Originally posted by chimx+--> (chimx)We live in a society that protects property rights, so yes, they do exist. You can be opposed to the existence of these rights, but you can't argue that they don't exist.[/b]
That's a purely semantic distiction. Of course "animal rights" exist in the sense that the concept of "animal rights" exist, otherwise we wouldn't be able to have this conversation.
Rather my point was that "animal rights" exist in much the same way that the "Aryan race" does, as nothing more than an ideological buzzword.
I suspect that you feel much the same way with regards to property righgs, that is while you acknowledge that the bourgeoisie believes in them, you don't agree that the capitalists have the right to "own" that which they "own", regardless of what the German constitution may say.
I guess the problem is that the word "rights" has two meanings, one legalistic and one sociological and the two very often have little if anything to do with one another.
And while governments can choose to list anything or nothing as "rights", those decrees have no bearing on what their citizens are actually entitled to as members of society.
I think you are confused as to who benefits from the existence of animal rights in our society currently. It is animals that are protected, but they exist to benefit human emotional needs. While rights are not innate, I do certainly think that there is generally an innate human quality for compassion and a tendency to loathe sadism.
I agree 100%!
I should point out that your ally, midnight marauder, does not agree and indeed stated uncategorically that "animal rights" do not exist for the purposes of human emotional needs.
But insofar as myself, I am in complete agreement that the clear empathic harm caused by the animal injuries is something that cannot be ignored; and that that harm is so great that a degree of animal protections must be legislated.
The only dispute between us, I suspect, is just how far to go with that legislation.
For while I recognize that emotional harm is something to be avoided, I must equally acknowledge that there are greater interests than not upsetting people.
And while the needless torture of an animal is undeniably more harmful than it is beneficial, the same cannot be said for productive uses of animals like farming or medical testing.
The fact is we need vivisective research and we have a great desire to use animal products. And while many people are indeed disturbed at the sight of both those undertakings, that harm is not sufficient to outweight the bennefits incrued.
It's a balancing test, in short, and one that society must make in any situation where people are bothered. Lots of people, after all, are bothered by "hate speech". The question of whether that justifies censorship is one of the more controversial ones of our day.
Even on this board, a great many -- perhaps even the majority -- of members would contend that censorship is indeed justifiable to stop "hate" or "fascism". Personally, I disagree, but I recognize that an analysis must be made.
And while I may be in the minority on that one, I suspect that I am in the definitive majority when it comes to animals. That is, I would bet a good deal of money that most people agree that while they don't like seeing animals get hurt and would prefer that farming et al., were done more humanely, they still want meat to get made.
Nothing in life is black and white, and the mere fact that something causes harm does not nescessarily mean that it should be outlawed.
But empathy is not justification for a massive rearrangement of how society operates. It's certainly a reasonble justification for a limited degree of animal protections, but no more.
It has been in the past. Muslim abstention very a variety of animals products, Buddhism's teaching of suffering led to vegetarianism in Asia and India. They may not have achieved the legalistic standings that I was originally speaking of, but certainly in some communities they became legitimized.
I think you missed my point. I'm not saying that empathy cannot be an excuse for massive social change, I'm saying that it can't be a justification for it.
All sorts of historic social upheavals have been based on emotional rather than logical causes, religion being an excellent example. But just as "Allah" does not justify Muslim sexism, nor does "dharma" justify forced veganism.
You are free, of course, to live own dietary life however you please, when you aim to impose it on the rest of us, you bear a significantly higher burden of proof, one you have consistantly been unable to meet.
Originally posted by midnight
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Ironically enough, even though we're both on opposing sides of the issue of so-called "animal rights", aside from the discussion on the origin and meaning of rights, we seem to have more in common in our arguments than differences.
I don't think there's anything ironic in that at all. Indeed, the fact that we are on the same page on many issues is to be expected considering that our mutual membership of this board indicates that we already agree on a great deal.
Similarly, the fact that we're both favour a moderate position -- not total "animal liberation", but not zero protections either -- is unsurprising as holding to either extreme is logically incoherent.
