I'm curious where animals get rights from in the first place? Serious question.
These rights apply only in human - animal relations and not animal - animal relations. Carnivorous animals and other plants are free to do as they like to their fellow beings. But, from what I know animals rarely abuse other animals for no reason. Usually there is a good reason for them to attack another animal like food, territory, self defense or if they are ill( elephants in musth, rabid dogs and wolves).
What am trying to say is that animals get rights from the same place that we get rights, laws and social norms.
Animals are farmed and killed for us to eat, the least we can do is to treat them with respect while they are alive.
I am sleepy.
Not trying to undermine your point, but wanted to point out that animals aren't always as noble as you suggest. Ever seen a cat playing with a mouse?
As a being capable of moral reflection, I think I have a duty not to inflict, or support the infliction upon, other beings capable of feeling pain and suffering. Thus, other beings have a right not to be inflicted with pain and suffering, from me at least.
As far as you know.
if it's
>Physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury
it has to be communicated to you, which in the case of animals is quite hard.
On the other hand, if you define "suffering" as
>an unpleasant situation causing signs of distress that is avoided by the sufferer,
then you can make better predictions, because "avoidance" or "distress" are easier to measure.
If I am about to demolish a house, it is my moral duty to ensure that the house contains no occupants. It is not sufficient to claim "as far as I know the house is empty, therefore I needn't check".
Similarly, if you make any moral claim predicated on the assumption that animals do not experience pain (or experience it to a lesser degree than humans), the burden is on you to demonstrate as much.
If you do not take religion or the supernatural as an axiom, you face a very difficult proof due to the physiological and evolutionary similarities between humans and other animals.
Anyway, you're going to have a problem proving that plants feel pain since they lack all of the elements that cause the experience of pain in animals, such as nerves and brains.
colanderman was that you had to prove they don't before eating them, so I pointed out that until recently, we didn't even know of such elements.
I claimed that if you make a distinction in your morality between animals and plants based on their ability to feel pain, you have that duty. (Note that this is a claim about the consistency of a morality, not about one particular moral system.)
If on the other hand your morality does predicate your moral right to eat something based on its ability to feel pain (as our ancestors did), then there is no such duty.
(Of course there is also a grey area between these -- a morality based on a creature's ability to express an experience of pain is more broadly accessible.)
Instead of defending our current habits with theoreticals, shouldn't we determine our actions based on the information we have available to us, with respect to the alternatives?
Personally, I take the position that everything I do probably has a negative impact somewhere. Taking the car, bus, train, or staying at home all have consequences for the environment. While I don't lock myself in my apartment, I do regularly review my lifestyle choices and see if they align with my values.
The same is true of the food I eat, both from an environmental point of view as well as how much suffering is involved.
(i.e. My comment is a critique of the consistency of the moral system the GP set up; it is not an absolute moral judgement.)
and tell me that it's "as far as you know" then.
WARNING: graphic. extremely graphic. i honestly don't understand how anyone could treat another living creature like that.
Clearly some forms of pain and suffering are easily observed!
But what about the pain and suffering you can't observe? Insects? Plants? Microbes?
My point is, by placing the moral threshold at "observable pain and suffering", you are taking the easy way out.
Nobody is obligated to protect your rights for you (and vice versa), but they can do so voluntarily.
Looking at it like this, it makes animal rights a matter of morality.
An animal cannot defend its own rights, so they depend on humans to voluntarily defend their rights for them. Nobody is obligated to do so, but its reasonable to believe the world would be a better place if we treated animals better.
But what do we mean by making things better? Most modern talk on this matter is a mere argument in a circle -- that circle which we have already made the symbol of madness and of mere rationalism. Evolution is only good if it produces good; good is only good if it helps evolution. The elephant stands on the tortoise, and the tortoise on the elephant.
Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except for some human or divine theory), there is no principle in nature. For instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature. He is right, but he does not see the logical addendum. There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature. Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value. To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it. Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive. Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence, so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to be got.
