When I Was Cruel
Still thinking about the animal rights/property rights/animal cruelty/powers of the state issues. I should stress that this is a topic where I really don’t know what I think right now, and may be in the process of changing same. So for the foreseeable future, you can assume an invisible “It seems to me so far” prepends every sentence if you like.
1. Any argument for animal cruelty laws based on how it makes humans feel would seem to justify laws against flag burning and such – from a libertarian perspective clearly a wrong result. Any laws regulating our treatment of animals then, must be based in some moral claim animals have on us.
2. The libertarian arguments against animal rights I’ve seen, most of which stem from the tradition of Rand and/or Rothbard, engage in twin, massive cheats: They make the species the basis of determining human rights, but the kingdom the basis of determining animal rights. They want to enjoin against cruelty to babies and the mentally disabled, so they conjure penumbras and emanations from the capacity of other humans to engage in “moral reason.” They want to permit cruelty to all animals, which they justify by treating all nonhuman species, from dogs to amoeba, as a single class. But if the species is the appropriate level at which to assign human rights, the species may well be the appropriate level to assign (discover?) animal rights. The second cheat from this embryo is, they assign human rights on the basis of the best humans capable of, while denying animal rights based on, in human terms, the “worst” animals are capable of. See Tibor Machen and Jason Kuznicki for examples.
3. Downblog, The Other Eric offers an analogy:
Several people in this thread have proposed a rule that one may use or even kill animals, but one may not torture them.
This is not without precedent. In war, you can shoot enemy soldiers, but (under the Geneva conventions) you may not torture them.
This seems like a sensible philosophy, if not necessarily a libertarian one[1]: Torture is forbidden, across the board.
This does have unpleasant implications for modern Americans. It suggests that we need to shut down the factory farms, and treat our food animals with a modicum of respect.
Eric the .5B rejects this, stating
You can shoot enemy soldiers who are engaged in military operations against you, but you can’t deliberately slaughter a village full of innocent civilians or summarily execute POWs not trying to escape, even if you think they would make great barbecue. Nor can you bring the captives back home, breed them, raise their children in captivity, and eat them.
The analogy is too strained to provide precedent.
I don’t think I agree. I think the point of TOE’s analogy is simply that bundles of rights are disseverable, and that our intuition is that torture is worth than many kinds of killing. Whether TOE’s analogy exactly justifies killing animals for food is – not yet – the point. It’s a place to start thinking about possible differential claims on us from members of the animal kingdom.
4. Considered in the most generous spirit, the argument for locating rights in “moral reason” is really an argument for locating rights in reciprocity. We know that dogs, for instance, are capable of loyalty, conscience, society and mercy. Dogs will avoid killing each other unless they’ve been trained to do so by humans, for instance. Dogs will not torture each other or play with prey. Other species will be capable of some subset of human virtues.
5. Nothing in the foregoing should be taken as a defense of cats. These vile creatures engage in torture, infanticide, rape and peeing on the carpet. Anyone who wants to make a species-based case for laws against cat cruelty is welcome to clear that higher bar.
6. Here’s a basic question regarding the Hayekian perspective on cultural evolution and rights: Did human societies decide that slavery was now unjust, or discover that slavery was always wrong? My instinct is the latter. This ties back to the first point, I think. The Hayekian argument for animal claims is not, “This should be against the law because of how it makes us feel” but, “This should be against the law because our feelings have led us to understand something about the nature of the victims.”
7. As it happens, I drowned a rat the other night – the quickest and surest way I had of killing it at that time. I would do it again.
8. It seems to me so far.
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
August 27, 2007 @ 8:32 am
They want to permit cruelty to all animals, which they justify by treating all nonhuman species, from dogs to amoeba, as a single class.
It entirely possible to assign rights at the species level yet still believe that humans can do with animals as they please. A dog is obviously not an amoeba, but neither one is a human.
The second cheat from this embryo is, they assign human rights on the basis of the best humans capable of…
Not really. Self-identification and moral reason are part of almost every human being alive.