This is an issue to which common sense speaks a great deal. The idea of granting, as you say, chickens the "right to vote" is on the face of it absurdly fantastical; and yet at the same time the notion of tolerating animal torture is emotionally abhorent.
Accordingly we are all forced to the middle, the only question is just in which direction we'll lean. And I suspect that a lot of the determing factors are rather subjective ones.
That is, while some political vegans may derive their position from thought out analysis, I imagine that the majority felt bad first and justified later; similarly, I suspect that we on the other side, for the most part, arrived at this question with a skepticism towards the notion of "animal rights" and then tried to explain why.
That's probably equally true for leftism itself.
The difference between us isn't that one of us is advocating something that the other isn't -- we both advocate protections of animals -- but rather, we disagree on the degree to which protections cover our interactions with animals.
Exactly. But we also disagree on exactly what it is that consitutes a right and what it means to be a part of society. Because of that, while we do both agree that animals must be afforded a degree of protection, we fundamentally disagree on just why that is.
Animal "rights" has nothing to do with the emotive harm humans feel when animals are killed.
And that right there summarizes why, despite our seeming similarity of opinion, we in fact don't agree with each other at all.
You contend that animals have rights in and of themselves and that those rights are entirely divorced from human experience of empathy. I, on the hand, propose that the only reason that animals should be protected at all is because their harm bothers us to such a great extent.
That's how I'm able to be consistant when it comes to things like plants and bacteria. Since their injury doesn't bother us at all, there is no need to protect them.
You, on the other hand, are forced to invent this "commonality of pain" thesis in order to try and justify how one independent creature with "legitimate exclusive interests" is deserving of protection but another one is not.
I note, however, that for all your appeals to the fundamentality of "pain", you've actually failed to define exactly what you mean by the term.
I suspect that's because you're using the word in a rather vague and nonscientific sense. That because you're coming at this from a primarily emotional direction, you haven't felt the need, or probably even considered the possibility, of specifying precisely what "pain" is for the purposes of this discussion.
But since you're trying to base an ethical paradigm and, accordingly, a political regime on this notion, you have no choice but to be specific about just what is that constitutes "pain" and, just as importantly, what doesn't.
'Cause although we all know subjectively what it is to "hurt" and, thanks to the psychological trick of emotional projection, believe we can see that same feeling in other creatures, that's an emotional experience, not an objective standard.
Sentience is typically described as the capacity to sense, hence the root of the word. And while there's a tendency to restrict that to those creatures that sense like us, there's really no way to draw a line at which point "feeling" begins.
A bacterium is just as capable of interacting with and responding to its environment as a fish is. The responses are simpler, but the capacity to sense is none the less real.
And so while the "pain" that a bacteria is hypothetically capable of may not manifest in exactly the same way as that of a fish or a reptile, that's only relevent insofar as it affects how we percieve that pain, it doesn't change the biological reality of its existance.
That's the problem with trying to base a social paradigm on a fundamentally non-social concept like "pain". It's unavoidable arbitrary since it bears no connection with the formulation of said society.
The only way that we can construct a viable and legitimate rights paradigm is if that paradigm is grounded in and how and why society, and not biology, operates.
We have rights not because we are "alive" or because we "feel" but because we are a part of society. It is our membershpi in that relationship which entitles us to the protections of and from our fellow humans.
Our right to security of person exists not because we have "interests", everything has "interests", but because society's very existance is predicated on is serving those who make it up.
That doesn't mean that every human society has lived up to that purpose, of course, the fact that rights exist does not mean that people must respect them. What it does mean, however, is that people should respect them.
The same, however, cannot be true for so-called "animal rights" as they have nothing whatsoever to do with the reality of human social interaction.
As far as I, or anyone else can tell, these organisms do not experience pain in the sense that animals or humans do, in any way, shape, or form.
The operative phrase there is in the sense that animals or humans do. For while you're right in that non-sentient creatures do not express human-like pain responses, all that that tells us is that they are more biologically removed from us than other mammals are.
It says absolutely nothing about their "exclusive interests" or their capacity to "feel". It also requires that we accept a remarkably subjective standard as the entire basis of assigning rights.
