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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

It's nowhere discussed in the article, so the other elephant in the room:

Our whole society is based on animals not having rights.

Some people see a gradation where we could have criteria to determine how many rights could each kind of animal have, and argue about small details. But of course the other point of view will be that any fissuring of the concept of animals as "things" will break the dam and there will be no going back.

For anyone seeing simple and clear lines that could be drawn, try to classify the elephants in the article, the differnt kind monkeys, pigs, cows, dogs , racoons and ant colonies. You see the wall that rises the minute elephants get special rights while cows keep feeding us, for instance.

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Grading rights in this way could also have consequences for humans. If rights are to be assigned based on intelligence/sociability/capability then it opens the door to considering whether some humans might not qualify.

Yes.

For some people it might look far fetched at first, but considering that women only got full voting rights around a few decades ago in most western countries, and are still far from there in so many countries, humans getting different rights is still totally a thing.

True...but in what jurisdiction do voting rights, or freedom of contract, start at birth? And is anyone campaigning for "justice" on that issue?

Whether or not you describe it as "rights", the concept of animal cruelty has been around for centuries. Probably millennia. And the great majority of people seem comfortable with shades-of-gray classifications of animals for that purpose. If some kid is capturing squirrels and torturing them, he's "obviously" a psychopathic sicko. Vs. if Ed's Exterminators is fleabombing some cat lady's house - nobody's getting worked up about Evil Ed "gassing" the poor, innocent fleas.

I believe it is backwards: Human society is predicated on humans being special.

Any truly objective observer will say humans are no different from other animals on Earth.

And of course, an elephant will likely say they're special while everything else isn't.

I'd disagree for two reasons:

- Humans can easily treat other humans as things as well. Humans being special is to me more or a convenient fiction than something really at the core of our societies.

- For such a long time, we didn't have to care whether humans need to be separated from animals, the value scale was pretty flat in that respect. In many circumstances a horse from a higher up would be more important than a peasant's life.

> Human society is predicated on humans being special.

So far, so good.

> Any truly objective observer will say humans are no different from other animals on Earth

And...we hard exit stage left. It's sad when presumably good intentions, like the ethical treatment of animals and cultivating some well needed humility as a species, leads to such an unfounded point of view.

From a purely biological perspective, I could see that argument. But until animals start hunting, experimenting on, cultivating, and eating humans, en masse, creating symphonies or buildings that will last centuries, and start sending themselves to space, I'll continue to believe the difference between humans and animals is a qualitative and not just a quantitative difference. I don't think a truly objective observe could see it any other way.

> Any truly objective observer will say humans are no different from other animals on Earth.

Except in all the ways that we are?

What other species have left the planet and came back to tell the tale?

Dogs, monkeys, rats. Surely we took them there and back, but how sure are we that that wasn't their plan all along?!

Ham the chimpanzee for one.

It seems askew to attribute 8 billion+ humans with an attribute marking so few humans .

The point is that any human did that at all, whereas no other species has.

No human has run faster than a cheetah nor flown like an eagle.

What is your point that elevates the value of human life above that of other animals?

> No human has run faster than a cheetah nor flown like an eagle.

No, but we have and regularly do move faster than any cheetah and fly higher and further than any eagle.

My point is that, to an objective observer, there are things that humans have done and can do that make us obviously separate, as a species, than any other animal on earth.

The scale of our combined efforts dwarf the efforts of other animals. Especially when considering that, physically, we have very few advantages over other animals.

Arguing against that point is just playing mental gymnastics to say “oh actually humans aren’t really exceptional”

Idk what that might say about the “value” (whatever that means) of human life compared to other life.

A concrete example would be climate change. Humans have been pumping the atmosphere full of shit for a long time and it’s causing global climate changes. No other animal has affected the climate at that scale.

Bad or not, that kind of thing makes us humans exceptional.

>No other animal has affected the climate at that scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

The environmental impact humans have had, if any, is astronomically negligible. Even if it wasn't, we certainly aren't the first and certainly won't be the last.

Again with the mental gymnastics

> This began approximately 2.460–2.426 Ga (billion years) ago during the Siderian period and ended approximately 2.060 Ga ago during the Rhyacian

So it took them what, like 400M years?

Our Industrial Revolution was 500ish years ago? Hell, we’ve only been around for 10k years.The scale of that is wildly different.

Also let’s not forget that we can quickly change the atmosphere’s composition, leave the planet and return, move faster than any cheetah, and fly higher and further than any eagle. All of that and more.

The rate of change of our species’ capabilities seem to change much faster than other animals as well

It’s crazy that you’re serious, I’m sorry.

>Our Industrial Revolution was 500ish years ago?

Yeah, and we're talking about maybe we could cause the oceans to rise a few fractions of an inch in that time.

The impact of humanity has been massively overblown by people like you, which only take away from any worthwhile conversation.

You must’ve just skimmed the conversation.

My point is that an objective observer looking at the world would absolutely recognize that humanity is an exceptional species (not necessarily in a good or bad way) among all that exist on earth in many ways.

The impact we have on the planet is non-negligible. A few fractions of an inch in 500 years (effectively instant on a geological timescale) is indeed meaningful, but not what I’m trying to argue.

> people like you

You know next to nothing about me. Try not to generalize.

I can infer enough about you from our conversation to reaffirm my point that human society is predicated on humans being special. It is our instinctive nature to place ourselves upon a pedestal and look down upon all non-human life, and you're demonstrating that in spades.

I'm not going to say this is human nature, because I think all species have the same instinctive frame of mind if we could but communicate with them. I have no doubt that elephants look down upon us as crazy apes, but I have no way to prove that since I don't speak elephant.

> I can infer enough about you from our conversation to reaffirm my point that human society is predicated on humans being special.

“Based on this one comment thread, I know enough about you to be able to tell that all of human society is based on humans being special“

Is a crazy statement that has next to nothing to do with the conversation I’ve been having…

I mean, you're championing the glory of humanity in a subthread where the observation is human society is predicated on humans being special.

This isn't a jab at you, rather you're demonstrating the axiom of human society as a member of it.

We are on top, which makes us special.

The endemic diseases say we're not on top of the food chain.

We're special to each other because we wouldn't function very well if we didn't find each other special.

Yet, we take great care in our own society to ensure people higher up in the food chain don’t take advantage of those below them—so much so, in fact, that the declaration of human rights declares we’re all born equal. If we sort ourselves in a hierarchy with other sentient beings, why doesn’t the same concept apply to them too?

I would be all for more severe laws on abuse and living conditions for animals without it getting into the specifics of "intelligence" or "rights". Something akin to the golden rule.

Let's be honest, these laws won't apply to the average person. It'll apply to where it really matters:

Poach an elephant in Africa and come home? Now you're going to court for murder.

Keep a Monkey inside your house? Looks like you're going to court for kidnapping.

Keep a dog outside chained to a fence and barely feed it? Looks like you're going to court for abuse (more severe than what we do now).

We can make provisions for things. Animals eat animals that's the reality of our world. But make cows sit in their own shit for years and eat food that's non nutritional for them? Now you're going to jail for mass incarceration of living things.

It's wildly accepted bees are quite intelligent. Let's treat the company who made insecticides that killed all the bees with genocide. Once that legal president is set, let's do the same for people who continue to use insecticides.

Animals have rights, but they are not treated as humans (in some jurisdictions you can even be jailed for mistreating certain animals). The anthropomorphisation of animals is kind of a childish behaviour that affects too many city kids.

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