Comment by Misanthrope —
August 27, 2007 @ 9:05 am
I’m with you on all but #2, for which I don’t follow your reasoning. The two bloggers you site drew a line and defined natural rights as existing for human’s only. You call this a massive cheat. The species vs kingdom appears as a way to fancy up an opposed but arbitrary position. Or I’m simply not understanding your position. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit.
Comment by Lee —
August 27, 2007 @ 9:23 am
Regarding #4, locating rights in reciprocity seems a bit slippery to me. Do we mean that we respect the rights of those beings who are capable of reciprocating or those who in fact do reciprocate? The latter position has been used in an attempt to justify all sorts of nastiness (e.g. “We can torture the terrorists because they torture”) and should probably be avoided. But the former has the familiar sorts of problems about accounting for “marginal” human cases (though there are always those willing to bite that bullet).
If anything, there’s a quite different (and, IMO, equally plausible) intuition which has it that we have special obligations precisely to those who aren’t capable of reciprocating and thus are in an important sense at our mercy (infants, the disabled). But then again, I’m a cat person.
I’d be inclined to say that all animals have certain “rights” simply in virtue of being creatures capable of flourishing in particular ways, which means that we shouldn’t treat them in ways the frustrate their ability to live lives appropriate to their kind (e.g. torture is out; I’m still not sure about killing for food). But I’d add that we can and do enter into specific kinds of reciprocal relationships with certain animals which bring in their train additional responsibilities.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
August 27, 2007 @ 9:42 am
I think you can believe that torturing animals should be illegal without believing animals have rights, if you believe that people have no right to engage in animal cruelty. Then, you can jail a person for sticking a rat in a blender, without also committing yourself to intervene every time a cat plays with a mouse.
Comment by Julian Sanchez —
August 27, 2007 @ 9:42 am
I agree the wartime analogy is strained, but I think the straightforward argument is quite easy. Human beings have a temporally extended sense of self in the way that (say) chickens and cows don’t. We think of ourselves in terms of the arc of a life, and have plans and goals that would be disrupted if we were to die suddenly. Since we bind our fleeting experience into this sort of larger narrative, it’s no surprise that we think that it’s *bad* to inflict pain on a person, but much, much worse to kill someone, even quickly and painlessly. What is bad about killing someone is qualitatively different from (at least one major aspect of) what is bad about causing them to suffer. But since animals are (to varying degrees) not like this, it shouldn’t be very surprising if it should turn out to be wrong to cause an animal to suffer, but not seriously wrong at all to quickly and painlessly kill it.
Comment by LarryM —
August 27, 2007 @ 9:44 am
I eat meat and wear leather. That being said, I’m inclined to think that most of our refusal as a society to to grant animals the kind of rights that would preclude such activities is based more on convenience and history than on logic.
Comment by Brooke —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:07 am
Jim, sorry to put this all in the comments, but I am now blogless.
I’ve been lurking and thinking about this since you raised the issue, and it’s also been on my mind quite a bit since Carol Schwartz the Dog has decided to unlearn her housetraining and has taken to relieving herself on the kitchen floor, about a foot and a half away from the doggie door. I can only assume it’s out of spite. I’m thus constantly debating the location of the line between cruelty and acceptable punishment.
I consider the rights of non-humans as being somewhat analogous to merit goods in economics; they’re basically a human construct rooted in social and cultural preferences. It’s sort of like what Gene set out in his post, using the Tiebout economic model of local taxation and applying it to non-financial issues of local control. Societies grant certain “rights†to certain animals based on cultural and social attitudes, and I tend to think that practically speaking that’s probably the best way to go about it.
In most of the West, we’ve given dogs a fairly extensive set of rights based on their place in our culture and the merit we see in them. If you want to raise dogs to fight, go on with your bad self, just don’t do it here; it flies in the face of our shared cultural understanding of man’s relationship to dogs. Take it some place where folks haven’t chosen to extend merit rights to dogs, and I don’t really mind. On the other side of the same coin, I think it’s really stupid that culturally, we have no problem with breeding and slaughtering chickens by the millions, but we don’t allow cock fights. Is the difference that factory farm chickens are for eating but cock fights are just for sport? Great, let’s end cock fights with some delicious fried chicken and some slaw and biscuits, problem solved as far as I’m concerned. Yeah, it’s a cop out, in the same way that merit goods are a blight on economics because they introduce emotion into what’s supposed to be an empirical discipline.