As I've said in the past, even the most simple statement of fact contains the implict caveat or as far as we know, right now, but that does not mean that we should not endeavour to be as objective as possible.
And "pain" is about as far away from objectivity as it gets, it is a phenomenon that exists entirely within our own minds and in our interpretations of others' reactions. And despite your assertions that it is somehow the critical determinant of "exclusive legitimacy", you've yet to explain just what it is that makes pain "as we experience it" do damn important.
As a neuropsychological phenomenon, pain is nothing more than the interaction of chemicals, not more and no less special than any other. As we subjectively feel it is an uncomfortably and undesirably experience, to be sure, but that is nothing more than an evolutionary defense mechanism fostered by its ability to keep us alive long enough to breed.
And while things like bacteria may not experience the exact same form of chemical stimulation, they are certainly capable of reacting to their environment in a similarly evolutionary benneficial way and with an identical purpose and biological characteristic.
In other words, while the particular manifestation may differ slightly, when you get right down to it, everything living feels "pain" to some degree or another. The only reason that we draw such a sharp line between pain in something like a dog and something like a tree, is that the pain we see in a dog's eyes is more familiar to us.
But emotional familiarity is not a grounds for assigning rights. It's certainly a legitimate argument for keeping animals safe from harm, as to do otherwise causes people psychological harm, but no more.
This isn't a reductio ad Calhounium argument against your proposed framework, and the point isn't that because you advocate similar idea to his and that therefor yours is flawed.
That may not be your overt point, but it certainly was the intomation. People don't cite Calhoun in political debates for neutral historical reasons, they do so because the man was a radical racist and making that kind of comparison is rhetorically powerful.
I doubt that even Ingrid Newkirk for all her rabid luncy truly believes that factory farms are morally comparible to the Holocaust. But she makes the comparison because she knows that it shocks people and she hopes that it will force them to reconsider their assumptions.
To an obviously lesser extent, you were, consciously or not, attempting something of the same.
The point is that, like African slaves, animals provide goods and services to humanity. If you believe, as you say you do, that in order for rights to have any meaning they have to be atributed to specific actors in a community with specific obligations and roles, than by necessity they would have to have some kind of rights -- a very different kind of rights than that of humans, but a form of rights none-the-less.
Animals "provide goods and services" in the same way that a microwave does, and I don't recall ever citing the capacity to "produce" as at all relevent to the question of social enfranchisement.
As you say, social participation means having social obligations, something which animals, and microwaves, do not and can not. Animals may "help" society in the sense that they preform physical tasks which produce/transform things, but again so do all manner of inanimate object.
Again, while appealing to material issues such as production and "roles", you are nonetheless still making a distinction between rights-deserving things like cows and chickens and non-rights-deserving ones like bacteria and microwaves.
As you've stated, that distinction is based solely on the capcity to experience pain "as humans do", i.e., to be capable of expressing something that we emotionally register as "suffering".
Absent that one argument, your proposed paradigm has nothing to it!
Pain is by no means the sole basis for rights -- it just happens to be the one most at issue we're talking about when we're discussing human treatment toward animals.
I'm curious to hear then what else you consider a critereon for rights, as so far you've listed nothing else.
In fact your entire argument in this thread ultimately boils down to this one assertion that "pain" is "bad" and therefore should be avoided. The fact that you've nonetheless failed to either define "pain" or explain precisely why it's "bad" means that, when it comes right down to, it your case rests on nothing but suppositions and appeals to emotion.
Absent "pain", you have provided absolutely nothing to differentiate between a cow and a lawn-mower. Certainly you haven't offered a coherent reason (other than "pain") why non-"sentient" life shouldn't be given rights.
Here, let me put this another way. If tomorrow, some scientist created a genetically engineered "cow" incapable of percievable pain, would you oppose its slaughter?
That is if we had no way to know whether it feld pain, if "far as [you], or anyone else [could] tell, [this] organisms [did] not experience pain in the sense that animals or humans do, in any way, shape, or form", how could you possibly justify protecting it given your paradigm of "pain"-based enfranchisement?
