The specific actions? Not really. The fact that you feel it is an absolute right (complete justification) to do all those things, well, that’s a little creepy.
No, It’s more to understand why people find them necessary.
When I say “psychopath”, I’m talking about most of everyone’s moral intuitions about what someone who’s right in the head just doesn’t do, not a clinical term. I don’t think it takes an elaborate psychological philosophy to see that someone that gets their jollies by needlessly inflicting violence on animals is messed up. I’m not talking about a theory of law, I’m talking general ethics - and that’s the whole problem with libertarian discussions like this one, where everything is reduced to a question of law or rights. As far as I can tell, there is no productive debate to be had with people that want to rationalize lighting a cat on fire on the grounds that cats aren’t legal persons. To me, this is just a reductio of thin libertarianism.
I’m sorry to say that it’s you who is doing the rationalizing. There is no essential difference between slaughtering pigs for meat and lighting cats on fire, as ridiculous as that may sound.
Your argument for there being a difference is probably that one is being sadistic for fun, and doesn’t have to be so, but the exact same thing could be said about eating meat or using other animal products. Meat is not essential to a person’s survival (that used to be different, but you can supposedly lead a healthy life as a vegan nowadays).
You may very well detest a person for deriving satisfaction from torturing animals, but your reasons for that are of a subjective and aesthetic nature, and not grounded in a universal ethic.
I’m not an ethical universalist in the first place - but the alternative is not subjectivism or aesthetics. It is not a merely aesthetic position to object to harming life for fun - it’s an ethical evaluation of the animal-torturer’s character. It might not be grounded in political justice, but it is grounded in a eudaimonistic ethics. Eudaimonism isn’t aesthetics. I’m not argueing on the grounds of what is essential for a person’s survival, but on the grounds of what is reflective of a person’s character.
Believe it or not, but I agree. Still, I contend that it is a person’s right to be a sick fuck if they’re not aggressing against another person. And by “right” I mean that other people are not entitled to any coercive action against the supposed sick fuck.
Accordingly, I consider it lawless and immoral to put an animal abuser behind bars, but I see - and even somewhat share - the reasoning behind detesting and perhaps even boycotting them.
I don’t eat meat, and the shampoo and conditioner I own was not tested on animals.
When it comes to the meat industry I find it rather peculiar. Yet, I haven’t put much focus on just the idea of breeding for feeding on such a large scale. That’s more of a personal dislike of how it’s done.
How about a compulsory fine, if the person is brought to a private court or whatever and the arbiter decides that a fine should be imposed.
That would be aggression against the person’s property, and equivalent with fining someone for faggotry or snorting cocaine (i.e. you have an ethical problem with the guy and want to see him punished).
Note that I base the above on the fact of animals having no rights. I say fact, because I have yet to read a sensible and consistent (with natural rights) rights-theoretical argument (as opposed to emotional or aesthetical, which wouldn’t be an argument in the first place) to the contrary.
Is it a jump to say that you only believe humans have rights because you’ve heard a convincing rights-theoretical argument (with natural rights) that said so?
No, not only. Before I had read arguments by Rothbard and others whose names I now can’t recall, I regarded animal rights as completely inconsistent with how they are treated in practice.
That being said, I don’t see what your point is supposed to be. Would you have a problem with me being convinced by sound rights-theoretical arguments that animals had no rights?
Above it sounds like you’re saying that animals have no rights because you haven’t seen a convincing (natural) rights-theoretical argument for animal rights. It seems relevant to ask you, then, whether you hold to the same standard for human rights.
(Possibly you misread my previous post? “Is it a jump to say that you only believe humans have rights because you’ve heard a convincing rights-theoretical argument (with natural rights) that said so?”)
Yes, I did. My apologies. You misread part of my post as well: where you quote me “(with natural rights)”, it was actually “consistent (with natural rights)”. It’s no big deal, but that fragment doesn’t make sense how you quote it, though I admit that my phrasing was somewhat weird.
On topic: I became convinced about people having rights, or more precisely, having property rights, based on Rothbard’s argument that only complete self-ownership is consistent with nature and universal. That’s how I understood him in The Ethics of Liberty, and I’d be happy to hear your arguments in case you either disagreed, or thought that this was irrelevant to the discussion (rereading this last sentence made it sound awfully redundant, but I’m going to let it stand as an expression of me trying to keep an open mind).