In response to your first point, I don’t think this approach makes animal torture on par with flag burning. To the extent that we clearly extend some animals some rights, I have trouble thinking of them as “property†in the same way a flag is; if the rights that we’ve collectively conferred on dogs are violated, I have no problem with intervening to protect those rights. I don’t think we can confer rights on inanimate object though, and intervene on behalf of a flag.
By virtue of being non-human sentient beings, I think animals are eligible for merit rights, to be conferred at society’s discretion. They aren’t inviolable absolute rights in that they can be undone, or, in the case of something like a foie gras ban, they can be added. In America, dogs get them and chickens don’t. If you don’t like it, lobby on behalf of chickens’ rights—lots of people do. Convince enough people, and you’ll get your way.
As long as I’m allowed to rap Carol Schwartz on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, I’m pretty happy. And the benefit of this approach is that I don’t have to use phrases like “temporally extended sense of self”
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:32 am
This is a good post on a difficult issue. I’m wondering about one thing, though.
The premise here, as usual in this discussion, is that our views on animal rights/cruelty to animals follow logically from from some broader underlying premises. But is this right, either descriptively or as a goal?
I don’t have any particular analytic insight here. but I do believe, rather strongly, that there’s a hierarchy of moral claims among animals, such that
* We owe apes, elephants, dolphins full and satisfying lives;
* We can freely eat pigs, cows, etc., but we need to treat them better than we currently do (which as a practical matter probably means eating fewer of them);
* Killing rats is fine but you probably shouldn’t torture them;
* You can do anything you want to insects.
I’d be much more likely to accept arguments on animal rights that supported these beliefs, than to change them on the basis of argument. And I kind of suspect most people are the same.
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:34 am
Also, Neel is right that the discussion has to be about people’s treatment of animals and not animals’ rights in themselves.
Comment by Barry —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:57 am
Jim: “5. Nothing in the foregoing should be taken as a defense of cats. These vile creatures engage in torture, infanticide, rape and peeing on the carpet. Anyone who wants to make a species-based case for laws against cat cruelty is welcome to clear that higher bar.”
They’re soooooo cute as kittens. If you hate cats, then you hate kittens.
Are there any depths to which a kitten-hater won’t sink? Society should cleanse itself of such abominations.
However, I *do* support reduced sentences for those who mildly harm a cat after it pees on the carpet (bed, draps, sofa) – clearly the cat has deliberately provoked them.
Comment by FreedomDemocrat —
August 27, 2007 @ 11:48 am
“Self-identification and moral reason are part of almost every human being alive.”
But not all throughout their life. So are humans deserving of protection from torture only after a certain age?
Trackback by Freedom Democrats —
August 27, 2007 @ 12:01 pm
Animal Rights, Continued…
Jim Henley on libertarianism and animal rights:
The libertarian arguments against animal rights I’ve seen, most of which stem from the tradition of Rand and/or Rothbard, engage in twin, massive cheats: They make the species the basis of determining h…
Comment by Donald Johnson —
August 27, 2007 @ 12:58 pm
I haven’t thought this through (which will be obvious), but maybe we focus too much on “rights” as opposed to other ways of thinking about right and wrong. People might be leery of awarding animals “rights”, but still think that in almost all cases (there might be exceptions) it is wrong to do X to an animal. Awarding a right would presumably mean you can never do it and that these rights should be enforced.
It might have something to do with what kind of beings we are. I have no necessary obligation to prevent a cat from tormenting a mouse (though I would probably try to stop it), but a human should never torment a mouse. (Or almost never–maybe the mouse knows the location of a ticking time bomb.)
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
August 27, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
But [humans are] not [self-aware, etc.] all throughout their life. So are humans deserving of protection from torture only after a certain age?
No. Human rights begin at conception and end at death. Any other line is impossible to make a coherent defence for, or to create the test that separates non-rights-bearing humans from rights-bearing-human. It also sets genocide up nicely, since we can equally reason that a tribe of humans with IQs around 75 don’t deserve the same protection as humans with 100. And so on.
