That's because we focus on large animals. Insects and plants have gone extinct. And several animals have been brought to their brink of extinction due to our direct or indirect involvement.

We're lucky we saved the buffalo; it's savior were those who had a nonanthropocentric view.

There have been 7 mass extinction events and we are in the middle of the 7th right now and it could possibly be one of the fastest ones yet for the rate of species loss.

The cause - Us.

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-i got kicked out of barnes and noble once for moving all the bibles into the fiction section


Think You Watch Movies? http://www.halo3forum.com/movies/81621-movies-you-need-see-before-you-die-weekly-review.html

I heard that in class but couldn't remember if it was 5 or 7. The rate of the extinctions has increased exponentially. The first was the dinosaurs, I don't remember the rest. Dodo was in there I think.

(This is a subtopic)
What is your views on animal emotions?
You've stated that animals can love and feel love; even I know that.
Some people see love as an emotion, some see it as just a feeling. Some may see it as instinct.
But what about happiness/joy, sadness, anger?
Personally, I believe animals can experience emotions.
For example, my dog decides to dig in our trash. I discipline my dog by yelling at her. My dog will go sit in a corner with her ears down and a sad look to her face.
I believe my dog just felt sadness. She gives every sign of sadness that a human will show, except direct human language.
Thoughts?

(btw. NG, your book is going to be the next book I purchase. Soon as I acquire money to buy it.)

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Some* Animals have the capacity to experience emotions just like we do. We simply communicate them abstractly among each other.

(cool. I'm broke)

(So am I and then I'll transfer it to you.)

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I'd like to make some elaborations.

What we give moral consideration to ought to be anything with interests. This is the interest principle.

An animal, such as a mother bear, has an interest to stay alive, protect her kin and territory, eat, and so on. When we see animals as a means to an end, intrumentally, not as an end of itself, intrinsically we violate its interests. Simply saying we should be moral to something that feels pain or has reason isn't enough as argued by the argument from marginal cases. But even infants and the mentally disabled have interests. So, too, do animals.

A distinction should be made between moral agents and moral patients. Moral agents are those which give moral actions, moral patients are those which receive a moral act. This is used the same way in the medical field. Doctors give care to patients, as moral agents give care to moral patients.

Now, to go ahead and beat the refutation to the punch, the interest principle is to be taken with rationality. This is not to say that we should refrain from violating an animal's interests in spite of our own interests; that is, if our interests are not in violation with the principle of nonmaleficience (you're interested in harming an animal cruelly) or using an animal as a means to an end that is outside the realm of moral significance and considerability (doing it without purpose, for the sake of it, or unnecessarily such as in excess).

This also doesn't imply that animals are immoral because they violate other animals' interests. For not only are animals moral patients and not moral agents, but they violate an animal's interests in their own, necessary, interests, such as the wolf killing the sheep.

The interest principle extends further than animals, but lookinfor1v1 and the rest of the anthropocentric world seems to be having a hard enough time taking this ethical babystep that I won't, at this time, go beyond animal rights.

edit: Let me ask you this, lookinfor1v1. Would you agree that the killing of an entire species is wrong and immoral, under any circumstances (outside of their complete extermination, and only their complete extermination, means the death of all humanity)?

edit2: Some good quotes for ya (I'll have lots more from Aldo Leopold soon).

"The splendors of earth do not simply lie in their roles as human resources, supports of culture, or stimulators of experience." - Holmes Rolston III, Challenges in Environmental Ethics 1991

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise." - Aldo Leopold, A Land Ethic 1949

"Several billion years worth of creative toil, several million species of teeming life, have been handed over to the care of this late-coming species." - Holmes Rolston III, Challenges in Environmental Ethics 1991

NiceGuy knows his stuff, he probably does alot of research before he posts a debate thread.

I think EVERY animal can be scared. being scared is an emotion aswell. (atleast I find it an emotion)

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No longer think of ourselves as conquerors over nature but a participant in its community." Animal rights is the first step, but that's an animal ethic, and in the larger scope of things I'm talking about an environmental ethic.




What about economists? The ones who destroy lands where animals thrive in order to build a theme park, or a church? I'm not talking simple cruelty, I'm talking about wasteful killing for our [human] self interest.





You didn't see the "sapien" in hidden text. Smooth, I thought that would go past you.

Who says you couldn't? PERFECT ATTITUDE. It's exactly that anthropocentrism I've been talking about; it's exactly why people treat animals however they feel. Nobody said they couldn't.

And stop asking me the same question. I've already answered it.




Higher reason.




A mentally disabled person did not ever possess the faculty to do so. So are you basing their rights that humans possess based on ...what they look like? Since it looks like a human?




I skipped over the blah blah blah. You're still basing your argument on faculties of the brain, on intelligence, and now on culture. Should a person of higher intellect be granted higher rights than one who is of lesser intellect? There is a greater gap between the average human and the philosopher than there is the average human and a chimp. Should a being of a culture "less civilized" than yours (we once regarded, and perhaps still do, other cultures as 'savage,' a state closer to animal than human) be afforded fewer rights?

You still sound like a speciesist; might as well be a racist or a sexist.

Not "animals included in our society," humans no longer thinking they're separate from it. What part of you being a component in this natural world don't you understand? What's so difficult in grasping the concept that you're basing the difference that justifies ourselves as higher up the Chain of Being than animals on either biological make up (what we look like) or biological advantage (reason)? We have higher reason, but animals surpass us in so many different biological fields.

Maybe animals don't wonder about the ways of the world because they already got it figured out

So now animals have deduced with their intellect, the purpose of their existense.
Ok.

I never said humans weren't different. Humans are different from other humans in the same areas of difference you're saying justify our treatment and attitude towards animals.

Just because I beleive humans are of higher in the chain of existence than animals, doesn't mean I advocate, or think is justifiable, the brutal treatment of animals and the environment.

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II JumpiN II



Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
Tom Stoppard

Wtf? All you have to respond to is a piece of sarcasm and then restating your personal view?

"brutal" isn't the only kind of animal mistreatment.