After all, this is largely a semantical debate. Call them "protections", "rights" or whatever else you want, for all practical purposes "protections" are a form of rights. But I understand, though, the purpose of this distinction between the two terms: without it, you'd have to say that you support animal rights!
Oh, the distinction matters a great deal more than that. Rights are fundamental attributes, entitlements which are universal and insoluble. They apply only to members of society by virute of their participation in the social interpersonal framework.
Protections, by contrast, are mere social concessions and can apply to anything whatsoever. They are eminently negotiable and incredibly contextual.
The mona lisa has protections, as does the Banff wildlive preserve. The only things that have rights are human beings capable of particupating in society.
And while superficially, both rights and protections may result in similar consequences (.e., being protected from harm), both the reasons and extent of those consequences are quite distinct.
A human being within human society has the right not to be harmed by anyone or anything, anything which attempts to harm him must therefore be prevented from doing so by human society. That applies just as much to things outside of human society as it does to those within it.
That's why society kills animals which pose a danger to people.
Animals, however, even in the most radical proposal for their "liberation", and certainly within the paradigm that you have proposed, would not be protected in any form from harm caused by other animals.
That is, their protections do not apply universally, but merely to the actions of specific agents at specific times in specific ways.
If you believed that animals truly had "rights, you would be obligated to argue for their protection even from natural predators. Something which, obviously, you cannot do as such a notion is absurd on the face of it even in theory.
Except that we're not talking about "murder" outside of human society, we're talking specifically about human interactions with animals. In that sense, we can conceptualized of an "animal murder".
Which is why a lion killing an elk is and unavoidable consequence of nature, and not a murder in the human sense.
And by limiting your discussion of "murder" to only those interactions which involve humans you are proving my point that such notions exist only within a human society framework.
Additionaly, you are failing to understand just why it is that "murder" is a violation of human rights. It's not because it causes us "pain" or any other such idealist nonsense, but because it violates our social right to security.
If animals shared that right, as you are implying they do, then they do with posses it without exception. That is in all cases, as with humans.
Clearly, however, that it is not what you are proposing. Rather you are suggesting that unlike with humans, animals' "rights" only extend to their interactions with one specific species and that protections from other animals are, for some reason, not included.
Subconsciously I suspect that these apparent inconsistancies stem from the fact that your "logic" is in fact an attempt to justify your prior emotional angst at the concept of "causing pain".
You don't like the idea of hurting animals and from that derived that there must be something "wrong" with it, but you're forced to grapple with the fact that "pain" is as much a part of life as reproduction.
And so you're forced to come up with this convoluted notion of limited pseudo-"rights" which apply arbitrarily to "suffering"-capable species, but no others, and only in interactions with human beings, but no others.
That's the logical mess you end up with when you start from a place of emotion instead of one of objective analysis.
It certainly doesn't make it any less alive, but the fact that a bacterium or a plant can respond to stimuli that would impact it negatively does not, in the slightest bit, mean that it can experience the feelings and emotions associated with being harmed or suffering.
Actually, that's exactly what it means. The capacity to react to external harmful stimuly is precisely what it means to "feel ... being harmed".
Again, bacteria don't experience that "feeling" in precisely the same way we do, but you've still to explain why that particular manner of sensation is relevent to the issue of social enfranchisement.
Nowhere in your self-admittedly long post did you offer even a single explanation for why human-like emotions have any bearing on what you've labeled "exclusive interests" or the deserving of rights.
Again, "pain" is nothing more than a series of neurochemical impulses in our brains. Bacteria may not have brains in which for neurons to fire, but they have a rudimentary equivalent capacity to chemically respond to harmful or dangerous stimuli.
At an objective biological level, therefore, they are just as eligible for "pain"-based protections as any dog or cat. Obviously though, again, no one proposes granting civil rights to E. coli!