Comment by Vache Folle —
August 27, 2007 @ 2:25 pm
Dogs and humans made a deal millennia ago. They are our friends and allies, and we owe them more than we owe chickens or other food animals.
I recognize a hierarchy of animals and how much respect I must give them. Humans- don’t eat. Carnivores- don’t eat. Apes- don’t eat. Ceteceans- don’t eat. Pigs and cows and chickens- eat but treat well. Deer flies- kill on sight.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 27, 2007 @ 3:07 pm
1) BS. I for one don’t want to permit cruelty, I just can’t bring myself to say that it’s just to put someone in prison for hurting an animal. I further don’t buy the rather convenient logic that hurting a dog should be criminal, but that slaughtering millions of cattle and pigs yearly in order to enjoy their meat is perfectly innocuous.
2) I for one am happy to argue strictly on the basis of mammals. I haven’t even brought up the billions of chickens slaughtered each year until, well, this sentence, and I’m happy to continue to ignore them. I’m also happy to accord rights to animals on a basis other than “dogs are great” – I agree, but it doesn’t convince me. That’s the trick, of course – arguing for the rights of an animal species that one isn’t fond of.
I’m happy to sensibly sever bundles of rights (as per my reponse to Mona’s hypothetical about a tribe of Homo erectus), but my point is that the analogy doesn’t support the intended severing – especially when the moral freedom to kill in that situation is based on rather stricter criteria than “I could go for steak, tonight.”
To me, this is the problem. It seems pretty inescapable to me that people are arguing for protections for animals they like against things they’d never expect to do to them, but against protections for animals they don’t much care about for uses they want to make of them. People don’t like dogs being mistreated, but they like beef. I don’t think that’s a basis for law-making compatible with libertarianism.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 27, 2007 @ 3:13 pm
Arguing that people have no right to do something that doesn’t abrogate anyone else’s rights (or as you put it, even any thing’s rights) just doesn’t fit in libertarianism as I speak it. We may have very different takes on libertarianism, and that’s cool, but I have to argue from my take on it.
Comment by Leonard —
August 27, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
Ditto on what Julian said up there, which is what I was trying to get at towards the end of the old thread.
Animals by their nature live in the present to a degree that we cannot imagine, at least without the help of marijuana and booze. Because they don’t, as Julian puts it, “have a temporally extended sense of self”, killing them is not comparable to killing us. To kill us not only cuts off our own life, with our own goals and plans, it may also cut off the goals and plans of those we love, who we are committed to.
But torment is a different thing than killing. Although we cannot know with certainty, it seems likely that the experience of pain is basically the same for us as it is for animals. We evolved from them; the wiring is the same. Thus, if it is wrong for us to inflict pain on each other, there’s at least a colorable argument that it’s also wrong for us to inflict pain on animals.
One good question here is, why do we believe it is wrong to inflict pain on each other? Depending on how you answer that, the question about animals should be clearer.
Part of it may be the fear that tends to go with injury, that one is permanently maimed. (So it is based on “temporally extended selfhood”.) But that is not necessarily so; if we had some means of inflicting pain on each other that did not involve the possibility of permanent damage, would we still think it wrong?
My intuition say yes. Still, it’s worth considering that many people consider words painful, and yet we do not ban their usage.
Furthermore, most people feel differently about tortures such as electric shock, waterboarding, and sleep deprivation which are not permanently damaging, than they do about methods involving permanently maiming the victim.
Comment by Rob Mac —
August 27, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
I’m fully in favor of protecting ecosystems and the environment, but I don’t think the above is defensible. Should we intervene when one elephant dominates another or one ape tribe attacks another?
This is also dubious at best. It does not follow that treating cows and pigs better will result in fewer of them being consume nor that consuming fewer of them will be necessarily a good thing. Cows and pigs certainly fare better in terms of species survival than, say, the dugong or dusky seaside sparrow. Also, the consequences of eating the cow and pig go beyond the individual cow and pig, an important consideration.
If this were amended to somehow designate pest species that consume human resources and spread disease, you might start to get somewhere.
