"Animal Rights"

[howardahood]

This is one issue I have never been able to resolve. Only human beings have rights, otherwise meat-eaters would be murderers. On the other hand, it seems intolerable for anybody to torture animals just for the fun of it. I suggest that the discussion be reframed. Instead of asking whether animals have rights, we might ask whether there is any justification for people to punish those who are needlessly cruel to animals? This approach might open up new lines of analysis.

My assumption has been that AR would oppose laws against cruelty to animals and would limit the response to ostracism or verbal condemnation, not enough to stop some people from torturing animals or to insure adequate care under humane conditions. Am I wrong in this assumption? Barbara?

Howard Hood

Edited April 8, 2008 by Howard Hood

[Brant Gaede]

My own position is very simple: Let people who abuse cats and dogs philosophically defend themselves in a court of law if they can. I won't.

--Brant

This is one issue I have never been able to resolve. Only human beings have rights, otherwise meat-eaters would be murderers. On the other hand, it seems intolerable for anybody to torture animals just for the fun of it. I suggest that the discussion be reframed. Instead of asking whether animals have rights, we might ask whether there is any justification for people to punish those who are needlessly cruel to animals? This approach might open up new lines of analysis.

My assumption has been that AR would oppose laws against cruelty to animals and would limit the response to ostracism or verbal condemnation, not enough to stop some people from torturing animals or to insure adequate care under humane conditions. Am I wrong in this assumption? Barbara?

Howard Hood

[Ellen Stuttle]

My assumption has been that AR would oppose laws against cruelty to animals and would limit the response to ostracism or verbal condemnation, not enough to stop some people from torturing animals or to insure adequate care under humane conditions. Am I wrong in this assumption? Barbara?

According to reports of persons close to her, she would have liked to have anti-cruelty-to-animal laws but didn't know how to justify them.

See posts #76 through #85, especially my posts #81, #84, and #85 on the thread titled "The Passion of James Valliant's Criticism" (that's the first part of three parts).

Ellen

___

[studiodekadent]

One of the traits of human nature is a propensity to empathize with those beings similar to ourselves. David Hume understood this (although he falsely considered it the origin of ethics), and called it "moral sentiments."

The kind of human being that could look at a cute, fluffy animal and just torture it for fun obviously has a major irrationality in his psyche that is fucking up his moral sentiments.

Now, as someone who loves meat, leather and fur, I do not believe in animal rights. That does not mean I consider animal cruelty moral.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

... although he falsely considered it the origin of ethics...

Why falsely?

Rand identified the pleasure-pain mechanism as the fundamental awareness indicators of value for life forms. (Actually, higher life forms—she did not stipulate that, but I have little doubt she would have contested it.)

As we are rational animals and pleasure-pain is the origin of our ethics (or part of the origin to be more precise), why is it not part of the origin of values for other animals?

That is the start of our code of values.

I am not against animal products. I am against valuing suffering qua suffering. And I am against indifference to it by caretakers if it can reasonably be avoided.

Michael

[studiodekadent]

... although he falsely considered it the origin of ethics...

Why falsely?

Because moral sentimentalism is incorrect. Hume considered morality more or less a natural instinct of sorts rather than the product of rational deliberation.

I do not deny that what Hume called "moral sentiments" do exist, they obviously do. They aren't however the source of morality.

[Wolf DeVoon]

According to reports of persons close to her, [Rand] would have liked to have anti-cruelty-to-animal laws but didn't know how to justify them.

Because torturing animals leads to bigger crimes, like killing and torturing humans?

The crimes of war don’t stop on the battlefield. Here is an account of how fighting in the first Iraq war changed Timothy McVeigh:

McVeigh was assigned as a Bradley gunner, and his Army buddies report that he was “just thrilled” when he blew up his first Iraqi vehicle. McVeigh’s friend Kerry Kling reports, “He said when they were invading Iraq he saw an Iraqi soldier coming out of a bunker and that when the first round hit his head, it exploded. He was proud of that one shot. It was over eleven hundred meters, and shooting a guy in the head from that distance is impressive.” McVeigh’s mother reported that he was “totally changed” by his experience in the war, and that when he came home, “It was like he traded one Army for another.” Or, it might be added, it was like he failed to respect the carefully nurtured differentiation between “heroic” and “terrorist” violence (Lee Griffith, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, Eerdmans, 2002, pp. 150-151).

