Animals DO NOT HAVE RIGHTS.

Yes, humans are superior to animals. Humans who cannot recognize and respect the rights of others are inferior to humans who can.

The moral lines we draw are based on a variety of standards, but there is an objective standard by which we must recognize rights: you cannot have rights if you cannot respect them in other people. We routinely limit rights to various portions of the human population: children, the mentally disabled, and criminals. We choose not to abuse them because we recognize them as human beings, but we do not grant them rights.

I don't believe in the mistreatment of animals, either; there is something inherently sick about the willful, gratuitous abuse of any living thing. But you cannot possibly grant animals rights. They do not need to have rights to be protected from abuse. We merely have to use our common sense of decency in our treatment of them.

We do indeed respect the rights of children, the mentally disabled, and criminals. Their rights are different in scope, under the law, from those of mature, mentally healthy, law-abiding folks.

The concept of rights is far more complex than you have depicted it. Are rights granted or just recognized? Are they inalienable, or even potentially inalienable? What exactly does it mean to respect a right?

No being can grant me rights that I claim for myself. No matter how I may be oppressed, I will always have rights; my ability to exercise them may be taken away, but they will always exist, because I recognize them in myself and all others who recognize and respect them in me.

Children do not have rights. They have privileges granted them by virtue of the fact that they are human beings. The same is true of the mentally deranged and criminals. The Constitution restricts the administration of cruel and unusual punishment, but that is not due to any recognition of the rights of the criminal; that is a restriction on the rest of us that we must abide by.

A right is something profoundly sacred that goes beyond the law. You have a right to vote; you do not have a "right" to drive a car. It would be a ludicrious infringement on your freedom to make driving illegal, but it is not a Right.

Your definitions are not only arbitrary, they are also contradictory.

If you commit a crime, say, income tax evasion, will you then stop recognizing the rights in yourself that you now claim? Does a judge who imposes a jail sentence, thereby refusing to recognize a right of freedom of movement, thus negate his own such right?

Your analysis of the Constitution is faulty. The prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is part of the Bill of Rights, and derives from earlier documents that went by that name. On what basis do you say that the prohibition is not derived from the rights of the criminal?

You attempt to delineate between a person's right, and a mere restriction on other's behavior. What's the difference? None.

For what it's worth, I claim a right to drive a car. As far as a right to vote, sure, but big deal. I claim a right to revolution, too. That right to vote, though you may wrap it in fancy words like "profound" and "sacred', doesn't exist outside of a formal electoral structure. The same goes for most rights - jury trials, due process, no self incrimination - they are meaningless outside of a specific legal context. I care much less about them than about the right to live my life as I please.

Patrick Henry summed up his opinion of rights like this:

"Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else!"

If I'm a criminal, it doesn't matter what rights I claim for myself, because I have none anyway. If I have a willingness to infringe upon the rights of others--a basic definition of crime--then I can't possibly have rights. It makes no difference what I may think of myself. I will go to prison, and when my sentence is completed, my debt to society will be paid in full; I can then resume the life of a person who has rights, unless I resume my criminal behavior.

What nonsense. A criminal is someone who breaks the law, not someone willing to infringe on others' rights.

According to your analysis, you needn't ever be released from prison once you're in.

Your meaningless word games are a mask for poor thinking.

Anse, I agree with your overall message (animals do not have rights) but not your logic. Children, mentally disabled, and criminals may have their rights curtailed, but they still have certain inalienable rights (like the right to a fair trial, for example).
IMHO, rights are unobservable phenomena (i.e. ideas). Although they greatly impact observable phenomena, the recognition and discrimination of rights requires the ability to reason about unobservable phenomena in the first place. Take, for example, the right to free speech in the U.S. The impact of the right is tangible; one can hear or read the words/sounds of others. However, the right itself is intangible; we know that people are allowed to speak freely because of abstract notions of fairness and justice not because we see people speaking.

If one accepts the notion that recognition of rights requires the ability to process unobservable phenomena, then in order to have rights one must be able to reason about the unobservable, for how can one have rights when one cannot discern rights to begin with. With respect to animals, it has not been shown that other species possess the ability to reason about unobservable phenomena (except, perhaps, for cephelapods, see reviews by Daniel Povinelli, Derek Penn, and Michael Tomasello for an excellent insight into this debate).