Again, I don’t think there’s any justification for this. Insects, first of all, have a tremendously important role to plan in nearly all ecosystems. And anyone who’s ever seen a large insect flop around on concrete, half stomped to death, should quickly dispense with Matt Yglesias’s dubious notion that arthropods “don’t have real nervous systems.”
This issue of animal cruelty is enormously complex and will not be resolved by any sort of magical grand unified theory of morality.
Vache Folle, I doubt very seriously that you truly abide by this hierarchy, though perhaps I am wrong. Do you eat tuna, swordfish, shark, or other large fish? These fish are all carnivores under any reasonable definition of the term. And pigs, cows, and chickens are hardly treated well in any but a few boutique farms. It is possible to eat “well treated” animals if you’re willing to be very choosy and pay for the privilege.
Apes and monkeys have been, of course, regularly eaten by local populations. Cetaceans of course continue to be eaten in large numbers in Japan and Norway.
(For the record, I’m a committed environmentalist and vegetarian.)
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 27, 2007 @ 3:41 pm
On why killing person is worse than killing an animal:
So, if a human being didn’t have plans or goals, that human being’s death isn’t as morally bad a thing? A bit more Randian than I go.
But more seriously, suppose some person suffered brain damage that prevented meaningful planning and the formation of longer-term goals than going to get lunch. This person could interact with other people somewhat normally (including behaving morally towards them), carry out the same daily routine (sleep-work-relax-sleep), and otherwise function well with occasional help from a caregiver.
Would humanely killing that perfectly happy, healthy person be no worse than humanely killing a healthy dog?
Comment by Leonard —
August 27, 2007 @ 4:18 pm
Eric, can we also posit that said person has no significant memory of his past, so that anything he does in the present have no meaning for him in the future? And that he has no specific memory of any events in his life up til now?
I think that is what is necessary to eliminate any kind of an “arc of life”.
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 27, 2007 @ 4:25 pm
On Eric versus Neel, I tend toward Eric. Presumably we need some reason that humans lack a right to cause certain kinds of harm to animals, esp animals they own, that trumps property rights yet passes some kind of libertarian sniff test. I’m not saying Neel doesn’t have such a reason – Neel always has a reason – I just don’t know what it is yet.
On Eric versus me, I agree with – me!
More seriously, and by way of example, Eric’s testimony on pigs in the other thread has me seriously reevaluating my own pork consumption. That is, far from it being a question of defending animals I personally like, it’s a matter of improving my understanding via the testimony of others. That is, because of Eric, I am better informed on pigs. Because of Ashish’s quote from the American Spectator, I am forced to grapple with factory-farming practices in ways I otherwise wouldn’t.
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
August 27, 2007 @ 5:20 pm
Rob Mac,
We’re talking about the treatment of individual animals here. Extinction of insect species is not OK, you are absolutely right about that. I’m saying that experiments on fruit flies raise no moral issues, that’s all. Do you think otherwise?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 27, 2007 @ 6:26 pm
If so, then almost any mammal has an “arc of life”.
Comment by Brian —
August 27, 2007 @ 7:01 pm
Doesn’t matter, anyway. According to the Not-News, Michael Vick has admitted to being “immature” but all is well because….wait for it….he has now “found Jesus.”
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 27, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
I’m not sure whose remark you mean here, aside from “Sab” who said, “I would sooner eat a baby than an adult hog.” I may have missed a thread.
That’s fair…but that would be the first time in the three threads here I’ve read that anyone hasn’t been following that pattern.
I don’t agree with the vegetarians, but I find the argument that cattle should be protected from slaughter as much as dogs should be from mistreatment far more convincing than the arguments that killing animals doesn’t violate them in some significant way. Animals don’t want to be killed, and they’ll endure suffering in order to survive. I don’t buy a separation of bundles of rights that can grant some subset of rights to any creature without granting the right not to be murdered.
And that’s the thing. None of us have to eat meat, to my knowledge. There may be wonderful benefits to eating meat, but they’re optional benefits, and people can be perfectly healthy without it. If livestock deserve some moral consideration analogous to what humans deserve, what are we doing if not murdering them wholesale for our own gain – and mostly for our own pleasure?
