Now I will not deny the sentiment behind most of these calls for intervention is noble. Anyone who knows me will understand how important the question of eliminating animal cruelty is to me. I even think the use of animals for food should be reduced to a bare minimum. I find animal cruelty utterly unacceptable and I will never associate myself with anyone who even as much as patronizes a business which engages in such behaviour. But we have to understand that as much as we all love and cherish our animal friends, they have no rights as humans have because they are not persons. In a sense, we are allowed to have animal slaves or hinder animal movement ("liberty"). We are also allowed to eat animals and own them. This is because animals do not posses reason or language. Would anyone in their right mind give animals homesteading rights or property rights?! They cannot even comprehend such rights. On the other hand we can make a normative value judgement here - about sentience and the necessity versus undesirability of pain. Animals have to be treated well not because they have a right to being treated as such, but ethics is more than just determining and enforcing rights. However, only rights are actually enforceable. This means that I cannot and should not be allowed to interfere in the relationship between other people and their animals in any aggressive manner. And this is what the author of the article proposes!
Furthermore he quotes a ridiculous number, 94.5%, as if "numbers make right". I'm pretty sure Herbert Spencer destroyed this argument centuries ago...
We must understand that once we were "animals" also. We still are in a way. Potentiality does not cease to exist once potential has been reached. We must be careful with our treatment of animals because one day we may find ourselves (to paraphrase Orwell) "[looking] from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it [will be] impossible to say which [is] which." And who knows, maybe science will soon teach us a lot more about animals and we'll have many more variables in our ethical equation... Didn't we, foolish white men, at one time equate savages from Africa and the Americas with animals? Lesson learned.
A interesting question, if animals do not get the notion of property. They definitively associate some objects as theirs, but how much more do they know about ownership???
ReplyDeleteIn a similar manner we can ask whether a child's toy is really the child's property. After all in that case every time parents take it away they would be breaking property rights. I think the two most controversial subjects when it comes to rights and property rights are animals and children because in many ways children are like animals (especially when they are in the infant stage).
ReplyDeleteAnd then comes the question, when does a child become a adult, as we are all aware about how artificial the age boundary is, for me, this is especially relevant when obtaining consent for medical treatment.
ReplyDeleteYes, the medical treatment and actually also cosmetic treatment (earings, tattoos, etc that parents "give" their children) are particularly important because they have permanent physical effects. Currently my position on this issue is rather complicated. The only problem I have still is establishing the difference between an infant and, say, a kitten, on grounds of personhood. I mean the infant will obviously be a person soon - but potential does not imply moral direction (I do not accept potentiality as a good way of determining how we should act. A lot of feminists use this type of reasoning and say "every man is a potential rapist" or anti-gun people say "every gun owner is a potential murderer").
ReplyDeleteIt might take some time, but I will develop an adequate theoretical base for all this soon.
If 94.5% are truly opposed to animal circuses then the circus would not exist, the demand would be far too low thus coercive government action would not be needed. The market is always democratic.
ReplyDeleteI like a comment at the link:
"Let’s start with the biggest circus with the most clowns first Commonly known as the European Union."