There are, no doubt, quite compelling enviornmental aspects to veganism and legitimate reasons as to why living in a vegan society would be vastly superior enviornmentally than living in one such as we do now. Frankly, however, I'm not as interested in those as I am the ethical aspects of factory farming, but there are dozens of others on this forum who are very well versed in such research and argumentation, and have proved these claims in countless other threads.
That last assertion is obviously a subjective determination, and I would certainly contest the notion that any of these so-called "well versed" individuals have done anything more than peddle a bunch of irrelevent appeals to authoritarian social moralism.
The question of whether or not there really is an "environmental crisis" and the degree to which "green" policies are nescessary is better left to other threads, but I emphatically do not accept this petty-bourgeois notion that the working class must make "sacrifices" in order to "save the planet".
There may well be a need for environmental reforms, but at the present time we don't have nearly enough information to justify the massive imposition that would be banning meat.
It's just too damn pleasurable a product to eliminate without some geniunly convining evidence that doing so is actually nescessary. Right now, we're not even close to having that evidence. And, indeed, I would contend that the facts as they presently stand seem to indicate that cutting meat productin would do nothing to help the environment or to, as some vegans have remarkably contended it would, "fight capitalism".
I assume that you are not among those who naively believe that veganism has any bearing on the shape of the environment, but believe me, many if not most of the "well versed" members you reference have put forware that and even more outragous claims.
You might want to be careful just how much you endorse their "argumentation", there are a lot of crazies on your side of this particular aisle.
And, of course, the evidence that being a vegan or a vegetarian will greatly improve one's health.
A "fact" which is as unsupported as it is irrelevent.
Abstinence is probably healthy too, certainly it reduces your risk of contracting an STD down to zero; doesn't mean I'm planing on joing the clergy any time soon.
Meat isn't necessary for anything except personal pleasure. Unlike sex, which is arguably a biological necessity, and drugs and alcohol, all three of which harm no one in and of themselves (except, potentially, yourself), which is what makes them all intrinsically different than meat.
They're only "intrinsically different" if you hold up "causing harm" to be at all important. Since you clearly do, it makes sense that you'd refrain from the one and not nescessarily the other.
For my part, I happen to not really care if I harm a cow. That may shock your conscious, but moral outrageous is not justification for political oppression.
Safe sex causes the death of thousands of little sperm, sperm which are just as capable of chemical reactions to stimuli as you are I am. Making alchohol usually requires the termination of some form of life, as indeed does making most organic drugs.
I know, I know, sperm and cannibis don't feel pain [i]like we do and in your moreal universe that's an important distinction. I'm still waiting, however, for you to show me a shred of proof that that distinction exists anywhere outside of your brain.
It has everything to do with the reasons as to why nearly every human is disgusted by thought of the process by which meat arrives at your table: animals feel the very same pain that we do.
I'm glad that you've finally stated what you've been hinting at all this time, your paradigm is not based on objective analses of society or humanity, but one the emotions that you feel and what you imagine the "reasons" therein to be.
Well, let me tell you, there are a lot of reasons that you, and others, feel "disgust" at the notion of slaugtering an animal, but none of them are at all relevent to the question at hand -- I should also of course point out that that "disgust" is not nearly as universal as you claim, after all someone had to make that meat in the first place.
You feel "disgust" because your brain evolved to react negatively to other humans being harmed; such a reaction was nescessary for the formation of rudimentary society and since social proto-humans survived better than non-social one, that emotional programming has been in our brains ever since.
The fact that you also react that way when you see a non-human animal is a kind of emotional bleed-over effect. The way that many other animals react to pain is, as you say, relatively close to our own and so we recognize it when we see it.
But that accident of nature has no relevence to how society functions or should function. It explains why animal torture is abhorent to us and, as such, provides a reasonable justification for extending some degree of protections to some animals, but as far as rights are concerned, it tells us absolutely nothing at all.
It isn't probably an arbitrary distinction, it's certainly any arbitrary disction.
There is no discernable difference for cutting open a squirrel for entertainment and mutilating a calf for a luxury food source.
Actually, there's an enormously discernably difference. I can say that because, for all your bluster, I'm virtually a certain that no matter how much you may condemn the meat industry you don't seriously believe that a farmer and a psychopathic squirrel torturer are morally parallel.