It’s not the defense of dogs or even pigs that makes me balk at what I think is hypocrisy, or the concern about livestock treatment- it’s the arguments to wedge in spurious moral exemptions for “humane” meat-eating.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 27, 2007 @ 7:21 pm
Aside from the vegetarians and vegans, of course.
Comment by Michael —
August 27, 2007 @ 7:45 pm
lemuel pitkin:
Are we veering into Phillip K. Dick territory?
We’re not there socially (that would take a lot of Dickean baggage), but I’d be unwilling to tell a small child it was OK to pull the wings off of flies.
Comment by Madeline F —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:16 pm
I think LarryM #6 and lemuel pitkin #8 have really good points, that point to where this discussion is going all crossthreaded.
Libertarianism isn’t a philosophy of how to interact with the world: it’s a philosophy of how to interact with government. It’s a conservative philosophy in that it will never suggest a new law, and yet it is not sufficient in itself, since it exists to interact with a government. The government, then, arises from a different set of principles, something more all-encompassing, something more like the common morality of the nation. Religion, humanitarianism, these have wider umbrellas when it comes to suggesting how we should interact with our fellows.
Libertarianism is constrained, like science. They mostly interact with their subjects (respectively “government” and “everything that can be measured”) conservatively; merely shedding light from a different perspective, without suggesting changes. To get morality out of science, or to judge the worth of bits of government by libertarianism, you can’t stand on them alone: you have to have one foot on another platform, something that judges.
The libertarians answers (media exposure! Shunning!) just won’t work for stopping animal cruelty. Libertarianism is tangent to the whole thing. Libertarianism will never increase liberty; it will just decrease government (which may in some cases increase liberty). Libertarians are never the ones on the edges of popular thought exploring rights and claiming them; they’ll just hold onto rights once solidly claimed. They just aren’t working in that arena with that set of tools. They’re the editors, not the writers.
Comment by Madeline F —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:30 pm
As for arguments about the underlying morality, it’s not correct to say that animals live in the moment. Elephants have family structures and graveyards and PTSD. Cats remember you even when you come back from college years later. Even the pea-brained jaybird stores acorns for the future.
Emotions, even emotions we consider “complex”, exist on an incredibly basic level: mice, for instance, are tested for despair. (You put a mouse in a tank of water with one underwater platform it can stand on… Then, when it has learned where that platform is, you take it away. How long until the mouse gives up swimming and does the dead man’s float?)
It’s convenient for humans to believe we’re the only beings like us… It’s like teenagers believing that no one else could possibly understand what they’re going through. Makes us feel cool. But really, it only takes a little observation to realize that all these genes that characterize our minds have cognates in every other animal. We can plan better… That’s just about it.
As for what I believe, I’m good with treating other creatures respectfully and staying out of their way as much as possible. But, respecting ourselves, too: we’re an animal that’s meant to have some meat. We’re not apart from the system of life here.
Comment by Madeline F —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:36 pm
Though to try to bang the square peg of libertarianism in, here: why not just say “in general, don’t f0ck with other species unless for some specific, limited reason, which must withstand many challenges”? Why not treat other species as other nations? Doesn’t it solve everything to just think of humanity as the America of the Linnean order?
Anyway, thanks for the platform for thinking on paper.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
August 27, 2007 @ 10:51 pm
OK, since nobody else is willing to take the other horn of the dilemma here, I’ll do it. Why is it so bad to conclude, based on the narrow moral-reason conception of rights, that infanticide and the euthanasia of the severely mentally disabled are not, in principle, wrong?
I think this is yet another confusion of morality with legality, but in the reverse order from the usual one. Here we have acts that are probably not immoral, but should be impermissible anyway. Why? Not the ick factor; that, like religion, is never a good public reason for anything. But because of the slippery slope argument, which is quite obvious and strong here. Giving all humans legally enforced rights on the basis of most humans having moral reason prevents us from having to draw messy lines. Species membership is easy to test and is a necessary condition for having moral reason; it’s not sufficient, but is not wildly far off sufficiency, and nothing closer is nearly so easily tested.