[Brant Gaede]

According to reports of persons close to her, [Rand] would have liked to have anti-cruelty-to-animal laws but didn't know how to justify them.

Because torturing animals leads to bigger crimes, like killing and torturing humans?

The crimes of war don't stop on the battlefield. Here is an account of how fighting in the first Iraq war changed Timothy McVeigh:

McVeigh was assigned as a Bradley gunner, and his Army buddies report that he was "just thrilled" when he blew up his first Iraqi vehicle. McVeigh's friend Kerry Kling reports, "He said when they were invading Iraq he saw an Iraqi soldier coming out of a bunker and that when the first round hit his head, it exploded. He was proud of that one shot. It was over eleven hundred meters, and shooting a guy in the head from that distance is impressive." McVeigh's mother reported that he was "totally changed" by his experience in the war, and that when he came home, "It was like he traded one Army for another." Or, it might be added, it was like he failed to respect the carefully nurtured differentiation between "heroic" and "terrorist" violence (Lee Griffith, The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, Eerdmans, 2002, pp. 150-151).

How did he change?

--Brant

[Wolf DeVoon]

How did he change?

--Brant

Yeah, I know, it was a specious argument. Sorry.

W.

[Brant Gaede]

How did he change?

--Brant

Yeah, I know, it was a specious argument. Sorry.

W.

No, no, no, Wolf! Fight back! Tell me how I got it all wrong so we can keep this going for another 200 posts! Don't you know that that is how it is Internet done? Jeeze!

--Brant

edit to put in a smiley face. I'd hate Wolf to think I was trying to roast him!

Edited April 12, 2008 by Brant Gaede

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Fight back! Tell me how I got it all wrong so we can keep this going for another 200 posts! Don't you know that that is how it is Internet done? Jeeze!

Brant,

You left out the part about how his is supposed to tell you about your dishonesty, immorality, power lust and unredeemable qualities. But not in those terms. Use profanity and other really rude shit like scumbag.

That's The New Intellectual.

Michael

[Mike11]

Only human beings have rights, otherwise meat-eaters would be murderers.

I've been avoiding commenting about this for a while but ...

That sentence expresses why I doubt the honesty of the whole of Objectivism. "X could be true but that would be, depressing. I think I'll rationalize instead, far better for my ego."

[Brant Gaede]

Only human beings have rights, otherwise meat-eaters would be murderers.

I've been avoiding commenting about this for a while but ...

That sentence expresses why I doubt the honesty of the whole of Objectivism. "X could be true but that would be, depressing. I think I'll rationalize instead, far better for my ego."

Well, let's give animals positive rights--e.g., animals have the right to be eaten by Howard Hood.

--Brant

[Wolf DeVoon]

Let's try again with empirical evidence that juvenile cruelty to animals leads to adult violent crime.

Still working on 'animal rights' as such.

W.

[Wolf DeVoon]

In the companion HH thread on Regulation of Drugs, MSK wonders whether Islamic jihad or Nazism as intellectual movements ought to be banned. This intersects my thinking on cruelty to animals, child abuse, and defense of innocent liberty in the broadest sense. It's an extremely challenging area for organic law. Hume's theory of 'moral sentiments' cuts no ice, unless you deem public policy legislation (the will of the people) constitutionally sovereign.

The trend in legislation in the U.S. has been to ban cruelty to animals, child abuse, incitement to jihad, false advertising, unfair competition, etc. Free speech, for instance, was curtailed to halt the teaching of communist ideology in 1952:

A teacher works in a sensitive area in a school room. There he shapes the attitude of young minds towards the society in which they live. In this, the state has a vital concern. It must preserve the integrity of the schools. That the school authorities have the right and the duty to screen the officials, teachers, and employees as to their fitness to maintain the integrity of the schools as a part of ordered society, cannot be doubted. One's associates, past and present, as well as one's conduct, may properly be considered in determining fitness and loyalty. From time immemorial, one's reputation has been determined in part by the company he keeps. In the employment of officials and teachers of the school system, the state may very properly inquire into the company they keep, and we know of no rule, constitutional or otherwise, that prevents the state, when determining the fitness and loyalty of such persons, from considering the organizations and persons with whom they associate.

If, under the procedure set up in the New York law, a person is found to be unfit and is disqualified from employment in the public school system because of membership in a listed organization, he is not thereby denied the right of free speech and assembly. His freedom of choice between membership in the organization and employment in the school system might be limited, but not his freedom of speech or assembly, except in the remote sense that limitation is inherent in every choice. Certainly such limitation is not one the state may not make in the exercise of its police power to protect the schools from pollution and thereby to defend its own existence.

