of mentally disabled humans is obviously not resolved, as they are not future human adults and possess none of the reasoning capacities that he mentioned earlier.
Leviathan my friend. On this forum at least when you start a statement in ad-hominem your often seen as being evasive and unable to address the actual point at hand. You may have a valid argument, try defending your case by explaining yourself rather then calling names.
There is some confusion on this forum but the econcalc issue is a pricing structure issue. It’s not an ‘in-efficiency’ issue. The in-efficiency comes from the pricing issue.
If I was arrogant, I would think that I’d have disparaged your numerous spelling and grammar errors much more extensively by now. Incidentally, an ad hominem, contrary to popular misconception, is not any personal attack or insult; it’s a charge that a person’s arguments are unsound because of some irrelevant personal characteristic. Hence:
“You don’t know anything about economics because you’re 14.” <== Ad hominem.
"You don’t know anything about economics because you haven’t studied it. <== Not an ad hominem.
“You’re an idiot.” <== Not an ad hominem.
Yes I see your point. I do seem to get stuck on details from time to time. Let me edit my earlier post.
I suppose your comment would have been a red herring than, am I wrong? You see I am still learning myself. Either way it’s a logical fallacy.
Easy on your tone though, because you just about underminded your whole arrogance position. [:D]
I see that you have gone another post evading the price issue.
Side Joke: I cn nt use spllchck. Srry. My grmr sx to!
IF someone is in a coma or braindead - then he cannot stay alive without someone feeding and cleaning him. And that someone - who first did it to the person after he ceased to be an actor - also homesteaded the braindead guy in the process, so that he has the right to exterminate the braindead guy, but others dont.
At least thats how applying rothbardian principles to it would be imo.
Ad hominem arguments are not necessarily fallacious. Leviathan’s second example was in fact ad hominem, and whether or not it was fallacious depends on if one accepts the premise that one must study economics to know about it.
I’m not sure that I’d agree. The etymological nature of the term “argumentum ad hominem” technically does mean any “argument against the person,” which means that focus on any personal characteristic might qualify. However, focus on relevant personal characteristics (such as the fact that a person is the owner of a car company when he or she attempts to argue for purchase of company cars), usually isn’t considered (in my experience), as it’s not logically fallacious. I just glanced at the Wikipedia entry after you mentioned this, and it didn’t clarify things much:
I was taught that the ad hominem is an attack against a person’s irrelevant characteristic or belief (not relevant ones), but also that it was logically fallacious in all its instances, I guess I’ll have to whip out my logic textbook again, though my professor and book taught me different things, if memory serves. :\