If I walked into a tigers territory, it will attack me. Humans are smart enough to know this. If a tiger walked onto my property it doesn’t know I might kill it or that it’s even personal property. Since it doesn’t know the law doesn’t apply to it. As far as ownership, what about blind people and their dogs?
I would also contend that
humans are the only
executors of willful
action, with all other
species of animals mere
genetic automatons
responding to stimulus.
I think you do not mean you contend that, but rather the opposite: that you contest this point. So you set up “willful action” as the criterium so you can easily knock it down? Look, humans are very very different than any other species of life we are aware of, in a number of major cognitive and behaviorial ways. Glance at the Hoppe quote on the other animal rights thread. One can, without too much difficulty, point to any one of these differentiating characteristics and say: here is why these rules (rights, or mutual respect, or division of labor, or whatever) should apply to our species and will give very good results for us, but there is no reason to apply them to these other species, for they don’t have these same factors going for them and wouldn’t get the same good results.
I guess you want to make it seem the whole concept of rights is totally arbitrary and idiotic, but in this particular instance – excluding animals – there are measurable, observable, objective factors that one can invoke and say: that’s why rights should apply only to humans. So disagree with rights as superstitious nonsense, fine, I shan’t convince you otherwise, I’m sure, but deliniating between humans and animals is not any problem for rights theory. One could do it with half his brain tied behind his back.
YES!!! This sounds like what I’m trying to get across, dammit! [;)] In every friggin overwhelming, fast-paced animal debate thread I’ve been in here. [:|]
See my other post about the “2 categories vs 3 categories” of “rights”. I don’t know if you’d have to call it animal “rights”, but simply acknowledge that there’s an ethically relevant difference between a sentient animal and a tree or a rock, or any other obvious property.
There are lab rats and lab rabbits that are used for experiments that were produced just for those reasons (because it’s quick and they can go through many generations in a short period), what I’m referring to is outside of that, because they still do animal testing to animals such as cats, dogs, and monkeys which usually don’t yield results that are even applicable to humans.
Doing neurological and psychological test by making a cat mangled in spikes with electric shocks going through it’s body, or by making a dog smoke to find what effects it has on the lungs doesn’t seem very natural. In the wild do you see other animals inject each other with AIDs to see what effect it will have on them, or electricuting them to see the effect it has on the mind?
You’re falling for both the naturalistic fallacy (“natural equals good”) and what I call the false natural/artificial dichotomy*. I contend that everything man does is natural, since man is part of nature. To say otherwise would entail that man is a supernatural being, like a god or something, and works via miracles. You might very well consider animal testing to be distasteful and boycott or otherwise shun companies and individuals that engage in it, but you are wrong (at least from what I understand as the libertarian perspective) in thinking that animals have a right not to be treated that way, or that what you’re proposing is any more natural than the alternative.
- I am not above using the word “natural” colloquially to mean the opposite of “artificial”, for lack of a better word (always saying “not man-made” and “man-made” instead would be tedious), but strictly speaking I consider that an error. Even the formulation of “natural rights” doesn’t mean anything if taken literally, and I am more comfortable calling them innate, or better yet, basic rights, in that they are the basis for the only known universal ethic, namely the NAP.
Ahhh, that sweet might-makes-right fallacy. It’s so convenient when you have the upper hand.
Well, I meant it in as a test of rationality and desire of freedom at the same time, but you could see it as “might makes right” (which applies in the real world, even if we strongly disagree with that: slavery ended only when it was profitable to substitute paid labor with it).
Give one example.
But is that really ethics?
Jackson, get serious, is English not your first language? When someone writes “I would contend that people are good”, they mean “it is my position that people are good”. Invariably. 100% of the time. As for giving you an example, you already gave yourself one: homo sapiens is the only species capable of serious contemplation regarding his choices.
That is just one example, there are any number of such differences, as gone into by Hoppe and as any marginally intelligent person can readily see. Only in the world of Disney movies are animals anything like humans. Any child can tell the difference between the two.
Yeah, maybe it was an awkward use of the word.
That may be the case for some people, but what about children or the severely disabled? I just don’t see how being the most intelligent animal automatically makes us deserving of rights exclusively. Where up the evolutionary ladder is the line of demarcation in our ancestors? Homo Erectus: no rights, Cro-magnon: rights? They even had to justify it in the BIble (the part where God created humans specifically in his image, in order to rule the Earth). It just seems so arbitrary to me.
