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Ask HN: Reasoning for Animal Rights

5 points by alchemister 4y ago

Is there a sound argument in favor of (inhuman) animal humanitarianism? I understand that excessive hunting and habitat encroachment is detrimental to the global ecosystem, but what about actions taken in a semi-controlled environment, like slaughterhouses and labs? From what I've seen, parties who object to animal cruelty/mishandling don't cite an ounce of logical proof behind their stance. It's as though they believe that their sentiment stems directly from common sense and as such does not necessitate a formal explanation. I understand that this is often a defining characteristic of interest groups, but it seems unusual for one with such great traction in modern western society. Nearly all of these activism organizations rely on shock and gore media to garner support, taken to extremes by the more popularized instances (e.g. PeTA). At the end of the day, their sole plea is to eliminate suffering inflicted upon animals...for no other reason than because it is within humanity's capability to do so. I've scoured through a dozen sites in the past half-hour, and this generally holds true to each one. The only legitimate thesis I could find essentially claims that animal abusers are liable to harm humans due to moral desensitization, which actually makes a fair amount of sense, until you realize that "abuser" might simply be referring to the common pet-owner or whatnot. Do you guys know any others?

ss108 4y ago
Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the potential social and legal consequences attendant thereto? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the "logical" reason for not harming them are either. TBH, your post comes across as rather a bit...robotic, to put it generously. In any event, I have a paper being forthcoming in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law in a couple weeks on animal rights under Jewish and Islamic Law as compared to American law. Too bad it's not published yet, or I could plug myself here lol
- alchemister 4y ago
  >Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the potential social and legal consequences attendant thereto? I'm asking for factual reasoning, not emotional justification. There's a major difference between what I believe is correct and what is objectively logical, or beneficial to humanity.
  - ceras 4y ago
    Caring about anything is inherently emotional. Take human suffering. There's no logical reason to care about it. You can't take someone with sociopathic tendencies and logic them into caring about humans - it simply doesn't make sense. Either that empathetic circuitry exists in someone's brain or it doesn't, which manifests as emotions when it does exist. I think you're starting from a flawed premise that logic is a motivating force. Logic is a slave to the passions, not the other way around. Logic is a tool we use to manage our emotional state more effectively by helping us choose actions that we believe are more likely yield net positive emotional states. Logic just computes results; it has no innate motivation of any kind, it takes motivations and emotions as inputs. Take this for example: > beneficial to humanity. You're implying a preference for humanity, which has some emotional foundation. Maybe you care about humans as a whole for some abstract emotional reason; or maybe it's purely self-interest since you're a human (so what benefits humans hopefully benefits you, even if you don't care about other humans) which is also an emotional reason. There's no objective, inarguable truth that you should care about humanity. The root of your confusion on animal rights stems here. Ultimately, animal rights is about taking the empathy that most humans innately have to at least a limited extent, and expanding that to apply to more entities. If you experience no empathy in general in life, it makes no sense. If you experience some empathy, it makes some sense. If you experience a lot of empathy, it makes a lot of sense.
  - GPerson 4y ago
    Perhaps you could explain why animals being sentient creatures only counts as emotional justification? It’s a profound fact that human beings evolved from non-human animals. It would be very strange to me if none of them are sentient. I believe killing humans is wrong precisely because they are sentient. Therefore killing animals is also wrong.
  - ss108 4y ago
    > objectively logical, or beneficial to humanity. Well those are two separate things. Anyways, the gist of the "logical" argument (which is a myopic way of looking at things to say the least) goes something along the lines of "at least x subset of animals has cognitive and emotional capacity analogous to mentally handicapped humans and/or human children, and thus should be given rights coextensive with such humans". Obviously, there's more meat to it than that, but that's basically what it is. There's no "logic" to it either way, really; opponents of that argument counter with arguments that often boil down to "no the children and mentally handicapped should get more rights because they are humans". This is largely about value judgments and morality, not "logic". A lot of political, philosophical, and legal things require reference to subjective factors and assumptions, and, unsurprisingly, a lot of people on Hacker News discount that realm of these conversations. I think it's a matter of competence; I've noticed when I talk to some engineers about these sorts of assumptions, they get confused and would rather discount that realm as inferior to "logic" than grapple with the stuff or learn how to become conversant in it (some engineers certainly already are). Obviously, there are lots of issues where a an almost purely pragmatic, logical approach may be more than sufficient, but even drawing that kind of line involves making a kind of value judgment.
- qiskit 4y ago
  > Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? So if a cat kills a bird, what should we do to the cat? A bear kills a deer. What should we do to the bear? > Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the potential social and legal consequences attendant thereto? It's why social and legal consequences exist. If humans weren't harming each other, we wouldn't have such social customs and laws. Drunk driving laws exist because people were drinking and driving and harming others. The customs and laws are a reaction to reality. > TBH, your post comes across as rather a bit...robotic, to put it generously. Would it be better if he were uncontrollably emotional?
  - necovek 4y ago
