The animal rights logic is usually the following: Animals have the capacity to suffer and a will to live, therefore they deserve a right to not be harmed or killed needlessly.
No sane person would argue that they should have the right to vote or anything like that, just the basic ones. I feel like there’s a lot of confusion about this.
E.g. kicking a dog on a whim violates their right to not be harmed and should be illegal in an ideal world.
It seems like you share the ethical concern. Why wouldn’t you be in favor of granting them these two basic rights then?
Maybe your problem is with extending this logic to something like killing a pig for taste pleasure compared to kicking a dog? I’d argue that if you’re against the latter, there’s no ethical reason to defend or even support the former. Something being culturally ingrained or pleasurable doesn’t automatically justify it after all.
My issue with that approach is that all rights that we concede to animals are related to humans. We would not police interactions between animals (unless provoked by a human). So it feel strange to give an animal the right to live just if its live would be taken by a human, but that right becoming meaningless if the life-taker is another animal. At the end we are only caring about human-animal iterations so why not simplify making it an human duty instead of an animal right?
I’m also fond of duties. From two perspectives. We could talk about giving animal rights, but we could not talk about giving animal duties. So they would be recipient of rights without duties. And I also like to remind people that humans not only have rights, that we also have duties which are equally important.
The base of the underlying logic is also not against veganism. As soon as you consider killing an animal for it’s meat something cruel it becomes inmoral. The the debate gets simplified in talking about what constitutes cruelty and, if killing for eating is cruel or not. Which to me seems much more on point that talking about animal rights which could get complicated and have the deep meaning lost in words and concepts.
At the end the animal having or not having rights is meaningless as most people debating this care only about what the human is doing to the animal. For instance, in a word without humans, would the animals still have those human invented rights?
The animal rights logic is usually the following: Animals have the capacity to suffer and a will to live, therefore they deserve a right to not be harmed or killed needlessly.
No sane person would argue that they should have the right to vote or anything like that, just the basic ones. I feel like there’s a lot of confusion about this.
E.g. kicking a dog on a whim violates their right to not be harmed and should be illegal in an ideal world.
It seems like you share the ethical concern. Why wouldn’t you be in favor of granting them these two basic rights then?
Maybe your problem is with extending this logic to something like killing a pig for taste pleasure compared to kicking a dog? I’d argue that if you’re against the latter, there’s no ethical reason to defend or even support the former. Something being culturally ingrained or pleasurable doesn’t automatically justify it after all.
can you explain what you mean by will to live?
My issue with that approach is that all rights that we concede to animals are related to humans. We would not police interactions between animals (unless provoked by a human). So it feel strange to give an animal the right to live just if its live would be taken by a human, but that right becoming meaningless if the life-taker is another animal. At the end we are only caring about human-animal iterations so why not simplify making it an human duty instead of an animal right?
I’m also fond of duties. From two perspectives. We could talk about giving animal rights, but we could not talk about giving animal duties. So they would be recipient of rights without duties. And I also like to remind people that humans not only have rights, that we also have duties which are equally important.
The base of the underlying logic is also not against veganism. As soon as you consider killing an animal for it’s meat something cruel it becomes inmoral. The the debate gets simplified in talking about what constitutes cruelty and, if killing for eating is cruel or not. Which to me seems much more on point that talking about animal rights which could get complicated and have the deep meaning lost in words and concepts.
At the end the animal having or not having rights is meaningless as most people debating this care only about what the human is doing to the animal. For instance, in a word without humans, would the animals still have those human invented rights?