An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules
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Philosophically, the same could be applied to a paraplegic, or in most cases to somebody with Down syndrome, so I wonder if there was more in the ruling; I find this argument very poor.
Someone with a learning disability - or Down Syndrome, or mental health issues of almost any kind - can often sue to void contracts that they've signed; or their guardian can sue on their behalf.
Courts can rule you to be mentally incapacitated, and you lose your right to vote in many states in the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/keeping-th...
I'm sure you can continue your research by yourself at this point...
Our goals in a social context are always to make the best possible decisions with what we know, and to enable each other to do the same. We have goals, information, communication, and laws. Rights are inarticulate and overly-understand things -- almost to the point of purposelessness.
People should not be making arguments based on rights, but upon what is known about ourselves and our reality. We should use what can be rationally supported and what can be reasonably predicted based upon shared experiences and cultural knowledge. Rights are just a vague and small slice of this, easily made muddy by the fact that people can know they have rights without even knowing why they should have them, where they apply, or when to give them up.
This is a good thing because it provides a written moral standard and a legal basis for further argument - rather like a constitution.
Relying on 'rational argument' doesn't work as well because most 'rational argument' in politics, law, and economics is persuasion through sophistry, custom, tribalism, rhetoric, appeal to self-interest, and/or the application or threat of force.
None of these have much to do with rationality in the scientific sense of being able to build useful models of reality from data.
tl dr; Defining rights makes spurious political plays more difficult.
ISIS will say everyone has the right to have a slave. The UN says everyone has the right to paid vacations (yes, it really does say that).
Who decides which rights should be accepted?
There is no one who can do so. Rights are arbitrary and reflect the culture of those who defined them.
You either decide to accept them or you don't. i.e. it's pretty much identical to "rational argument".
He has tried to define a difference between them that doesn't actually exist.
Most of the time you can just say something like "It should be unlawful to do X in situation Y because it undermines the ability of those involved to make predictably good decisions."
Rights are useful in the same way that asserting "pi = 3" is useful: it's simply better than nothing. It is hardly some kind of ideal, despite how easy life would be if it were true.
A rational argument is one that compels a rational person to agree -- one that provides a natural threat of catastrophic failure should it be ignored.
The problem that everybody thinks they are rational and that they don't know what rational means is not a problem with rationality. It's a problem with irrationality.
In respect to the OP, setting down the rights of Orangutans surely is making a rational argument, then allowing that argument to be applied in all similar cases, rather than making the same argument repeatedly?
[1] as fought for cross-culture/worldwide/etc (eg human rights) and positive, not culture-specific & negative (eg rights of one tribal group over all others in a country).
So if rights are always secondary to rational arguments, what extra value do they bring to the ethical picture? They only mean anything if you are making irrational decisions, 'blindly' protecting them and whatnot.
>[rational arguments] produce much more fragile legal structures than rights infer.
I don't believe this, and I don't think there are any examples to suggest this. Laws are notoriously less flexible than they would need to be to be engines of rational decision-making, and thus there are no 'rational' legal structures. The fact that we have judges, juries, and opportunities for defense against the law are constructs that we invented to inject rational flexibility into a legal systems which would otherwise be blind draconian monoliths.
But this means you step outside of the legal structure and into the ethical structure of the minds involved: a judge/jury can rule that, even if you violated some law, you might be _justified_ in doing so and should not suffer any consequences. This kind of argument is often made in terms of rights, but then, so are the laws that are being ignored. One must always apply a rational argument, because every right is in conflict with some other right -- being that they are vague, underspecified things to begin with.
In today's world, that means two things. If you cannot pick up and fire a gun, you have no rights. If you can pick up a gun, but cannot restrain yourself from using it against others who also can, you have no rights.
It is convenient for some people who have rights to act as a guardian to someone who does not, to provide the illusion that they also have rights. Babies enjoy the illusion of some rights, because if you try to harm one, the parents will probably try to harm you, along with hordes of other offended adults.
The entire system is built upon a civilized arrangement, where people agree that certain actions do not merit retaliatory violence. In order to insult someone else's mother without getting punched in the face, I must be prepared to hear insults to my own mother and restrain my own fist.
