|
I'm for personhood for all tetrapods. Possibly some molluscs and social arthropods.
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 06:12
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 13:27 |
|
|
Even if a person has no rights for any social contract because of impairment or because those rights were stripped from them, there are still some fundamental things we grant all people regardless of their legal status in a society. A guy with an IQ of 25 can't communicate or consent to any kind of legal contract, but he still has the right to live, to not be experimented on medically or have his organs harvested. I think in the future we are going to have to re-assess what has human rights when we start replicating human tissue on a larger scale, so maybe at one point in the future a brain dead person could be considered property in the same way as a laboratory animal, though maybe only if created specifically for that purpose. Right now the extremely mentally impaired have rights so I think it's only fair to share them with other thinking, feeling beings that may not be able to communicate with humans or comprehend contracts.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 07:30
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:Because its not a human. Why would you need any more reason than that? You're so speciesist.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2014 07:59
|
|
|
The "sense of self" thing is the latest argument now that tool use can't be used as an arbitrary dividing line between us and the other animals. I don't think a sense of self is as rare as people would like to believe, and I think a creature could have a developed sense of self without necessarily responding to itself in a mirror. Pretty much any animal that engages in deception or stealth has to have at least some concept of itself as a being in relation to it's environment and awareness of how others perceive it. I don't think a cat that is slowly and carefully stalking through the tall grass, watching carefully where it places it's paws to avoid making sound, is just a biological robot running through programming. Or that those male deer that like to taunt lions by hopping close to them for no apparent reason - biologists explain the behavior by saying it shows that the males have good genes by surviving risky behavior and makes them more attractive to mates, but those deer aren't robots, they are almost certainly experiencing the same exhilaration that humans experience when we do risky stuff to show off for mates, and an awareness of how it must appear to others is part of that. Mammals all seem to have the complete set of emotions human have. Mammals feel love, fear, anger, etc. They experience fun when they play, and it certainly looks like that "Aww, it's so cute" feeling we experience when we look at baby mammals is present in many other species of mammals that have shown care to baby animals outside their species. We have 5 year old dog that appears to adore the new kitten we adopted, he plays with it, grooms it, and gets anxious when he's worried about it. I used to have a german shepherd that would carefully catch my gerbils and bring them to me in his mouth when they escaped their cage. Even if they don't have a stream of consciousness monologue going on in their heads because they lack language, they seem to fall within the range of normal human empathy. Thinking along those lines made me realize that all mammals should be protected from unnecessary suffering, but then realizing that a LOT of that behavior is also found outside of the mammals, among crocodilians, birds, and even some fish. It made me want to draw the line at vertebrates, but then you have octopi... I don't think a non-arbitrary line can be drawn to separate humans from other animals. Draw the line at the edge of our species, we have apes smarter than many humans. Draw the line at mammals and you have to deal with parrots and corvids. Draw the line at tetrapods and you have to address fish that build nests and care for their young. Draw the line at vertebrates and you are arbitrarily excluding molluscs that seem much more intelligent than many of vertebrates. And what about hive animals? An individual ant may be very similar to a robot (though recent research shows they do appear to do a lot of decision making based on their own desire to be productive vs. their desire to be around other ants), but an anthill as a whole acts as a single organism that can adapt and learn. Bees vote on where their next hive will be in a system similar to both the democratic process and the internal thought processes of humans. I think lifeforms that don't have specialized nerve cells or brains may not be worth protecting from suffering, as there doesn't appear to be a mechanism for experiencing suffering. That might be where I have to draw my line.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 19:42
|
|
|
blowfish posted:Jellyfish? They have nerves. I would rate a honey bee hive higher than a solitary bee. Even if we did avoid needlessly killing animals that we considered "alive" enough to be worth protecting, one could justify keeping a bee hive and doing things that you know are certainly going to kill a few of the bees, but not being allowed to just destroy the hive as a whole. ClearAirTurbulence fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Dec 7, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 20:54
|
|