Otherwise you'd favour locking up every single carnivorous/omniverous human on earth. Something which you've displayed far too muich sense to possibly believe.
No, clearly you are capable of discerning a difference as would be any other clear thinking adult. What you're arguing is not that it's impossible to differentiate the two, but rather that despite their differences they are both nonetheless "wrong".
In order to make that argument, however you are obliged to prove a couple of things. First of all that either of them are socially undesirable in the first place and secondly that that undesirability outweights the basic human right to freedom of action.
So far you haven't even managed to prove the first one, not in anything approaching a consistant manner.
For my part, however, I've provided a simple yet coherent model for why animal torture should be prevented and prevented by force. It's the same one that chimx alluded to in his post just above yours: it hurts human beings to see animals harmed.
Accordingly, we should make the same calculation that we do with other things who's destruction bothers us and outlaw it unless something stronger weights in the other direction.
As I said, the specifics of that calculation are often very tricky and do border on the arbitary, but the nescessity of that calculation in the first place is undeniably real.
And so just as we are able to distinguish post-war Germany's demolition of Nazi monuments from the Taliban's demolition of those two Buddha statues, despite the historic value of both, we are able to distinguish killing out of pure sadistic glee and killing in order to cure a disease or provide food for human beings.
It's not always that simple, of course, but nor is it anywhere near as grey as you are asserting.
To spin your "social contract" around, part of the reason I don't want a cow's neck to be slit is because I don't want mine to be slit either.
That's a nonargument and you know it.
No one's going to confuse a cow with a human any more than they are going to a tree; and so just like how permitting the killing of trees poses no danger to your personal security, neither does permitting the killing of cows.
There is a danger, however, when it comes to identifying which humans are actuallky able of actualizing their social capacity and which are not. Whereas we can all intuitively tell what's a cow and what's a person; we cannot so easily tell who is an actual or potential member of society and who is not when it comes to biological humans.
These are the marginal cases which people like you love to cite so much. And while it may not "cut it" in your mind, the reason that these people are, to a large extent, socially enfranchised is because we just can't know where they stop and actual social participants begin.
There's no "test" for social participation, nor even if there was one would I trust it for a second.
Human societal rights emerge from participation in human society, but because when it comes to the greyer cases that's such a damn difficult thing to measure, it's nescessary to have a simple and yet complete way to ensure that every single member of society is protected.
The best way to do that is to view all human beings as having all rights; that means treating a very small amount of people who don't actually have rights as if they do, but that's a tiny price to pay and an entirely harmless one.
Expanding our conception or rights to include every single "pain" feeling animal, however, would have a massively destabilizing effect on the very foundations of our society.
Not only is the very concept logically inconsistant, as I've demonstrated again and again, but any attempt to realize it, no matter how tempered by real life, undermine the humanist framework of our civil society and cause inumerable real practical harm to real practical human beings.
Under your definition of rights, a baby would not have any rights to speak of.
Under your clarification of why they would, a fetus would have the full rights of a baby.
No to the first one, but yes to the seoncd, albeit a qualified one.
Babies, much like squirrels have zero chance to participate in human society. That is we know without exception that a 1 month infant cannot conceptualize rights or operate within a moral interpersonal framework predicated on them.
We also know, however, that they will quickly develop into a being that can and that therefore their protection does not only respect the rights of a future member of society, but it eminently socially nescessary.
The further we go back biologically, however, the less and less relevence the future potentiality has. A sperm, after all, has a potential, even if it's a tiny one, of eventually leading to a person; a zygote has a somewhat larger chance, but it's still less than 50/50.
By the time we get to a 9 month foetus, there's a pretty decent chance that we're dealing with a potential person here.
All of which is why a foetus, of whatever age, sitting in a jar somewhere should almost certainly be granted a limited degree of societal protections. That's protections, mind you, not rights. As already illustrated that distinction is an essential one.
No baby has rights, they are merely protected until such a time as they become capable of participating in humnan society.
