Since this is the first attempt at a properly formatted post from lookinfor1v1, I'll respond to parts, but not all of it. Many parts are too fallacious to respond to, but the lesser fallacies deserve attention.
For the record, PETA is not an animal rights group. They kill 2/3 of the animals they get their hands on. They are an extremist group who has absolutely no redeeming value. Stop whale on Kryll 'violence'? Stop Killer Whales from eating Seals? These statements are enough to tell you that the people at the top of the organization aren't intelligent enough to tie their shoes, let alone come up with a meaningful statement.
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Originally Posted by lookinfor1v1  After going over your points, I've come to several conclusions.The so-called "animal rights" movement is relying upon a logical fallacy which is based on mutually exclusive premises. |
I've read your post, and before I go into it, I must say that the majority of your thoughts/statements/assumptions about the animal rights movement are absolutely false.
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"Animal rights" premise #1: Human beings are no different from other animals, with no divine or elevated nature which makes us distinct;
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Biologically, we aren't any different from any other animal. But, herein lies your first mistake - the animal rights movement claims that the one thing we can do better than any other animal in the Kingdom is think at a level not possible with the other animals; and said ability must be used to determine how animals should be treated.
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"Animal rights" premise #2: Human beings are ethically bound not to use other animals for their own selfish purposes.
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I suppose, yes. However, that's only a very small part of it. The message (which you edited out, left out, or didn't know about) they're trying to convey is that if/when we eat animals, they should be killed in the most humane way possible.
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If human beings are no different from other animals, then like all other animals it is our nature to kill any other animal which serves the purposes of our survival and well-being, for that is the way of all nature. Therefore, aside from economic concerns such as making sure we don't kill so quickly that we destroy a species and deprive our descendants of prey, human animals can kill members of other animal species for their usefulness to us.
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This is where your incorrect premise caused you trouble. Animal rights groups readily admit that we're far more intelligent than any other animal known to man. They claim that we must treat animals with respect, and cause them as little pain as possible.
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It is only if we are not just another animal -- if our nature is distinctly superior to other animals -- that we become subject to ethics at all -- and then those ethics must take into account our nature as masters of the lower animals. We may seek a balance of nature; but "balance" is a concept that only a species as intelligent as humankind could even contemplate. We may choose to temper the purposes to which we put lower animals with empathy and wisdom; but by virtue of our superior nature, we decide ... and if those decisions include the consumption of animals for human utilitarian or recreational purposes, then the limits on the uses we put the lower beasts are ones we set according to our individual human consciences.
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My last statement is equally valid here. But, we are superior to animals in only one respect: intelligence. Socially and biologically, we're inferior to the vast majority of the animals on Earth.
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Even though I personally believe we were created by God, unlike advocates of the Judeo-Christian tradition I do not rely upon the question of whether humans have a "soul" to distinguish humans from animals. Like secular rationalists, I'm content to resolve the issue of the nature of human beings, and the nature of animals, by scientific means -- observation, experiment, and the debate of paradigms. Each of these criteria is simply a proof of intelligence and self-consciousness:
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We are not the only intelligent creatures on Earth - just the most intelligent. Most mammal are self-aware. . .
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1) Being observed as producing or having produced technological artifacts unique to that species;
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We aren't the only species to create tools from scratch, and use them - not by a long shot.
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2) Being observed as able to communicate from one generation to the next by a recorded language unique to that species;
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Many higher mammals communicate from one generation to the next. In fact, I can't think of a single higher mammal that doesn't. Every species that migrates, hunts, or lives in a pack uses one form of communication or another to pass on information vital to the survival of the species. Bears, Wolves, Dolphins, etc all learn how to hunt from their parents. The ability to observe something, understand body language, and put those two things to use indicates a very complex intelligence.
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3) Being observed as basing action on abstract reasoning;
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Define it? All sorts of animals use basic logic and reasoning skills every day of their lives.