Right, it was already mentioned by several here that any uniquely human behavior or cognition will have exceptions. At minimum, infants and vegetables exhibit no uniquely human characteristics. That doesn’t negate the reality of unique human characteristics. Cheetahs run fast. The two crippled cheetahs in the world don’t make that untrue.
The fact is that there are these characteristics, and one can make a pretty good case they mesh well with freedom. Freedom is going to be a good regime for a species with advanced cognition, extreme individual variation, tool use (aka capital accumulation), etc. to really thrive under. It will be super-effective and successful for that species to operate in freedom. For other species, they don’t have the same plus-factors as humanity and won’t thrive in the same way if given Rothbardian rights.
You and Dondolee are right that wanting to treat certain animals nicely and gently is merely an aesthetical affinity, an arbitrary affectation, and invoking the concept of “rights” is just a way of trying to force everyone else to behave according to those prejudices.
Now, you think talk of morality and rights is a joke anyway, so why should you care either way? Why not be indifferent to us doling these magic, imaginary rights to anyone or anything we like? Because restricting the free range of individual humans to use animals however they wish will cause a meaningful drop in the utility or well-being of humans – making cosmetics more dangerous, introducing uncertainty into the legal system, making certain research impossible, etc. On the other hand, endowing animals with habeas corpus, immunity from torture, and whatever, will cause no real long-term benefits to their species.
I care because righteous action is the most dangerous force known to man. It frightens me when people genuinely feel justified in action. If you are the sort who just finds it convenient to delineate rights by some arbitrary standard for the sake of efficiency, I can’t understand why you do, but I guess I really don’t care that you do.
Why wouldn’t it be? At a minimum, insofar as it reflects on the character of the human, it seems to be an ethical question.
You sure as hell don’t find meat processing factories either though, do you now? Very few ways people go about getting food have much to do with how nature goes about it, so I assumed you’re talking about the naturalcy of the ‘want’ in question. Like others said if you find it ethically distasteful you can boycott organisations engaging in this kind of testing, but I really don’t think you can neatly delineate it from breeding animals for feeding.
Butler Shaffer makes the following point:
So the concept of rights is intra-species. Humans have rights with respect to humans. Cats have rights with respect to cats. Arguments about what makes our species different to other species miss the point. The fact that we ARE different is enough of a justification.
Ultimately however, with a free market in law, the laws will reflect the will of the population and what laws they are willing to pay to be enforced. What animals have what rights will be determined by consumer demand.
Fruits and many vegetables are made by the parent organism to be eaten and returned to the soil to fertilize the seeds.
It wasn’t a rhetorical question – I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t care, I was really asking why you should care, so I could then I answer myself that you should care because of the utilitarian reason I gave. OK, so actually the question was a rhetorical device, just in a different way than normal. I shouldve wrote “it is because” instead of just “because”. To restate: rights should not be applied to animals because to do so hinders humanity, and doesn’t really help animal species.
I feel completely justified in brushing my teeth. I feel completely justified in not doing so. I feel completely justified in writing this post. I feel completely justified in flushing my fish (if I had one) down the toilet. Do any of these actions frighten you?
Anyway, I shouldn’t make fun. I’m not going to convince you to beleive in morality, and haven’t been trying. I’ve been communicating with you in a perfectly good, utiltarian way. Is your main purpose here to convince me and others that morality does not exist? Because you should be smart enough to realize: that is not likely to happen. It’s probably a waste of your time. But, that’s subjective ;).
Wiki seems to have a somewhat high quality answer to this (yay). Ethics addresses questions of morality and …morality refers to personal or cultural values, codes of conduct or social mores that distinguish between right and wrong in the human society. Describing morality in this way is not making a claim about what is objectively right or wrong, but only referring to what is considered right or wrong by people.
Do you not consider needless pain and suffering, pointless death and torture, or indifferent neglect of sentient captive beings to be wrong? I’d say it sounds perfectly relevant to ethics.
Psychopath isn’t even a clinical term anymore, much less a term anyone should care about when dicussing what one should or should not do. Not only that, we really have to look at the implications / defintions / relevence / relation of peronality disorders to varying psychological philosophies of antisocial personality (which is what I think you are refering to) or anyother personality disorder. Likewise, it may be nothing more than a Christian / post-Christian mind set to give a flying fuck about anything outside of the human tribe and customs one associates with (from a socialogical / social psychological / anthropological / theological viewpoint) much less to have a concern about anything outside of human, excluding a some ancient Indian type of mindsets.
If you want to philosophise on a theory of law in the role of society with animals that is one thing, but it should be distinguished. That is probably a more interesting and productive debate.