This implies that the only requirement for having rights is the ability to respect the same rights for others. It would seem that a necessary prerequisite for that is the ability to communicate. Orangutans have demonstrated this ability with manual signing, lexigrams, and keyboards. But it is uncertain whether an orangutan could also generalize its social interactions to include other humans or orangutans that had never been previously encountered. They have learned to use money, so it's very possible they could learn the other social constructs of civilization.
Orangutans have at least demonstrated learning and cognition abilities on par with some humans, so I'd be willing to pretend they have rights in line with human children or those otherwise legally incompetent. They can definitely learn to use the gun. The question is whether they can also learn not to use it.
After that, it's a matter of negotiation. An orangutan might care more about fig tree rights and habitat protections than about the right to own property or freedom of religion.
Well, I suppose if I break my wrists, I don't have a right to live anymore.
>This implies that the only requirement for having rights is the ability to respect the same rights for others
This is obviously not true at all. If I tell you I have a right to own property, surely an ant doesn't have the same right. So what do you mean by "others?" Other things that I would choose to call equal humans? Who gets to say who that is?
This is fundamentally why I hate the concept: people like to pretend it means something if only everybody ignores all the obvious inconsistencies in the discussion.
You're saying fundamentally incompetent things, and the vagueness of your terminology lets you feel secure in the fact that nobody has the ability to correct you.
So you have replaced a debate about values and shared definitions to one predicated on groupthink. Basing your moral decisions on shared experiences and cultural knowledge leads to the exact kind of in-group/out-group thinking that the idea of rights was designed to combat. It isn't a perfect moral framework, but it is one that has achieved a great deal of good in the last few centuries.
I'm not talking about in-group/out-group thinking, but _generally applicable_ constraints on human behavior. Economics, psychology, science, etc. Things that can be optimized on _arbitrary_ cultures using techniques that are already known to succeed everywhere.
Rights do not fit into this picture. Rights are not based on measurable and general principles, but upon cultural expectations handed down through tradition.
"The Nonhuman Rights Project had addressed that argument in their brief, countering that young children and adults with severe mental disabilities are not expected to fulfill the social obligations of mature adults, but are still granted legal rights.
While that is true, wrote the judges, “it is undeniable that, collectively, human beings possess the unique ability to bear legal responsibility.”"
In a way, it's a pretty decent way to look at it. It means all that is required for an entire species to be given personal rights is to prove that they can fulfill the obligations that come with them. It decouples the rights from the good or bad inviduals, and reduces it to "what is this genetic grouping capable of".
I still orangutans should have rights, though.
Plus you're a distressingly short trip from the bar being "having right and proper political beliefs".
"Speciesism" at least has the virtue of being fairly unambiguous. It may still be the better policy even if it isn't perfect.
Meaning ethically we have no ground, if cows could start having rational thoughts /talking all we could answer them is "sorry for killing millions of you all, you have tasty meat, it has nutrients... And stuff... and you didn't complain before".
Personally, in that case, I'd have ruled that they have no standing to represent the animal as they are neither related nor has the animal agreed to their representation.
I see your point though; if a person were doing as little harm as a mosquito does, most people wouldn't kill them in retaliation.
“it is undeniable that, collectively, human beings possess
the unique ability to bear legal responsibility.”
Also, did you know you can put a corpse on trial? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod
I find the latter reasoning much better, but think that the whole argument could have been avoided by asking another question: instead of "does the primate have rights?" we could ask "do humans have the right to lock up a primate". In the latter case, it would have been fairly easy to reason that the interests of the human (seeing a monkey in a zoo) are in no way vital and cannot establish a right, without getting into the question whether the monkey has rights.
[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/#ConProAni
That's a rather poor argument because it is non-specific. By that argument I can not own a potato either because there is no vital need for me to do so.
The point of framing the argument in the terms that konstruktor has, is to change the debate from, "Are apes sufficiently like humans to justify giving them rights?" to "Are apes sufficiently different from non-sentient entities to justify treating them differently." And I think this is a much more persuasive argument -- I think humanity is less willing accept freely that apes are equivalent to humans on some level, than they are to say that the act of viewing an ape for enjoyment does not justify locking up something that is clearly more intelligent and self-aware than your average apricot.