Those protections are not absolute, however, quite the contrary. And when they conflict with legitimate human needs and wants, again, a balaning test must be made.
Therefore while keeping a foetus alive is in the broad interest of society and of potential future member, as well as the psychologically well being of the many people who feel emotionally invested in foetuses; none of those interests are sufficient to outweight a pregnant woman's right to personal integrity.
Accoringly criminalizing abortion is an unjustifiable infringement on fundamental rights, as is outlawing or discouraging the use of human embryos or other biological materials in the pursuit of nescessary medical research.
I would contend, however, that killing a foetus for the purposes of eating is is probably unjustified as the wide variety of meats available makes that a highly dubious want which probably does not outweight the aforementioned reasons of protecting foetuses in isolation.
Obviously the same cannot be said for banning all or even most meats in their entirety. Although I'm not entirely closed to the idea that it might justify criminalizing the cooking of dogs or great apes as the psychic harm there is higher than in most other animals, and the relative bennefit of having their meat in particular is rather low.
For the record, he can't, and there are millions of people like him across the world, as there have been throughout history.
These people would not be afforded rights if we were to follow the logical extension of your moral framework -- something you yourself do not even do.
That last phrase is a complete assumption on your part, and one not founded in anything I've posted here or anything else.
I can't speak to your particular brother's case, but I can invent a hypothetical that illustrates the point just as well. If there was an individual human that I knew with 100% certainty was not capable and never would be capable of social participation (something which is probably impossible), it would be my conviction that that person was not in fact entitled of human rights.
They would be, of course, entitled to a high degree of social protection for the reasons I've outlined many many times now. But, no, that person would not have human rights in any way, shape, or form.
And while that might come across as particularly callous, that is again a solely emotional reaction, completely divorced from the objective question of what defines a right.
And before you ask if that means I'd favour vivisection on our hypothetical individual, my answer is a qualified no, although in certain specific circumstances I could probably be convinced as to its nescessity.
There just isn't that much information that we'd get from human testing that we can't get from other sources. If testing on "vegetables" were all that were standing between us and a cure for AIDS then I would support limited human testing ...but that's just not the case.
Disabled humans simply aren't that useful for medical purposes. What we really need are controlled healthy human trials and we have those now. We just wait until animal trials have been completed first.
Animal trials which, again, provide us with just as useful if not more useful data than we'd get from testing on sick and generally malformed marginal cases.
And since humans (even diabled humans) are part of a community of rational actors and as such are emotionally bonded to members of society, for the same reason that animal torture should be outlawed, testing on "vegetable" humans should be strongly avoided.
Not only in the abstract, but also on a real-life, day-to-day basis. When my stepfather feeds this person (who has the mental capacity of about a six month old infant), I can guarantee you that the idea of realizing his right to life for the sole purpose of "not missing rights for anyone".
I'm sorry, you seem to be missing a part of that sentence, your second clause doesn't have a conjugated verb and so doesn't really meanin anything.
I'd guess, however, that your intention was to convey something along the lines of "the idea of realizing his right to life for the sole purpose of "not missing rights for anyone" would never occur to him". And you're probably right.
But the question of what would or would not occur to your father is to be blunt completely irrelevent.
Of course those emotionaly attatched to "marginal cases" don't see them as such and certainly don't base their feelings on the rational basis of social enfranchisement. That's just not how emotion works.
But what you need to keep in mind is that the emotion your father feels towards your brother is no more real and no more distinct from the love that many pet owners feel towards their pets, including pets that might not meet your definition of "sentience".
I would even go so far as to say that there are probably people out there who feel just as much love and caring for completely inanimate objects. The capacity of the human mind to invest emotion is truly remarkable.
And while that love caring is certainly a good reason for that person to expend energy for the target thereof, and is also a pretty good justification for extending some degree of societal protections, the degree of which obviously depending the the specifics involved... it is not a good reason for considering that target to be considered a member of human society or possesing of human rights.
Again, you are confusing emotional attatchment with legitimate objective societal measures.
