Why do you all waste time protesting against speciesism?

[birthday pony]

francois, i think you have been evading an answer to the question that's been posed to you by me and b.p. ...

if "rights" revolve around moral use of violence, and you feel that it is ok to use violence to stop someone from savaging a dog, but not a rock or a carrot, then you are saying the dog has a right that rocks and carrots do not share. otherwise, it is you who will be acting immorally by using violence against someone who is acting well within their rights.

in short, what gives you the right to stop someone, including the use of force, from savaging a dog?

Or even the dog from stopping his/her own attacker for that matter.

[|Y|]

Rights granted by one human to another (human or non-human) are called Laws, and are generally upheld by the State. If I protect a dog that is being harmed I am granting it no rights, I am merely expressing *my* right to act, nothing more. I accept that some people see dogs as nothing more than a tastey meal.

[Francois Tremblay]

francois, i think you have been evading an answer to the question that's been posed to you by me and b.p. ...

if "rights" revolve around moral use of violence, and you feel that it is ok to use violence to stop someone from savaging a dog, but not a rock or a carrot, then you are saying the dog has a right that rocks and carrots do not share. otherwise, it is you who will be acting immorally by using violence against someone who is acting well within their rights.

in short, what gives you the right to stop someone, including the use of force, from savaging a dog?

First of all, you are assuming that I need a right in order to use violence. But the use of violence by the individual is decided by his own morality, not by rights only. Even if I do not have a right to stop a friend from killing himself, I may try to do so based on my overwhelming affection for that person and the desire for them to not waste their life (I personally would not do so, but I can understand if someone else does).

What rights tell us are the uses of violence that can be justified, and therefore should not be punished by society (if that society is moved by rational principle and not collectivist indoctrination or base emotionalism). I should not be punished for killing someone who is trying to kill me. I should not be punished for getting back something that was stolen from me. And so on. What it does NOT tell us are what the individual should do in his own conscience.

That being said, the other issue is that you say I don't think dogs have rights. This is not accurate. I said that as pets, dogs are social agents and therefore have rights, conditionally to their status as pets. So I don't think that the scenario you propose is necessarily unjustified. My issue is with the AR activists' idea of rights.

[birthday pony]

Rights granted by one human to another (human or non-human) are called Laws, and are generally upheld by the State. If I protect a dog that is being harmed I am granting it no rights, I am merely expressing *my* right to act, nothing more. I accept that some people see dogs as nothing more than a tastey meal.

I would agree. I was just trying to understand where franc was coming from.

[Yarrow]

the other issue is that you say I don't think dogs have rights. This is not accurate. I said that as pets, dogs are social agents and therefore have rights, conditionally to their status as pets.

so you say dogs DON'T have rights, if they're not under pax humyna (like pax romana, a special kind of peace). rights are perhaps an invalid concept from my point of view, we would do better to talk about the duties of a humyn.

even the word 'speciesism' misdirects from the problem, i think. judging something by it's species is not such a terrible thing, but to look upon biology as something that can be manipulated without recourse is, in my mind, an opinion open to abuse.

[Francois Tremblay]

AFAIK, "humyn" is not proper english.

[Yarrow]

if by proper you mean acceptable in scrabble, no it's not in the oxford (or websters, i think, for the US). but then US isn't proper english, and plenty of people have trouble with the word aluminum (although it's the brits who got it wrong there).

it's a semantic derivation, used to indicate that male is not the base state of humynity. a little NLP goes a long way.

but let me get this right: you think a right exists when it is asserted by someone who comes up with a moral justification for a given act? and if it's not asserted, it doesn't exist? because i have trouble gelling that with inherent morality- which is an interesting idea in itself.

[Francois Tremblay]

If you are implying that a right is made up by the individual, then no.

[|Y|]

A dog would have complete rights to protect itself, the scenario presented merely makes it increasingly unlikely.

To the person proding the dog with the stick? Depending on who they are they might not enjoy being put in a pack of hungry wolves! (Essentially the converse scenario.)

[Francois Tremblay]

Yes, humans get attacked and killed by non-human animals all the time. By far the most deadly are viruses and bacteria. Do viruses and bacteria have rights? No, but it sure as hell doesn't matter either way.

[Yarrow]

sorry to bring it back up, but again i think that depends upon your definition of rights.

What rights tell us are the uses of violence that can be justified, and therefore should not be punished by society (if that society is moved by rational principle and not collectivist indoctrination or base emotionalism).

which surely means this definition of rights means nothing in our context.

If you are implying that a right is made up by the individual, then no.

so rights are inherent, regardless of what any person (or society) thinks?

[Global Dissident]

"violates our right to claim them as property and do whatever we want to their bodies?"

Such a "right" does not exist. Really one cannot "own" anything, but only control/manipulate/dominate it physically.

[|Y|]

Global Dissident, indeed. That is the foundation which modern anarchism is based upon! The thing is all living things *require resources to exist* thus it is a right to have "property."

Only, as Proudhon correctly argued, *possession* is the natural form of property. There exist in no other animal species the act of upholding non-possessive, capitalist, property. Humans are the only animals that do it and it requires a state to do it.

[Francois Tremblay]

Yea Y, that makes sense.

[Yarrow]

so to reiterate, for debates' sake: i 'waste' my time fighting speciesism because i think a fair and peace-minded attitude cannot be nurtured whilst one is engaged in acts of indiscriminate 'cruelty'. whilst i have no problem with (others) eating meat or using yeast for bread, i think we need to better understand the consequences of our actions when it comes to other forms of life on our planet.