    Well, like most "solutions" in the civilized world, laws simply come in to prevent the worst outcome. Which is that humans would revenge any harm done to their peers. This would lead to disproportionallity and constant "turf wars". Because of this human nature, we introduce laws to let you know in advance what the rules are, and establish an entire system of people determining the fairness of it all. So while I am saying that laws are a simple formalization of the general retaliation, risk of retaliation is an inherent incentive for humans not to harm another (laws or no laws). Compassion and development of empathy are another matter, and evolutionary, they help in getting more people (and animals) on your side, though having animals on your side is not as important as it may have been a few millenia ago. Empathy towards other beings is an extrapolation of civilisational developments. Basically, showing empathy towards animals signals you would be empathetic to people too, which makes you a more desireable peer today. So, stretching it, it's logical you'd want that for participation in the society. Another logical explanation is that without developing empathy for animals, majority of the people would not care for the disruption to the ecosystem (since many people are emotional more than rational). But while there is a logical component to empathy, it's not all logical, just like most of the feelings are. We don't discount love or happiness on rationality grounds either.
    - ss108 4y ago
      "Basically, showing empathy towards animals signals you would be empathetic to people too, which makes you a more desireable peer today." Pointing this out not against you (because I know this is rhetorical on your part), but to highlight the issue for those who scoff at using anything other than "logic" to decide things: There's also no logical reason why empathy to humans is desirable. People might say "but what about an orderly society" or something, but then you can always keep asking the basic question of why x is desirable. If you follow it down the chain, it will always come down to subjective normative judgments. "Logically", human society need not exist. Logically, the earth is harmed by humans. Logically, the earth doesn't matter either. Logically, neither the happiness or safety of any individual human nor of human societies as a whole matter. Logically, maybe only math exists, but if nothing else existed, would math even really be said to exist? Is there any "logical" argument for that math and logic matter even though they are logical?
tmnvix 4y ago
It's enough for me to know animals suffer.
logicalmonster 4y ago
I think starting at proving why human rights exist is the more valuable logical path as there’s some contention that inalienable human rights exist and it doesn’t seem reasonable that animals have rights and humans don’t. I’d suggest that once you have a reasonable proof for human rights (imo the best one is argumentation-ethics) then you can see whether there’s an objective argument for rights that applies to animals.
jmalicki 4y ago
"Animal Liberation" by Peter Singer, a Princeton bioethics professor, is probably the leading academic treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_(book)
qb 4y ago
You probably would agree that reducing suffering inflicted upon humans is generally speaking a good and ethical thing to do, right? To understand why many people think the same re. animals, perhaps trying a different starting point might help: why single out humans? There's fairly good arguments (https://www.animal-ethics.org/the-idea-that-only-humans-are-sentient/ https://www.animal-ethics.org/the-idea-that-only-humans-are-... and the linked papers are a good resource) to be made that many other species have a similar capability to have positive and negative experience (sentience) which are not just citing 'common sense' or similar weasel-words, instead actually looking into the neuroscience of pain and other suffering.
qiskit 4y ago
There is no logic or reason to animal rights. Lets say animals have rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. What do we do when a mama bear kills a deer to feed her cubs? Arrest the mama bear for murder? What do we do when an ant colony takes over and wipes out a termite colony? Execute them for genocide? What do we when someone kills a mosquito? If we examine a bowl of salad a vegan is eating and find thousands of microscopic animal parts in it. Do we execute the vegan for crimes against fauna? Like all agenda driven by emotion and virtue signaling, you can reject with a cursory look at the matter. Does that mean we should allow unnecessary cruel behavior towards animals? No. We should be the best stewards of animals, plants, etc on earth we can be.
- GPerson 4y ago
  I think there’s a few problems with this point. It seems to imply that unless animal rights = human rights, then they don’t exist. The second is related to the first, but it commits the perfectionist fallacy. A third point, perhaps related to the first, is animals may not be capable of moral agency in the same way that humans do, so we may have to treat them differently.
  - qiskit 4y ago
    The first is related to the third is related to the second is related to the first isn't an argument. It's trying to avoid the argument because you can accept the truth. Why not just answer the difficult question I laid out? If an animal has rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, what do you do to the mama bear that kills a deer to feed her cubs? Animals don't have rights precisely because they are animals. Just like plants don't have rights because they are plants. Rights are a human invention for human societies. It does not exist in nature. Animals live in nature and must live under the laws of nature. If animal rights exist, then what are their inalienable rights? Try it and you'll see how absurd the notion is.
    - GPerson 4y ago
      I don’t view this as us having an argument. “ The first is related to the third is related to the second is related to the first isn't an argument.” Do you think this is a generous interpretation of the ideas I put forward? “ Why not just answer the difficult question I laid out?” The way you framed it sounded like a rhetorical device and not a call for discussion and answer.
flatearth22 4y ago
h2odragon 4y ago
Happy animals gain weight faster and taste better. If you're raising them for meat pure efficiency is a good argument for decent treatment. If you have many critters then the health of all of them could be risked by lack of care for a sick one. The "human dignity is damaged by mistreating animals" argument isn't a bad one, as you note: people who cannot empathize with animals are more likely to fail at empathizing with other humans.