You could argue that caging an orangutan in particular is not important, however you could just as easily argue that the world might manage if we all stopped growing potatoes.
However, I would personally argue that a rights based system only works when you have a way to have rights clash and reach compromise positions. An open ended right is not very useful because just about every right becomes impossible to enforce or provide at the extremes. When you provide certain agreed upon rights to both humans and orangutans you can have meaningful discussions about where those rights intersect and how those confluences should be handled, and in this way you avoid the absurd implications of absolute rights.
Certainly we can find other philosophical approaches which are more reasonable.
(not taking a position, just pointing out the massive inconsistency)
Philosophically, the same could be applied to an ant. I find your argument very poor.
It includes leading proponents and opponents of legal protections for non-human animals.
I got disillusioned very quickly, but one very interesting course I took was on the definition of personhood, and I had to give short talk on the "grey areas" of personhood. Biology alone is not going to cut it, and once we begin to extend personhood status to beings other than homo sapiens, it is going to get very fuzzy.
Given that no important scientific advance has ever originated from philosophy ... (ie. the ones by accomplished mathematicians that were -usually posthumously- declared philosophers don't count)
It's like the "we have to redesign the methodology, find the lessons for the company" discussion at the end of every software project. It takes time and effort, makes management and project managers and even customers very happy, it involves programmers listening to the "good" advice of everybody who can't program and is about as productive as suicide, without the satisfaction at the end.
Philosophy is when you try to answer questions about definitions/language, with definitions/language.
That doesn't make philosophy useless. It just makes philosophy one part of the system -- a lot of times philosophy generates questions and ideas which are later addressed in a scientific way. It's a useful tool; be careful not to either overvalue or undervalue it. (Likewise, AFAIK no important scientific advance has ever originated from a grammar instructor, but coherent language is an important tool for allowing science to be performed and communicated.)
There is some truth to this. It is what I mentioned before : "Given that no important scientific advance has ever originated from philosophy ... (ie. the ones by accomplished mathematicians that were -usually posthumously- declared philosophers don't count)", specifically by the don't count part.
So two points :
1) this definition actually excludes most parts of philosophy [1]
2) This part of philosophy can only be exercised productively by people who also have extensive credentials in at least one other field (otherwise the "later addressed" part doesn't work). Which brings the question, is this philosophy ? Or is this logic ? (taking one example field that's well represented in philosophy's claims).
And to be honest, this is the same argument Religious studies makes. With one huge difference. Most important researchers were actually learned in Religion (vast majority were very learned in Christian religion, and they did credit or at least reference their religious knowledge with part of important discoveries, with Newton and Einstein as 2 very well known examples. Even though nearly universally learned in Christianity, I should probably mention some of them were Jews (including Einstein, of course). But there's examples of people of other religions further back. Weird part is that there seem to be very large differences between religions on this point. From the large majority of islamic scientists, for instance, it is well known that they weren't muslims, but rather non-muslim slaves at some court [2]. For Hinduism the reverse seems to be true. Like Christians, many Indian scientists credit their faith with pushing them to research nature (and like with Christians, the general population did not always agree with that assessment and killed a number of them for it))
I have actually seen this at university. There were several (about to retire, or even emeriti) professors that were monks. Given how they lived, I can understand how that would help with scientific research. One should take a look at, say the Jesuit atlasses of the sky, and you'll be impressed with the quality and quantity of their work. They are not just credited with lots of discoveries, but also with absolutely incredible amounts of grunt work, and with keeping knowledge of science spread throughout western culture.
For philosophers you can say the exact opposite. There are many "pure" philosophers. None, to my knowledge, have been credited with large amounts of grunt work.
