Anarchy, State and the Puppy Mill
Lots of good stuff on animal rights, property rights and animal cruelty in the comment thread downblog, and many folks were kind enough to take up the issue on their own blogs. I’m reading and digesting. Couple quick items as a kind of progress report:
1. As part of my thinking on this, I’ve decided that I can’t oppose bans on foie gras production. This will doom my to outcast status at the next reason happy hour.
2. There are places in the world where people eat dogs. That grosses me out. I don’t support laws against it, though.
Now, the links:
Julian Sanchez starts to say there isn’t a libertarian case, then revises and extends.
Megan McArdle mostly responds to Julian, and again.
Jason Kuznicki offers a sweeping anti- case I don’t think I buy, but with the best title yet.
Gene Healy thinks there might be, and points to Robert Nozick’s writing on the subject.
cheerful iconoclast talks about the problem of some flavors of libertarianism with edge cases.
Matt Barr attacks the question from the other side, the question of differing bundles of property rights.
Lee at A Thinking Reed offers a selection from Steven RL Clark, and suggests that fuzziness is not just for puppies.
James Joyner thinks JS Mill precludes a libertarian case for prohibiting animal cruelty, but see Julian II above, in response.
I Think Therefore I Err says the more you know animals, the harder it is to draw bright-line distinctions between Them and Us.
That’s what I’ve seen so far.
Comment by Hesiod —
August 23, 2007 @ 8:48 pm
How about, torturing animals is a sign of deep psychosis that is too often a precursor to harming human beings?
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 23, 2007 @ 8:53 pm
Dude, you didn’t read the other thread at all, did you?
Comment by sab —
August 23, 2007 @ 9:47 pm
My sinologist sister was taken to restaurant in China after her first wedding and fed an unspecified white meat. Afterwards she figured out that it was dog, and she says she felt as if she’d been fed a baby. It tasted OK, kind of like pork, but she still felt horrified and violated. (Imagine how the dog felt.)
I’ve met a number of pigs (the real porcines, not the jerky human guys) and I would sooner eat a baby than an adult hog. Hogs are just big fat dogs with trotters instead of paws. They are even brighter than most of the dogs I know, with vivid personalities. I’d sooner eat dog than a hog, and I’d sooner eat my own arm than either. I’m not a vegetarian, but I can’t imagine eating, or killing for sport, any animal that functions at the sentient level of dogs or pigs.
Comment by sab —
August 23, 2007 @ 10:03 pm
Help me on this. I have libertarian tendencies, because otherwise they will be banning pickups from our driveways, pitbulls from our yards, and drying clothes from our outdoor clotheslines. But I still think that people who fight dogs should burn in Hell forever and be locked up for a long-time in the meantime. I don’t want pitbulls voting, but I can’t accept that their safety or protection is morally or legally on a par with protecting my garden gnome or birdbath.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 23, 2007 @ 11:57 pm
I don’t have any thoughts to contribute on animal rights, but I gotta give props for the title of this thread.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
August 24, 2007 @ 3:16 am
sab: libertarianism is a political philosophy that starts from the premise that people are rational, intelligent beings who are usually the best judges of their own interests. Like all generalizations, this is only approximately true. Naturally, I think this is a pretty good approximation, but of course it will not work so well on the cases where the generalization isn’t true. And those cases are precisely the points at which consensus among libertarians breaks down.
So there isn’t a consensus libertarian position about how to take care of small children, the severely mentally disabled, or the profoundly senile, because the libertarian generalization about how people act breaks down in these cases. Exactly the same thing happens with animals, because they share some, but not all, people-like attributes, but are clearly incapable of full participation in society.
If you’re a libertarian who thinks that factory farming is inhumane, cruel and should not be legal, then you’re a libertarian who thinks that factory farming is inhumane, cruel, and should not be legal. There you go.
Comment by Thoreau —
August 24, 2007 @ 5:59 am
Neel-
That formulation of libertarianism in terms of positive statements about rational adult humans is only one way of approaching it. When you approach it that way you are correct in saying that libertarianism has no definitive prescriptions for children, mentally disabled adults, pets, etc.
However, some would formulate libertarianism in terms of the immorality of the state’s actions. When this is applied to rational adults who interact with kids, pets, disabled adults, etc., it places very tight limitations on what (if anything) the state can do in these matters. Now, in some ways that’s a good thing, since even a state action that is justified (by whatever criterion) can still be horribly executed. But at the same time, it could lead to some conclusions that many (myself included) might take issue with.
Personally, I prefer the first formulation of libertarianism described above. It may make fewer prescriptions than the second version, but that isn’t a bad thing for somebody who doesn’t require an all-encompassing theory of everything.
Comment by Doc Nebula —
August 24, 2007 @ 9:20 am
My blog post, which is mostly a cleaned up version of my first comment in the thread downblog, can be found at: A Brown Eyed Handsome Man: Something Vicked this way comes, if you’d care to look at it.
Actually, it can be found there whether you care or not. It’s not, like, existentialist, or anything.
It’s also on my other blog at The Miserable Annals of the Earth: Something Vicked this way comes. And on that blog, you might like this, too.
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
August 24, 2007 @ 9:51 am
Jim,
I spent two years in the Philippines, where eating dog is part of the culture. Got invited to a birthday party and had several helpings of what I thought was a beef stew. A guy that had been at the birthday party came over the next morning and asked me “so how’d you like the dog last night”?
To add insult to injury the people who were throwing the party liked to name their dogs after missionaries who they liked who had served there before I arrived. I had apparently eaten Elder Heke.
Blech.
~Jon
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 24, 2007 @ 12:21 pm
I’ve never dealt with pigs, but I’ve dealt with dogs and cattle. Dogs are awesome, but cattle are dumb – I’ve never see one act any brighter than a rabbit.
Killing a dog for fur or meat horrifies me only a bit less than because the poor, mistreated thing lost a fight, and torturing it is only an exacerbation of a horrible thing. It’s just wrong to me. On the other hand, I have no problem with cleanly killing a cow for food, and only a minor problem with the mistreatment of cattle in the meat industry as it is.
However, these are both my reactions. They’re emotional and biased heavily by my preference for smart, loyal, affectionate animals. Neither are a just basis for law. If animals deserve rights, cattle deserve protection from killing no matter whether I consider them barely more than methane-makers. If they don’t, dogs don’t deserve protection from horrible treatment no matter how sick what trash like Vick did makes me.
Trackback by Samizdata.net —
August 24, 2007 @ 1:23 pm
Animals and rights…
Jim Henley has kicked off a fair old discussion buzz on the blogs in asking the question: do animals have rights? My short answer right away is they don’t as the term rights only makes sense applied to humans because humans, being actually or potentia…
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 25, 2007 @ 9:33 am
Thoreau: Thanks. I was pretty proud of it.
Follow-up post(s?) coming.