In my world, the only obligations anyone or anything has, are to defend yourself, and to treat others in the manner that you would want to be treated.
Exploiting a superiority over another species just because you can, in my opinion, is an indication of that one hasn't transcended inferior instincts.
All personal opinions of course, I could be wrong about everything.
I wouldn't for the sake of it willfully maim or destroy a plant.
That said, I'm also not the kind of guy that watches his footsteps to avoid stepping on ants or grass.
My point is in order to do something you wouldn't like done to you to something else, not out of necessity, but just because you feel like doing it, you may have missed an update or two from evolution's package manager.
Yeah screw trying to provide consistent source of protein for 7 billion people. We torture and mutilate cows and chickens just because we can.
I'm also arguing that it is not necessary to be cruel to animals, even if you have to eat them. Beating and torturing a chicken doesn't provide any more protein than if you treated it humanely and slaughtered it in a quick and painless way.
You can even argue that being a part of our diet actually benefits the species as a whole. You don't see cows and chickens on an endangered species list, but you don't see them in the wild either.
To go even further, we will eventually have the ability to create synthetic meats that don't require us to slaughter animals.
The language is misleading.
Think about what rights you have when you're alone. None whatsoever -- rights only apply when you're interacting with others!
Rights are behavioral rules that we agree on, encoded as if they were inherent to people because it's simpler to think of them that way (and our society benefits from the misdirection, on the whole).
Rights are things that thinking beings can "respect" in others (and follow the behavioral rules), or not -- this works the same for respecting human or animal rights -- but they are a completely human construct.
That's not a right of the object, it's a right of the people who own the object. If I make a replica of the Statue, I can do whatever I please with it, including burning it to the ground.
Before the animal question -- where do people get rights?
"Rights" are absolutely not inherent to anyone or anything... though it serves our society if people believe that rights are natural and inherent. The language of rights reinforces that view, but it's obviously false if you think it through; they're a language construct around a behavioral guide.
In reality, a single entity (person/animal/etc.) has no rights whatsoever. What "rights" do you have when you're alone? They only serve any purpose when you're interacting with others.
Rights are something a thinking entity recognizes (acts as if they exist) in others. If you "recognize" a right in another entity, you guide your behavior to avoid violating that right.
So generally non-humans aren't capable of respecting human rights -- your dog can't personally understand that the mailman has a right to unhampered movement in public walkways. But that's irrelevant to whether "animal rights" can exist -- if a thinking person recognizes that an animal has a right (to no undue suffering, whatever), that animal now has that right.
In the eyes of that one person, anyway.
The animal rights struggle is generally about getting more people generally to respect rights in animals, and then enshrining those rights in law (to force recognition of those rights even in people who don't intellectually agree the right is merited).
I love thinking about this stuff because the language is so misleading -- I was confused about rights for many years, before I finally sat down and mapped out what actually happens IRL when various rights were respected, violated, etc..
In all honesty though we get our rights from wherever we can convince others that we have those rights, for example in the UK if you're born to the right parents you have the right to live in buckingham palace. They claim those people get those rights from God.
Still, they do feel emotions such as joy and fear, and physical sensations such as pleasure and pain. And how we treat them does have an effect on which of these they are going to feel.
Would I go out of my way to cause pain to an animal? Would I go out of my way to prevent pain to it? On what basis should I decide?
I think everything we do says, "this is who I am". That is, through every action (or inaction), we make a statement about how we perceive of ourselves. If I perceive of myself as a kind person, I would be conflicted about doing anything that I know will cause pain to another sentient being. If I have low self-esteem and don't think of myself as a particularly nice person, I might not make much of an effort to regulate my behavior to account for the effect it might have on others.
So, I would say that we forget about "animal rights", and think only about whether our actions truly reflect the kind of people and the kind of society we wish to be.
I'll also add that animals can feel 'pain'. The world is a better place with less overall pain.
Being able to think outside of the existing paradigm of rights based thinking is not something that is "wrong" it is actually more 'considered' than knee jerk assertions.