Adler v. Board of Educ. of City of New York, 342 U.S. 485

The above typifies what's wrong with conventional law. It grants the state wide, undefined 'police power' to be wielded irresponsibly by politicians and bureaucrats. There's no limit on banning Nazis or cock fighting or dangerous drugs or anything else that conceivably might excite newspaper editors. In the current regulatory disaster grounding American Airlines and 300,000 passengers without notice, a legislator huffed nonsense about a single inspector at Southwest Airlines and the FAA responded by punishing American for putting cable clips on backwards (but equally securely and without flight risk). It truly is deuces wild if you politicize the police power.

Nor is equity jurisdiction better equipped to stop hate speech or cruelty. The courts are not good at trivia. The purpose of equity is to fix problems that arise in certain cases where the operation of common law cannot remedy or prevent a specific, demonstrable wrong. The benchmark is fairness, not moral terpitude or community outrage.

I'm sorry to say that cruelty to animals, child abuse, dangerous drugs and many other insidious evils lay outside the routine operation of Objectivist law enforcement and the profession of justice. These are matters of profound individual responsibility and neighborhood policy that will vary from place to place and time to time. In previous writing I said 'Law cannot absolve you of a folly,' and 'Laissez faire is not Heaven or Hell, but life on life's terms.' Self-government demands that each of us do justice in person. Cruelty must be met with individual censure backed by individual force, if you want it to stop. Let the bastard drag you into court if he dares. Compare The Right to Do Wrong.

The purpose of law courts is to adjudicate larger issues than a neighbor kid torturing a stray cat or offering crack to your children. Murdering the neighbor kid is not your only option and murdering someone you dislike gallops over the threshhold of the most heinous crime on the books, abuse of police power. Citizen cops have to think, use a variety of techniques to abate wrongdoing. For instance, a Russian kid was causing trouble on the beach a couple years ago. People complained. I whapped him on the shins and deported him to the police station, paid the cops to send him elsewhere. It's a thankless job. Had to do it twice. Had to search the damn river by kayak end-to-end for his corpse, because some wise guy said he had been killed. Eventually he made it back to his mom's house in Moscow and the beach got a new replacement miscreant to deal with: a flasher/pervert threatening tourist chicks. Took a decoy and two-man shifts to photo ID him, show the photos to previous complainant witnesses, blah blah blah blah blah. Never ends.

W.

Edited April 13, 2008 by Wolf DeVoon

[John Dailey]

~ I LOVE those 'hide your Real meaning' catch-phrasings using the rhetorical device of innuending/insinuating a Causality without honestly trying to argue it; you know, 'significant correlation', 'has been associated with', the media's fave 'has been LINKED to', and here in "Juvenile's animal cruelty" we have the new, improved causality-insinuating 'compelling evidence [statistical, of course] supporting a relationship' blah, blah.

~ I have no doubt that eating potatos (or a McDonald's) or especially, smoking Virginia Slims, 'leads to' Marijuana smoking; and we know where THAT 'leads to', right?

~ No one's seen a 'link' between Tylenol and Ecstasy yet? There oughtta be a...'study'...obviously.

LLAP

J:D

Edited April 13, 2008 by John Dailey

[Mike Renzulli]

I guess Barbara is busy so I will step in to directly answer your question.

You are correct that Objectivists oppose laws against protections for animals short of protecting them via property laws.

Like environmentalists put nature as their highest value and anti-abortionists put fetuses as their highest value, animal rights activists put animal life as theirs. If you follow their logic to its consistent conclusions, even the acts of terrorism they conduct against laboratories, fur stores, meat companies, leather shops and fast food restaurants are the result.

As Dr Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute points out, unlike humans, "Animals do not survive by rational thought. They only survive through reflexes and sonsory perception association. They cannot reason. Predation, and not reason, is an animals only means of survival and they do not have the capacity to learn any other."

Rights depend on man's ability of rational thought. Animals are devoid of any such ability.

Therefore, animals are not deserving of special protections.

My assumption has been that AR would oppose laws against cruelty to animals and would limit the response to ostracism or verbal condemnation, not enough to stop some people from torturing animals or to insure adequate care under humane conditions. Am I wrong in this assumption? Barbara?

Howard Hood

[Brant Gaede]

I guess Barbara is busy so I will step in to directly answer your question.