And sadly, like Christianity before it, philosophy can be credited with inhibiting science as well. The big current example is research into human races, but there are other examples. From the closely related "bon sauvage" incidents, the "green" morality (believe it or not, nature is what might be termed chaotic neutral, it is decidedly NOT "lawful good", but we're repressing knowledge about this). The same thing is true for research about humans themselves, where lots of things are repressed (e.g. the reason that Freud is so fixated on sexual experiences during early age is understood to be that a significant portion of his patients were victims of paedophilia, but again I'm told you can't say this directly in papers). Humans must be good, especially scientists themselves (e.g. Galileo Galilei was deservedly a famous scientist ... who then decided to become a politician and a horrible, horrible human being. Which of those 2 things got him in trouble with the church (and with the state) ? Let's be honest here : the second (otherwise the timing becomes very hard to explain). General lesson to be drawn here : no matter how you are, if you start sending letters to every politician and priest how "their kind" will all get tortured and hanged as soon as he can make it happen, you'll be in serious trouble if it appears you are getting a following).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy
[2] For instance Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwārizmī al-Majousi al-Katarbali, who was instrumental in helping Greek and Roman algebra survive the Dark Ages was very likely a Zoroaster
The problem with your point of view is that you get blinded by what can even be a Science. I think that's why we need philosophy. It asks hard questions and directs the investigation.
- Also, I find this whole thing distracting, if you have any energy to put into "rights", there are billions of humans in need of help for very basic things (including rights). Am I overlooking something?
Cows have no rights because they're tasty and boring.
What matters is the amount of empathy we feel with the creature. With dogs, we often think of them as our friends and companions. With mice, we often think of them as vermin and a problem.
Though, I'm sure if you took George's mouse Milo and fed it to a snake George would be extremely upset.
That's pretty far outside the mainstream -- lots of jurisdictions have laws about the humane slaughter of animals.
For obvious reasons, people tend not to restrict their moral consideration of pain to those beings that will never die.
The vast majority of people don't care at all. But the people who do care care a lot, and make a lot of racket.
> For obvious reasons, people tend not to restrict their moral consideration of pain to those beings that will never die.
I honestly have no idea what you could possibly be talking about. Can you rephrase? Specifically, since the set of "those beings that will never die" has size zero, the sentence seems like a truism.
If I understand this correctly, you were saying that the animals' deaths essentially render their suffering irrelevant. It seems to logically follow that if everything is dead "at the end of the process" then there's no suffering that we need ever care about.
I don't honestly think you hold that position, but it's at least consistent with your earlier post, so it'd be nice to know where your logic breaks from mine.
Your example of the mouse fed to a snake is a good one; I find that very ethically troubling. It's also different depending on whether it's being done in a scientific context (for study of snakes as predators) or in a domestic one. On the whole I'm against it, but shouldn't I thus also be against the use of feeder fish or insects to lizards and so on? I find it increasingly hard to draw a bright-line distinction.
One day a couple of years ago I found one of my cats had trapped a dragonfly, more of curiosity than malice (so the cat didn't mind when I moved his paw out of the way). The dragonfly was a bit stunned and one of its eyes was bashed inward like a piece of plastic, so I thought it was a goner. But I picked up to take a look because I'd never seen such a large specimen before. Now, dragonflies are interesting, as a photographer friend of mine who specialize din insects explained many years ago. They are the lions of the insect world, ie large and predatory, and cannibalistic. They live for up to 2-3 years as flightless nymphs, hunting in both water and on land, and for about 6 months as adults. They are somewhat territorial, and there are also far more males than females so mating is highly competitive (for the males) and usually involuntary (for the females). By the end of the summer it's very common to see dragonflies going around with missing limbs, damaged eyes, and so on. I learned about them in England, where you see ones that are 2 or 3 inches long, but here in Northern California where I live now it's common to see ones that measure 4-5 inches - which bring me back to the one my cat caught. I picked the thing up and it sat on my hand, and fortunately I had a camera with me so I got a bunch of photographs. I assumed it was just going to die, but to my surprise, after a few minutes of just sitting there, it perked up, checked itself over with its front legs, stretched itself out in a few different directions, and took off. Then it spent a minute or two flying around badly - remember on its eyes had been bent quite out of shape. Again, I assumed it was going to wobble along until it hit something or got grabbed by a bird, but it kept hovering and then darting over short distances with increasingly good control, until eventually it seemed satisfied and zipped off with confidence. It hung around the garden for a few minutes longer (I presume to feed on some tiny insects) and if I hadn't had it in my hand I wouldn't have known it had suffered any damage.