No, he does it because he knows that if he doesn't his son will starve and eventually die. He experiences the same pain that people like you and I do, and subsequently is treated
Again, though it's not because he "experiences pain" that he's treated, but because there's someone who cares for him. Absent that person, and absent someone to take there place, his feeling of pain would be irrelevent, as he wouldn't in fact get treated.
As you well know, there are millions of beings all around the world capable of experiencing what you call "pain" that are nonetheless harmed routinely. It isn't pain that's the determing factor it's the emotional investment of those around them.
I think this more than anything you've written so far demonstrates just how deeply your argument is based in feelings rather than logic. That you'd present the emotional motivations of a loving father as at all releven to the political question of what constitutes a right shows, to me at lesat, just how little you understand of what it really means to make an objective analysis of society.
Societies are complex social phenomina, and the actions of society as a collective whole have very litte at all to do with benefiting each and every member of society.
'Cause if they did, we wouldn't be posting on RevLeft, we'd already be living under communism.
That's a rather bizarre assertion, especially coming from someone who also wrote the following:
the different claims to rights that we have are very dependent upon the material conditions under which we live: the dominant forms of social interaction and relationships, societal organisation, technology, etc.
The reason that we are not living communism right now is that the material conditions have not yet made it possible. It's the same exact reason that capitalism only emerged a few hundred years ago or, to use your own example, why public health care is a relatively recent invention.
The existance of fundamental human rights does not mean that all societies "must" be capable of respecting those rights or even of recognizing them, all it really tells us politically speaking is that a society ought to recognize and respect them if it is to be considered free or "progressive" in any sense of the word
You're right, societies are very complex entities, but they exist for a very simple reason: they provide more bennefit than their absence. Accordingly, it is their fundamental purpose to maximize the bennefit that they provide.
Obviously we're still working out the kinks, even after a few hundred thousand years, but there's a reason that we've consistantly strove in the direction of progress.
My burden of proof is to show that animals should be interacted with with the recognition that they are sentient creatures with a capacity to suffer identical to that of humans -- a statement which is undeniable.
Not only is that statement undeniable, it's also bordering on the tautological, which is why it also clearly can't be your burden entering this debate; because if it were, we wouldn't be capable of having a debate...
No, your burden here has been to demonstrate that the "sentience" of which you speak is relevent to the question of social rights and their protection. Your burden is to explain why the "[way] that animals should be interacted with" is the same as the way that we interact with humans, or at least much closer than the current standard.
And for all your assertions regarding the fundamentality of "pain" and "feeling", you've still not proven a single of the premises nescessary to make your case: you haven't shown that "pain" is at all "bad" in and of itself; you haven't shown that animal "pain" is significantly distinct from non-animal "pain"; and you haven't shown that "pain" has anything to do with what constitutes a right.
I think you've established quite convincingly that animals getting hurt is emotionally bothersome, but then that fact was never in doubt. Now many of your more sensibly allies on this issue, such as for instance chimx, have cited this emotional harm as the reason why animal "rights" should be afforded.
I disagree with the extend to which they would offer these protections, but I cannot disagree with the underlying logic.
You, however, have claimed something more; you've contended that there is something else at issue, that there is something more important than this human harm which should motivate us to act.
And despite a valiant and largely eloquent attempt, you've unfortunately failed to even come close to making that case.
I am not here to defend the well-meaning lunatic who puts a gun to your head and tells you to "put down the hamburger".
Actually that's exactly who you're here to defend.
Unless your entire argument is one large preamble to a vegan cookbook, you propose that animals have inherent rights and that those rights must be protected. That requires the use of force when those rights are challenged.
You don't nescessarily support ALF or Justice Department type vigilante violence, but at the least you must support some kind of institutional response to percieved animal cruelty in this and/or any future hypothetical society.
Again, I couldn't care less what you personally choose to eat or not eat or kill or not kill, I only care what you intend on stopping me or anyone else from eating or killing.
My interest in "ethical debate" extends solely to the political sphere; outside of that, "right" and "wrong" don't enter into my thoughts.
Fuck that post was long.
How do you do it LSD? :P
There's a reason I took a two month break from posting, it's tiring stuff! :)