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4) Being observed as engaging in inductive and deductive reasoning processes;
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That applies to every creature that's ever hunted. The reason carnivorous animals go after the old, the small, and the lone animals is based
entirely on their reasoning skills. A pack of wild Wolves uses reason to work as a team to effectively seperate an animal from a herd - that indicates a very high level of intelligence.
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5) Being observed as engaging in non-utilitarian artistic activity unique to that species.
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Utilitarianism and altruism is observed in the Animal Kingdom all the time. Non-utilitarian artistic activities? I don't entirely understand what you mean. If you mean non-utilitarian activities, the beta in a pack will steal food and sex from the alpha, and that's not productive. . .
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I'm sure there are other criteria we could use, but these are obvious ones that come to mind immediately. None of them speculates about the unobservable functioning of a neural network; all of them are based on observable effects of intelligence and self-consciousness.
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Your criteria had almost nothing to do with what you thought it did, and IF it did, you'd have proven the opposite of what you were trying to.
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Conclusively, we are of a different nature than other animals we know. Neither cetaceans nor other higher mammals, including the higher apes, qualify as "human" under these criteria. We do not observe these significations of intelligence and self-consciousness in any other species we know, such criteria being neither necessarily anthropocentric nor even terracentric.
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If your criteria were what makes a species human, than thousands of species would be considered human.
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By the "survival of the fittest" which is the law of raw nature, no animal has rights: only the tools to survive as best it can. The chicken has no right not to be eaten by the fox. The wildebeest has no ethical recourse against the lion. If we are merely animals, no other animal has any ethical standing to complain against the human animal for eating them or wearing their skins.
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Again, you entirely missed the point. The point isn't that nature applies rights to creatures - it's that we humans, the most intelligent species on Earth, need to recognize that it's not okay to cut the leg off an un-anesthetized sheep, or spoon out the brain of a fully aware and living moneky because we enjoy it.
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But, if we are superior to other animals -- if our nature is of a different kind than other animals -- then why should we grant rights to species who can not talk, or compose symphonies, or induce mathematical equations, or build satellites which send back television pictures of other planets?
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Because we recognize that they do think, even just a little, and they do feel pain and emotion.
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Why shouldn't we humans simply regard lower animals as things which may become our property? We may be kind to animals if it is pleasing to us to do so, but we should not grant animals an equal stature that nature has not given them. Respect for nature requires a respect for the nature of what things are ... and we are better, stronger, smarter, than the animals we hunt, ranch, farm, fish, trap, butcher, skin, bone, and eat.
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No-one is saying anything about equal rights - animal activists want only to keep un-necessary pain and suffering from said animals. You could not have missed the point more.
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They certainly have no ethics about us, for they are just animals.
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You're kidding, right? What about the dozen or so cases of the last decade where a wolf will raise a lost child, or a dolphin will protect a scuba diver (injured or not) from a shark attack? - Dolphins have also been observed to protect seals from sharks and Killer Whales too.
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Nor are any "animal rights" activists themselves merely animals. There is no organization called Porpoises for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It is People who make those demands of other People.
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If you think PETA is an animal rights group, than you're ignorant.
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Those who argue for animal rights argue that since animals are living and feel pain, that therefore nature gives them a right not to be treated cruelly. This is an argument that could only work on a being capable of empathy -- and that requires an elevated consciousness. It is true that animals can feel pain, and that esthetically requires that we not be cruel in our treatment of them. But what is cruelty? Beating a horse that won't pull a wagon? Making animals fight each other for sport?
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Both are cruel.
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That's no longer the issue, is it? The issue is ranching minks to skin them for fur; castrating and slaughtering steers to eat them; hunting and shooting deer, ducks, and elks; testing cosmetics on animals; doing medical experiments on animals to advance medical knowledge. Do we have a moral obligation not to use animals for human utilitarian purposes, which is another way of asking whether animals have the right not to be treated as objects to be exploited for their usefulness?