Conversely, we should recognize a right to life from birth and not conception because birth is just as easy a line to draw, and no less necessary a condition for rights-bearing.
And there you go. No worries about the legal status of The Children ™, nor any handwringing required about the veal calves etc. Such a small, easily digested bullet to bite! (And, like those given to the sepoys of 1857, coated in savory pig fat…)
FWIW, I think laws against dogfighting set a bad precedent– they give the Scalias of the world ammunition in their defense of other ick-factor-based laws– but I’m not going to spend any time making their abolition a priority. But you can have my veal saltimbocca and my pate de foie gras when you pry them from my cold dead fork.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
August 27, 2007 @ 11:37 pm
And for whatever *else* it’s worth, I buy the fancy special cruelty-free meat from Mollie Stone’s– which is kind of like Whole Foods but more expensive, if you can believe that– and even get the local farmer’s market stuff when I have the time to go there. Because even to a cynical dogfight-permitting sort like me, it really does taste a lot better. Modern factory farming is largely a product of unbelievably stupid subsidy policies, not of the free market, and it does no more favors for uncaring epicures than for animal rights activists.
Comment by Joshua Holmes —
August 28, 2007 @ 1:00 am
Conversely, we should recognize a right to life from birth and not conception because birth is just as easy a line to draw
It’s also a wrong one.
Comment by Steve Trinward —
August 28, 2007 @ 11:07 am
If there is a line to be drawn, it is more practical (as well as logical?) to make it occur somewhere around the first time a “fetus” begins to assert its own presence as a self-aware being. The “quickening” is a good example: the first kick!
What gets us in trouble, by proclaiming either genetics (this is “human” acc. to having such a DNA code) or “conception” (that mythical moment only capable of being extrapolated back from several weeks later) as a defining factor of “personhood” (humanness), and then placing a boundary for “rights” around that definition … is that this rules out the following: sapient other earth-species (dolphins, etc.), ETs, AI, hybrids (cf. Cordwainer Smith’s underpeople), etc. Under these rules, none of these could be considered “human” or accorded “rights” of any sort.
Along with this, there is the premise that “animals” are outside the pale here, which allows for “dominion over the beasties” with all the negatives implied.
Neither “conception” nor birth canal defines the nature of the entity; there is behavior present at some intermediate stages that could be considered “humanness” … this is the level on which the discussion should be held, whether it addresses homo sapiens or other species, which may or may not possess sapience as well as “life” …
Comment by Hugo —
August 28, 2007 @ 3:33 pm
Comment by Julian Sanchez
who are you? animals, (say) chickens and cows, have as much “a temporally extended sense of self” in the way that humans do.
they have plans and goals that would be disrupted if we were to die suddenly.
dogs know and dream about being outside.. about sex, food and games.. they have nightmares that can hunt them during their wakening hours, etc.
It is not surprising that you argue as you argue Julian?
Jim – great post btw
Comment by cls —
August 28, 2007 @ 4:07 pm
I won’t speak for Rothbard but Rand was known to have said that she wanted there to be a case for animal rights but couldn’t conceive of one that she thought worked. What she wanted was the complete opposite of what you imply.
And most the arguments I have heard among libertarians on the issue of rights for animals does not treat them all as one class and hasn’t. They are often nuanced and discuss the development of different species as a consideration.
You see the same debate regarding abortion. The Right to Lifers argue that is a one size fits all sort of argument. But the pro choice libertarians (the majority) argue that fetus is very different from a developed individual who has been born and therefore it doesn’t have the same rights.
Comment by Hugo —
August 28, 2007 @ 4:12 pm
Comment by cls —
Today – most developed animal individuals have less consideration than a fetus or a chair!
Comment by Hugo —
August 28, 2007 @ 4:15 pm
PS: many animal rights activists are pro-choice and also advocate the abortion of animals as long as there are not enough homes. they advocate spay/neuter of all animals as long as there are not enough homes and 3-4 million cats and dogs are killed every year…
after all the fetus of a cat is not the same a fully developed cat individual who longs for autonomy and the expression of free will and all other evolutionary needs..