First, I’m a little curious how you would have responded (before reading Rothbard) to someone who says that, for instance, torturing some group of people is OK because they have no rights.
As to self-ownership and natural rights, there was a period last year when they were discussed frequently by me and others. I linked the two that I know for sure focus on self-ownership, but they all deal with natural rights. I am of course always happy to debate on the matter.
“Actual logical proof of natural law” Actual Logical Proof of Natural Law
“Can you define natural rights as a meaningful concept?” Can You Define Natural Rights as a Meaningful Concept?
What are rights according to those on the forums? Rights
“The question of “natural” rights” The question of "natural" rights
“Oughtism and its cure” Oughtism and its Cure
“David Osterfeld on natural rights and self-ownership” David Osterfeld on natural rights
How do natural rights cross the is-ought divide? How do natural rights theories cross the is/ought divide?
Does it make sense that human morality be a matter of deduction? Does it make sense that human morality would be a matter of rigorous deduction?
Rasmussen natural rights proof https://forum.freecapitalists.org/groups/natural_rights/forum/p/7370/238502.aspx
Rothbard self-ownership, my refutation David Osterfeld on natural rights - #2 by Amanojack
Adam Knott’s outstanding post on Mises and objective ethics The Ancient Chimera of Universal, Absolute, and Objective Value - #177 by adam_knott
O’Neil’s essay Ayn Rand Is-Ought http://mises.org/journals/jls/7_1/7_1_4.pdf
I think we can agree that normative rights are based on ethics, and ethics are based on what is right and wrong. On right and wrong, I follow Mises when he said, “We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.”
And so it is with cosmetics too.
I am at once thankful for those resources, as well as humbled that you think I need to brush up as heavily on my rights theory as that number of links suggests (I’m only half-serious on that latter part).
Nah, I just put them all there because I had the list lying around in case you were interested. The best value-for-money is probably to read the O’Neil article.
I don’t think it takes an elaborate psychological philosophy to see that someone that gets their jollies by needlessly inflicting violence on animals is messed up
I would still think if one wants to try to look at personality types, it can only be judged and measured within the context of the environment. i.e. someone breaking some type of homeostasis to a dramatic degree. Killing animals for the heck of it, is not without precedence in human history. Even a theory of ethics would probably be best off to kind of look at things in the same light.
While I won’t do it now, it may be interesting to see how various societies throughout history looked at, treated, and defined excessive cruelty. Off the top of my head, I can already think of some major discrepancies.
As far as I can tell, there is no productive debate to be had with people that want to rationalize lighting a cat on fire on the grounds that cats aren’t legal persons
To me it intuitively seems like a kind of “aspergery” or at least overly dogmatic approach to things if some one wants to defend lighting the cat on fire. I certainly would not share the same aesthetic values with that person. But I still think there may be room for productive discussion.
To try to think of something off the top of my head: If some one loves the world of Hoppe, for example, and anarchy was essentially just a micro kingdom with culturaly conservative values, I still some how think frying a cat for the lulz would go against culturaly conservative values. I still think there may be a type of cultural precedent that could be argued to have some thing not reward psychotic cat killing.
Some of us are going to be defending lighting cats on fire because having the right to do that sort of shit to your own pet or livestock inevitably follows from unrestricted self-ownership and animals not having rights. I guess that has to be elucidated, because apparently (which was a surprise to me) not all libertarians hold the above axioms (is that even the right word?) of self-ownership and moral agency being a prerequisite for rights to be evident.
Now, that does not mean that I’m in favor of torturing animals, as defending the legitimacy of an act is not necessarily (and in this case, decidedly not) the same as defending its aesthetics or even morality. I merely posit that it goes against the NAP to engage in coercive action (fining, imprisonment, etc) against a person who’s defiling their own property, because that property happens to be cute and cuddly.
Boycotting a person for the above reasons, however, is completely legitimate.
Right, but I think BP went out of his way to say it wasn’t legal theory that is being discussed. I wasn’t really thinking about legal theory either. When I said “overly dogmatic”, I meant more along the lines of using the NAP as one’s de facto definer of good / bad and right / wrong.
The difference is that testing animals in cosmetics has nothing to do with the actual product itself. You can get cosmetics without them being tested on animals. In the meat industry the animal is the product. My personal dislike has to do with the process in which the meat is processed, not the product itself.