5 points by alchemister 4y ago

ss108 4y ago

Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the potential social and legal consequences attendant thereto? Otherwise, I'm not sure what the "logical" reason for not harming them are either. TBH, your post comes across as rather a bit...robotic, to put it generously. In any event, I have a paper being forthcoming in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law in a couple weeks on animal rights under Jewish and Islamic Law as compared to American law. Too bad it's not published yet, or I could plug myself here lol

alchemister 4y ago
>Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the potential social and legal consequences attendant thereto? I'm asking for factual reasoning, not emotional justification. There's a major difference between what I believe is correct and what is objectively logical, or beneficial to humanity.
- ceras 4y ago
  Caring about anything is inherently emotional. Take human suffering. There's no logical reason to care about it. You can't take someone with sociopathic tendencies and logic them into caring about humans - it simply doesn't make sense. Either that empathetic circuitry exists in someone's brain or it doesn't, which manifests as emotions when it does exist. I think you're starting from a flawed premise that logic is a motivating force. Logic is a slave to the passions, not the other way around. Logic is a tool we use to manage our emotional state more effectively by helping us choose actions that we believe are more likely yield net positive emotional states. Logic just computes results; it has no innate motivation of any kind, it takes motivations and emotions as inputs. Take this for example: > beneficial to humanity. You're implying a preference for humanity, which has some emotional foundation. Maybe you care about humans as a whole for some abstract emotional reason; or maybe it's purely self-interest since you're a human (so what benefits humans hopefully benefits you, even if you don't care about other humans) which is also an emotional reason. There's no objective, inarguable truth that you should care about humanity. The root of your confusion on animal rights stems here. Ultimately, animal rights is about taking the empathy that most humans innately have to at least a limited extent, and expanding that to apply to more entities. If you experience no empathy in general in life, it makes no sense. If you experience some empathy, it makes some sense. If you experience a lot of empathy, it makes a lot of sense.
- GPerson 4y ago
  Perhaps you could explain why animals being sentient creatures only counts as emotional justification? It’s a profound fact that human beings evolved from non-human animals. It would be very strange to me if none of them are sentient. I believe killing humans is wrong precisely because they are sentient. Therefore killing animals is also wrong.
- ss108 4y ago
  > objectively logical, or beneficial to humanity. Well those are two separate things. Anyways, the gist of the "logical" argument (which is a myopic way of looking at things to say the least) goes something along the lines of "at least x subset of animals has cognitive and emotional capacity analogous to mentally handicapped humans and/or human children, and thus should be given rights coextensive with such humans". Obviously, there's more meat to it than that, but that's basically what it is. There's no "logic" to it either way, really; opponents of that argument counter with arguments that often boil down to "no the children and mentally handicapped should get more rights because they are humans". This is largely about value judgments and morality, not "logic". A lot of political, philosophical, and legal things require reference to subjective factors and assumptions, and, unsurprisingly, a lot of people on Hacker News discount that realm of these conversations. I think it's a matter of competence; I've noticed when I talk to some engineers about these sorts of assumptions, they get confused and would rather discount that realm as inferior to "logic" than grapple with the stuff or learn how to become conversant in it (some engineers certainly already are). Obviously, there are lots of issues where a an almost purely pragmatic, logical approach may be more than sufficient, but even drawing that kind of line involves making a kind of value judgment.
qiskit 4y ago
> Are you missing the fundamental fact that animals are sentient creatures with feelings, etc? So if a cat kills a bird, what should we do to the cat? A bear kills a deer. What should we do to the bear? > Do you only refrain from harming other humans because of the potential social and legal consequences attendant thereto? It's why social and legal consequences exist. If humans weren't harming each other, we wouldn't have such social customs and laws. Drunk driving laws exist because people were drinking and driving and harming others. The customs and laws are a reaction to reality. > TBH, your post comes across as rather a bit...robotic, to put it generously. Would it be better if he were uncontrollably emotional?
- necovek 4y ago
  Well, like most "solutions" in the civilized world, laws simply come in to prevent the worst outcome. Which is that humans would revenge any harm done to their peers. This would lead to disproportionallity and constant "turf wars". Because of this human nature, we introduce laws to let you know in advance what the rules are, and establish an entire system of people determining the fairness of it all. So while I am saying that laws are a simple formalization of the general retaliation, risk of retaliation is an inherent incentive for humans not to harm another (laws or no laws). Compassion and development of empathy are another matter, and evolutionary, they help in getting more people (and animals) on your side, though having animals on your side is not as important as it may have been a few millenia ago. Empathy towards other beings is an extrapolation of civilisational developments. Basically, showing empathy towards animals signals you would be empathetic to people too, which makes you a more desireable peer today. So, stretching it, it's logical you'd want that for participation in the society. Another logical explanation is that without developing empathy for animals, majority of the people would not care for the disruption to the ecosystem (since many people are emotional more than rational). But while there is a logical component to empathy, it's not all logical, just like most of the feelings are. We don't discount love or happiness on rationality grounds either.
  - ss108 4y ago
    "Basically, showing empathy towards animals signals you would be empathetic to people too, which makes you a more desireable peer today." Pointing this out not against you (because I know this is rhetorical on your part), but to highlight the issue for those who scoff at using anything other than "logic" to decide things: There's also no logical reason why empathy to humans is desirable. People might say "but what about an orderly society" or something, but then you can always keep asking the basic question of why x is desirable. If you follow it down the chain, it will always come down to subjective normative judgments. "Logically", human society need not exist. Logically, the earth is harmed by humans. Logically, the earth doesn't matter either. Logically, neither the happiness or safety of any individual human nor of human societies as a whole matter. Logically, maybe only math exists, but if nothing else existed, would math even really be said to exist? Is there any "logical" argument for that math and logic matter even though they are logical?