Now I certainly don't think dragonflies are sentient or even intelligent - I think of most insects as being a bundle of hardwired reflexes. But watching the thing 'repair' its flight model was startling, and while it's not evidence of intelligence it suggests some sort of rudimentary self-concept. The very long lifespan of some dragonfly species presumably confers some sort of evolutionary advantage, so it seems reasonable to imagine they have some learning ability - fruit flies can be taught to navigate a maze [1] and dragonflies are known to have a capacity for selective attention [2], and insect brains are surprisngly complex [3] so I don't think I'm anthropomorphizing when I suggest the possibility that they have some sort of pre-conscious but nonetheless subjective life experience.
1. http://www.dnalc.org/view/1720-Training-Flies.html
2. http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0960982212013929/1-s2.0-S096098221201...
3. http://bioteaching.com/insect-brains-and-animal-intelligence...
BTW here's a picture if you're curious: https://plus.google.com/117583585506971591172/posts/8J7ZLgKk...
As for the second, I think that's an unfair and paralyzing comment but I don't think you mean it in bad faith. We all have different capacities to help alleviate suffering in different ways, with different impacts. The fact that there are "bigger" injustices does not mean that small ones should be ignored, especially when they are within your community and you have the ability to fix them yourself.
Or - if you're interested in stepping a little outside mainstream opinions - what makes animal suffering any less important than human suffering? Are we really special in some way that other animals aren't?
edit, namely I have found the long term of many similar groups who support animal "rights" do not want people to keep pets. Having family members who breed and show dogs it is not uncommon to find these groups trying to get laws passed limiting pet ownership or worse.
Animals have rights, not human rights.
Oh course they have issues, pets aren't designed to live domestic suburban human lives. I just don't believe humanity automatically and morally should have dominion of all animals. I think giving up on non-working pet ownership is a step in the right direction. And when sci-fi style robotics gets here, give up on working animals altogether.
I say this as someone who loves and has owned several dogs. They're just not cut out for our lives. I think there was a study that showed most pets have severe mental illness. Not to mention, the ones that can't play the human domestic game and heaven forbid show their natural aggression or dominance traits, well they get killed. How the hell is this moral? Why is the loss of pet ownership this horrific thing? It seems like thats the way a compassionate society should be leaning towards.
For the most part, these additional restrictions are to prevent animal owners from practicing monstrous acts on the animal. Failure to abide by those restrictions is a social signal that the human may not be able to behave in a civilized fashion with other humans. The restrictions have the outward appearance of protecting animals from cruelty, but the actual intent is for civilization to identify and protect itself against cruel humans.
Animal rights advocates have lost the plot. Certain interactions, like the exchange of rights, can only appear between equals. With the possible exception of animals like the great apes, corvids, pachyderms, and cetaceans, the vast majority of species are strictly inferior to Homo sapiens with its awesome powers of language, social coordination, and tool use.
My thoughts on this last time this concept emerged on HN: http://swombat.com/2012/11/6/dolphin-history
You have this assumption that in the future everything will have rights. All that will happen if that occurs is that the concept of "rights" will be laughed at and ignored.
The more rare something is, the more powerful and special, and meaningful.
Diminishing the meaning of 'rights' is great: if everyone and everything had appropriate rights, there would be no further need for the concept to be discussed. That's a good thing.
See also: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-against...
Giving the rights to puppies as you mention doesn't chanage that either way; this is a red herring.
And I suspect it was not the parent commenter's point.
As I say in my article - this used to apply only to male citizens... then it grew to include people at the bottom of the social ladder (slaves), people of different colours, religions, etc, and progressively more and more different people. It's only natural that this progression will continue and include entities who are not human.
If we ever meet an extra-terrestrial intelligence, I sure hope they have followed this progress to its natural conclusion, and include all life in their circle of "things deserving of respect".
Us humans don't even have basic human rights, as evidenced by the recent extensive publications regarding the torture practices of the US (rectal feeding?). Such a contrast to this (otherwise completely unrelated) article.