Given that logic, animals have no rights because rights mean nothing to animals. This is not a bad or good thing, it is simply a statement of fact. Animals also do not have morals, not because animals do not have a soul, and not because they are inferior. Animals do not have morals because such an unobservable idea is useless to them.

As a result this whole Great Apes Rights thing is horseshit. Why would someone waste their time fighting to grant rights to an animal that doesn't care? When animals start clamoring for rights, then the notion of animal rights will make sense. Hell, if you can teach an animal to even discern the notion of rights, I'll be impressed.

I know I’ve said this before, but most of the time you, I, and just about everyone use the terms rights and duties in a reciprocal way. I shouldn’t beat a child simply for my own amusement, should I? I expect we agree that’s wrong. Well then, do I have an ethical duty not to beat that child or does the child have a right not to be beaten? Most people are going to say quite readily that both propositions are true. So why does this semantic distinction between rights and duties become so precious when we’re talking about a dog, say, instead of a child?

You say that we don’t grant rights to less than fully competent humans. Do you really mean that? If you do, then I’m betting most folks aren’t likely to agree with you. I don’t. I’d argue that while we don’t assign full rights to less than fully functional humans, we do grant them some rights. And generally the rights we bestow are based on their degree of competence, their ability to understand, appreciate, and exercise the rights they’re guaranteed.

We can get into a discussion about the important differences between a duty and a right if you like. I don’t think such a discussion is all that germane to this issue, but others disagree. Before we start down that path though, and hopefully in lieu of making that journey, maybe you could tell me why this distinction between “duty” and “right” matters so much to you when we’re talking about a chimp rather than, for example, a developmentally-disabled human.

After all, to the best of my recollection I’ve never seen you begin a post (top-level no less) by saying “Mentally-impaired human beings DO NOT HAVE RIGHTS.” Would you say such a thing if given the opportunity? If not, and if this contractual definition of “rights” must remain paramount, then why not?

Just curious…

Cheers.

IMHO, rights are unobservable phenomena (i.e. ideas).

Shusaku, this is not correct. The idea of rights is an abstraction, but it is not difficult to discern who has them and who doesn't. All one needs to do is observe the behavior of the person in question.

When I encounter a fellow human being, I recognize in them the ability to ascertain and respect the rights of others. It's not as arbitrary as people want to believe; if you are human, you have rights. If you aren't, you don't. It's a pretty objective standard.

When a person fails to live up to the obligations that having rights entails--respecting those rights in other people--they can no longer be said to enjoy the rights of other human beings.

I apologize, as I did not clarify my definition of unobservable phenomena. When I refer to rights as unobservable phenomena, I do not mean that they are difficult to discern, but that they are not physically tangible. In order to discern rights, one needs to observe the physical impact of a right, however the actual recognition of said right is an interpretation of physical evidence, not the observation itself. Point in case is the issue of the Second Amendment, many people observe the physical behavior of owning guns, but its the interpretation of the physical behavior that determines whether or not one believes that all americans have a right to own guns. Because rights must be interpreted and cannot be seen, touched, or heard, they are defined as unobservable phenomena.
Similarly, language can be defined as unobservable phenomena as well, since language is primarily symbolic; the actual physical output of sound is interpreted and grouped into phonemes then words, so the discrimination of words is primarily an interpretation. Even the laws of physics are unobservable phenomena. Despite the fact that they define physical reality, recognizing physical laws requires an interpretation of observable phenomena.

For humans, processes like relational reasoning, analogical reasoning, and symbolic representation are easy and commonplace; even infants have some form of high-order cognitive processing (although fetuses do not). For all other species, such processes do not even appear to exist. Therefore, it is easy for you, as a human, to recognize said rights and appreciate that other humans recognize said rights. However, such a cognitive process is unavailable to other species living on this planet (as far as we know).

To put it simply, humans can interpret and incorporate physical reality into higher orders of meaning. These set of processes enable our development of civilization including rights. Animals don't have these processes, so how can they have rights? I would argue that my logic is fairly objective and not particularly arbitrary; rights exist in the eyes of those who can appreciate rights.

