Animal Rights
Should animals be given the same rights as humans?
Yes
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No
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animals have no intrinsic rights, they need to claim rights or be attributed rights by another species that is capable of such claims since rights are the political assertion of ones ethics or morality. The short version of my arument is that if we are moral and morality has as much to do with what is basic and fundamental as it has to do with what is optimal, we have the ethical optimal to attribute basic if not complex rights to animals insofar as we relate to them (if we are significant in their life and directly cause and control the degree of suffering the animals experience). If we do not do this we demonstrate that we do not understand what it means to be ethical beyond the borish sense of one's rights. Side: Yes
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This is a somewhat relevant argument I posted aw while back: Well, purely from an intellectual perspective, humans are the "smartest" of the creatures we know the existence of (I don't want to debate God's existence right now), higher memory capacity, higher order thinking (through the enlarged prefrontal cortex other animals lack mostly), etc. From a biological perspective, we have no direct relation to them in terms of a food chain (some asian cultures aside), so we could be considered "equals" in that sense. But obviously from a societal view, we see humans as superior to all beings. As I believe with most views, our opinions are subjective, but they are based upon an inherent selfishness that drives the majority of our actions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it is just a fact of life. Should they have more rights? No. This is a societal issue, and dogs are not contributing members of society, nor are they, in a purist sense, even members of society (dog owners may disagree, but their opinions are clearly biased). They obviously can't pay taxes until they have equal representation in our elected government. And since I don't see dogs running for congress anytime soon I think we can dismiss that idea. Side: No
the intelligence, nor the contribution to society, nor the fact that they do not pay taxes, nor their place in the food chain is relevant to the argument, this is a moral argument and thus we need to think about what we ought to do as moral agents. Insofar as what we ought to do is concerned, we must consider that how we treat other sentient life independent of intelligence or political capacity is a reflection of us as a species. our moral character is the degree to which we maximize the quality of sentient life which we have claimed stewardship over as the dominant and "moral" species. We are only moral if we afford sentient life similar rights, if not the same rights. Side: Yes
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