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I've used animals to perform medical experiments in lab at USF
dozens of times. What you don't get is that there is a difference between just doing said experiments, and doing them ethically. Making sure they're properly anesthetized is, and should be, the first priority.
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The idea of a right means that which has rights may not be treated as a utilitarian object for the fulfillment of the purposes of others. Animal rights would mean animals would be immune from being used to fulfill any human purpose.
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Still, you don't get the concept of animal rights. Your premise(s) were terrible.
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PETA has it exactly correct. If animals have rights, then we may not ethically use them for our own selfish purposes, no matter how necessary we think that use or how humanely we assert we do it to them. This is, in fact, the logical conclusion of "animal rights."
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It's a damn good thing PETA is wrong, isn't it? They are a truly detestable organization (and are the antithesis of real animal rights).
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If animals have rights then we need not make any distinction between an unnecessarily cruel use of animals (pick one: ....- fighting, animal testing for beauty products) or eating animals, because if animals have rights then we are not morally entitled to put them to utilitarian use, period.
Let me make it clear: I am not questioning the humaneness or cruelty of any particular practice. My point is that the interests of those who assert that the lower animals have rights is not to protect animals against cruel treatment. That can be done merely by an appeal to our consciences. Those who assert that animals or even "habitats" have rights do so to destroy individual human rights to control what I term the anthroposphere: the human habitat. It is the individual human right to control our private spheres of action -- our individual habitats -- which they oppose.
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Fighting two animals is not okay, but animal testing is okay. When they fight, they are not treated humanely, but when used for experiments, they feel very little pain (most. . .of the time), and are contributing to save not only humans, but animals as well.
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So where do we find ethics here? If we look to nature, we see only that the strong use the weak for their own purposes -- and we are obviously the master of all other animals by that standard. If we look to the center of all human ethics, the Golden Rule, we are told to treat others as we would wish to be treated. But what others? Animals can't treat us as we wish to be treated because they don't have the wit to entertain ethics at all.
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First of all,
wild animals
do treat humans as they wish to be treated. How often do people get attacked by animals for absolutely no reason? Almost never. 99.99% of all animal attacks are because you were doing something you weren't supposed to. And even then, most of the time animals don't kill the human(s) - they do just enough damage (or just scare you) so that you'll leave it alone.
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Which leaves us esthetics, which exists only in individual humans. Since lower animals don't have rights, we humans need to make judgments on humane versus cruel treatment of lower animals not by treating animals as if they have rights but instead must rely on our esthetic values -- our consciences. But, after seeing tree-spikers, people throwing paint on fur coats, and Kentucky Fried Chicken being equated with Auschwitz, it's now apparent that the effect of trying to give animals the same ethical immunities as humans is that all esthetic distinction between ....-fighting and eating meat is lost. The effect of "all or nothing" in our uses of animals is to blunt our consciences, which makes us crueler to animals, not less cruel.
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I don't think that means what you think it means. . .
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Those people among us who would give lower animals human rights do not do it because they love other animals. They do it because they hate humankind. They hate the fact that their own superior nature as intellectual beings gives them superior challenges which they shrink from by attempting to deny the superiority of their human nature.
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Sweet Jesus falling down a slippery slope!!! Evidence? Perhaps they just don't like the idea of something that is practically helpless suffering needlessly.
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"Animal rights" activists use the tools of rationality which are uniquely available to the human species in order to deny the distinct nature of their own rational faculties. They raise up animals in an attempt to lower humankind.
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Reason is not unique to humans. Humanity would do well to treat nature with respect. We're not as mighty as you think.
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They may speak for themselves only, not for me. I know what I am, though in a scientific sense an animal, I am more than that. I know what animals are. And I will name what "animal rights" activists truly are: the Human Defamation League.
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I know what you are - an ignorant ass. Still, and forever, an ignorant ass.
03-03-2008
Join Date: Jul 2005
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