The problem I have with your logic is that it is too involved in which human beings should have which rights, such a question is irrelevant to the topic; all humans have some form of rights (yes, even criminals). Furthermore, your logic does not set a boundary for when a species should be considered as to having rights or not, which is the question Spain is attempting to address. Hypothetically, if some non-human species evolved or landed on our planet with the ability to reason about unobservable phenomena, should they then be granted rights?

All right then Anse…

You didn’t like my previous question, I guess. Honestly, I’m not that surprised. I’ve found that very few people on your side of the fence appear to be interested in answering it. Easier simply to carry on, I guess.

So here are a few other questions that perhaps you’ll find more interesting:

You say that you extend rights to your fellow humans who are not disabled or imprisoned because you recognize their innate ability to understand and reciprocate your behavior. You also say that even though disabled humans who don't have the ability to understand and respect the rights of others have no right as such not to be abused, we choose not to abuse them because we recognize them as fellow humans. I presume you mean to say that we should choose not to abuse them. You’ve also said that our “common sense of decency” should be enough to give animals – and impaired humans too I gather – all the protection they need from abuse. So then in your ethical scheme all creatures without rights, human and nonhuman alike, must rely for protection on our common sense of decency. Is that about right?

Assuming I’ve gotten it nearly right, from what do you think this common sense of decency derives? How shall we quantify and define it? What principles shall we extract from it and how should we apply them? From what I can see, common sense of any kind is far from being uniformly distributed or universally recognized.

To put it another way, what compelling reason do I have in your ethical scheme to do other than as I like to any being who can’t retaliate against me or benefit me in some way? Let’s assume for the moment that I don’t have to fear opprobrium or retribution from my fellow citizens. If I recognize that another can neither harm me nor help me, why shouldn’t I do with him or her just as I please, within the bounds of my own personal sense of decency anyway?

It seems to me that one advantage of speaking in terms of “rights” is that most everyone recognizes that issues involving rights are taken seriously and usually involve fairly strictly defined responsibilities and limitations on one’s actions as well as liberties.

Cheers.

"You didn’t like my previous question, I guess. Honestly, I’m not that surprised. I’ve found that very few people on your side of the fence appear to be interested in answering it. Easier simply to carry on, I guess."

I'm not sure if you count me as on the same side as Anse, but I actually agree with your analysis of Anse's logic. IMHO, all humans have rights because all humans can recognize and reason about their existence. Animals don't have rights because rights are a human construct and therefore useless to the survival of other species. The specifics of which humans get rights and which don't is a complex nuanced question that is irrelevant to the question of whether animals have rights.

I’m not yet quite sure what side you’re on in this debate. If that matters... I’ve read enough of Anse’s posts on this subject over the years to know pretty much exactly what he believes and how he feels about it. I was hoping he might feel moved to explain a bit more about why he feels so strongly, but I guess that’s not happening. Oh well...

Anyway, I’ve read many of your posts on this topic and in general I have to say I agree with some of your particular points, but I’m somewhat bemused by many of your general conclusions. To wit:

shusaku:

“IMHO, all humans have rights because all humans can recognize and reason about their existence.”

That’s generally but not universally true. We all know that there are impaired humans who are no more capable of recognizing and reasoning about their existence than is the average chimp. Heck, my dog has more ability to appreciate her existence than do some poor souls.

shusaku:

“Animals don't have rights because rights are a human construct and therefore useless to the survival of other species.”

Hmmm… Of course I agree that the concept of “rights” as such is a human construct. But the basic moral/ethical impulses that give rise to our notions of rights are not all exclusively human – at least they don’t appear to be. Clearly we have some common mental/emotional ground with any number of other species. But even if we didn’t, what of it? It seems to me that if we decide that species X has some fundamental right to exist, that decision may very well impact the long-term survival of species X.

shusaku:

“The specifics of which humans get rights and which don't is a complex nuanced question that is irrelevant to the question of whether animals have rights.”

Well, I agree that discussions about when and why various humans are imbued with particular rights are (or should be) complex and nuanced. But I don’t see any compelling reason to exclude non-humans from consideration in our (hopefully) complex and nuanced debates about rights and duties and privileges.

So let me ask you directly the same question I’ve posed to others: Do you think an adult human with the IQ of a four year-old has rights per se? After all, one can reasonably argue that such a being is no more capable of recognizing and pondering his or her existence than are some non-humans. Does the fact that one being has purely human DNA make all the difference?

Cheers.