You are correct that Objectivists oppose laws against protections for animals short of protecting them via property laws.

Like environmentalists put nature as their highest value and anti-abortionists put fetuses as their highest value, animal rights activists put animal life as theirs. If you follow their logic to its consistent conclusions, even the acts of terrorism they conduct against laboratories, fur stores, meat companies, leather shops and fast food restaurants are the result.

As Dr Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute points out, unlike humans, "Animals do not survive by rational thought. They only survive through reflexes and sonsory perception association. They cannot reason. Predation, and not reason, is an animals only means of survival and they do not have the capacity to learn any other."

Rights depend on man's ability of rational thought. Animals are devoid of any such ability.

Therefore, animals are not deserving of special protections.

My assumption has been that AR would oppose laws against cruelty to animals and would limit the response to ostracism or verbal condemnation, not enough to stop some people from torturing animals or to insure adequate care under humane conditions. Am I wrong in this assumption? Barbara?

Howard Hood

Pets are made a limited part of interacting human society via a custodial relationship. And just as we don't torture and abuse fellow humans in principle we don't pets. Hence certain laws protecting animals that seem to be kind of rights' derivative. This is not Objectivism. I think it's kind of queer that with human rights so badly misunderstood or simply ignored we don't leave these semi-philosophical questions to future generations instead of concentrating on the big issues at hand. Do we lack a law? Let's give them something to do so they don't go to seed. They'll thank us for their inheritance.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

As Dr Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute points out, unlike humans, "Animals do not survive by rational thought. They only survive through reflexes and sonsory perception association. They cannot reason. Predation, and not reason, is an animals only means of survival and they do not have the capacity to learn any other."

Mike,

That's one hell of a quote. If "predation, and not reason, is an animals only means of survival," and man is a "rational animal," is there any reason predation will evaporate from his nature because he can suddenly produce his values through conceptual thought? Anyway, isn't farming a form of predation by control of reproduction and confinement?

Locke is on to something here, but I think he makes a mistake defining animal in terms of predation, then ignoring it when he gets to human beings.

In terms of rights, I am beginning to have a glimmer of a better premise than NIOF. Since survival is the main value, one human being being a predator of another is anti-survival, thus it violates his right to life (to jump ahead in my inquiry).

Predation can be defined according to more standards than just using force. I have to do some thinking...

Michael

[Judith]

You are correct that Objectivists oppose laws against protections for animals short of protecting them via property laws.

Speak for yourself. I'm an objectivist and I support laws protecting animals.

As Dr Edwin Locke of the Ayn Rand Institute points out, unlike humans, "Animals do not survive by rational thought. They only survive through reflexes and sonsory perception association. They cannot reason. Predation, and not reason, is an animals only means of survival and they do not have the capacity to learn any other."

Rights depend on man's ability of rational thought. Animals are devoid of any such ability.

(*snort*)

Obviously neither he nor you has ever trained a dog or a horse. Or, at least not by any means that recognized the animal's true capacities.

You might be fascinated sometime to watch a horse trying to figure out just what the rider is trying to impart when teaching higher level dressage to the horse. The horse really does have to "figure it out". Or, you might be fascinated sometime to watch the face of a dog watching his or her person and deciding on whether or not to do something forbidden. I'd not argue that they're capable of philosophical discourse, or of inventing gods, but anyone who says animals don't use simple concepts isn't looking at what's right in front of them.

Judith

[Judith]

On the subject of animal rights, I may have posted this article here before, but I like it so here it is again:

A Libertarian Replies to Tibor Machan's 'Why Animal Rights Don't Exist'

by David Graham

http://www.strike-the-root.com/4/graham/graham1.html

Judith

[Brant Gaede]

Human rights are a human invention.

Animal rights, as such, are a human invention.

For animal rights to have real parity with human rights means human rights could also be an animal invention.

--Brant

[Wolf DeVoon]

Human rights are a human invention.

Animal rights, as such, are a human invention.

For animal rights to have real parity with human rights means human rights could also be an animal invention.

--Brant

Well, yeah. We're animals, right?

[Brant Gaede]

Human rights are a human invention.

Animal rights, as such, are a human invention.

For animal rights to have real parity with human rights means human rights could also be an animal invention.

--Brant

Well, yeah. We're animals, right?

C'mon, Wolfo, you know I'm differentiating. Just like all save you. You must be one of them lousy individualists.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

He's a sheep in wolf's clothing...

Michael