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This line of reasoning gets tricky very quickly and takes us into ethical dilemmas. Take for instance babies with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly http:
by chime 11y ago
This line of reasoning gets tricky very quickly and takes us into ethical dilemmas. Take for instance babies with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_K http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_K
Should functional chimps who show emotions, bonding, skills and reasoning ability be given fewer rights than human babies with no brains but heartbeat, even though we know for fact that they can never be functional members of society? Are our rights based on DNA or potential?
My preference is to treat entire species as non-human persons once even a few members have demonstrated partial intelligence. So cetacean, hominoid, psittacine, canine, feline, equine, bovine, and porcine could easily fall into that category. However, since I hear bovine and porcine are delicious, I don't expect them to get any rights in my life time. Maybe in a few centuries once lab-grown meat is plentiful.
In the meantime, I don't see why we can't treat intelligent species that are not commonly eaten as non-human persons with basic rights.
- ufmace 11y agoI thought they already have at least some rights. Don't many states have entire departments of police officers dedicated to enforcing animal cruelty laws? I don't see much objection to making and enforcing laws against pointlessly cruel treatment of animals.
- Natsu 11y agoThe objection here seems to be over animal testing. So it's a question of whether one prefers to feel good about themselves and leave human victims due to lack of testing, or whether one allows for animal victims.
- Tomte 11y agoNo, they don't. The laws against cruelty are directed towards humans. They forbid specific behavior of humans which involve animals. In the same way, desecrating a cemetary or destruction of property is also forbidden, yet neither graveyards nor objects hold rights themselves.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoCuriously, laws against cruelty to animals was used to protect children against abuse, early in the last century! There were no child-abuse protections then.
- derefr 11y agoI think, in a lot of mental-impairment cases, it's not so much that the person (being? body?) still has any capacity that philosophically would grant them rights, but that they have friends and family willing to fight anyone who tries to take those rights away, and that this sets a precedent for society-in-general. Same with babies: there's nothing there except the parents' stringent insistence that there is, in fact, something there. Or, to put it another way: if humanity consisted purely of sociopaths and there was no such thing as a maternal instinct, babies would not have rights; every human being would likely have a childhood consisting of learning to defend themselves in order to escape captivity/slavery at the hands of their parents.