tmnvix 4y ago

It's enough for me to know animals suffer.

logicalmonster 4y ago

I think starting at proving why human rights exist is the more valuable logical path as there’s some contention that inalienable human rights exist and it doesn’t seem reasonable that animals have rights and humans don’t. I’d suggest that once you have a reasonable proof for human rights (imo the best one is argumentation-ethics) then you can see whether there’s an objective argument for rights that applies to animals.

jmalicki 4y ago

"Animal Liberation" by Peter Singer, a Princeton bioethics professor, is probably the leading academic treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_(book)

qb 4y ago

You probably would agree that reducing suffering inflicted upon humans is generally speaking a good and ethical thing to do, right? To understand why many people think the same re. animals, perhaps trying a different starting point might help: why single out humans? There's fairly good arguments (https://www.animal-ethics.org/the-idea-that-only-humans-are-sentient/ https://www.animal-ethics.org/the-idea-that-only-humans-are-... and the linked papers are a good resource) to be made that many other species have a similar capability to have positive and negative experience (sentience) which are not just citing 'common sense' or similar weasel-words, instead actually looking into the neuroscience of pain and other suffering.

qiskit 4y ago

There is no logic or reason to animal rights. Lets say animals have rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. What do we do when a mama bear kills a deer to feed her cubs? Arrest the mama bear for murder? What do we do when an ant colony takes over and wipes out a termite colony? Execute them for genocide? What do we when someone kills a mosquito? If we examine a bowl of salad a vegan is eating and find thousands of microscopic animal parts in it. Do we execute the vegan for crimes against fauna? Like all agenda driven by emotion and virtue signaling, you can reject with a cursory look at the matter. Does that mean we should allow unnecessary cruel behavior towards animals? No. We should be the best stewards of animals, plants, etc on earth we can be.

GPerson 4y ago
I think there’s a few problems with this point. It seems to imply that unless animal rights = human rights, then they don’t exist. The second is related to the first, but it commits the perfectionist fallacy. A third point, perhaps related to the first, is animals may not be capable of moral agency in the same way that humans do, so we may have to treat them differently.
- qiskit 4y ago
  The first is related to the third is related to the second is related to the first isn't an argument. It's trying to avoid the argument because you can accept the truth. Why not just answer the difficult question I laid out? If an animal has rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, what do you do to the mama bear that kills a deer to feed her cubs? Animals don't have rights precisely because they are animals. Just like plants don't have rights because they are plants. Rights are a human invention for human societies. It does not exist in nature. Animals live in nature and must live under the laws of nature. If animal rights exist, then what are their inalienable rights? Try it and you'll see how absurd the notion is.
  - GPerson 4y ago
    I don’t view this as us having an argument. “ The first is related to the third is related to the second is related to the first isn't an argument.” Do you think this is a generous interpretation of the ideas I put forward? “ Why not just answer the difficult question I laid out?” The way you framed it sounded like a rhetorical device and not a call for discussion and answer.

flatearth22 4y ago

h2odragon 4y ago

Happy animals gain weight faster and taste better. If you're raising them for meat pure efficiency is a good argument for decent treatment. If you have many critters then the health of all of them could be risked by lack of care for a sick one. The "human dignity is damaged by mistreating animals" argument isn't a bad one, as you note: people who cannot empathize with animals are more likely to fail at empathizing with other humans.