Leave Michael Vick Alone...

[WillMagic]

CMI,

First, let's take a step back for a second, to just how far you are having to push the human/nonhuman distinction in your attempt to break the property rights framework....to literally the most edge-case in the world, a human being who is clinically dead, and has effectively zero chance of ever regaining consciousness.

And you know what? I don't know what the answer is in this one in a million edge case. I don't. I don't know if this person is a human or not. I don't even know if "torture" has any meaning when it comes to this person because he, or she, or more appropriately it at this point, can't even feel pain.

So you know what? I'm going to say that the next-of-kin can do what they want with this thing. If they don't own it, they come as absolutely close to ownership as it is conceivably possible with the human form.

[CallMeIshmael]

Will,



Just to note again, that this person isnt "almost dead". It wouldnt be hard to find someone who could both walk around and fail to be a moral agent.




Anyway, no, I dont think this has gone too far (though I readily admit it has gone pretty far!). This whole subthread started with a discussion about who exactly gets rights. Your position is that only humans do. And you also contend that the reason humans do and animals dont is their ability to act as moral agents and/or the ability to ask for rights. Finally, you said that you believe only this position and the PETA position are consistent.



My only real problem with your viewpoint is the idea of WHY humans are the only ones to get rights. I am, before pretty much anything else, a biology guy. And I think the line you are drawing between human and animal is, from an objective biological viewpoint, somewhat arbitrary/anthropocentric. But, I wouldnt even have a problem with it, if you just came out and said "all humans get rights, all animals are property, thats the way it is," because I cant really argue against it. I can disagree with it, but I cant say its "wrong" because anything I could counter it with would, itself, be an assertion.


However, when you come at it from these other precepts (moral agent, etc), then there is room for argument. You say its a consistent position, yet when I present examples (admittedly at the extreme, but finding animals with a greater moral ability than a human isnt impossible) where your precepts should either allow me to have a human be property or bestow on an animal some rights, you still dont do it. You become inconsistent.

Just say that humans get rights an animals dont, regardless of moral agency, and you're consistent. Otherwise, you're not.

[John Kilduff]

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I don't believe Jefferson or Aquinas would have agreed that ownership of an animal gives one the right to torture it solely for the sake of gratuitous pleasure. They would probably have thought that a man whipping his horse long, needlessly and unmercifully, probably himself would have deserved to be horsewhipped.

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And there is simply no way he would have been in favor of the State horsewhipping someone who was a little overzelous with the whip.

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I wasn't talking about someone being merely "a little overzealous".

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Right, you were talking about someone being an arbitrary amount more overzealous than "a little overzealous." If you think Jefferson is going to think that the state should intervene because a man treating his horse badly, you've lost touch with reality.

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An "arbitrary amount" my foot. You know we were talking about a severe abuse situation, not someone merely being a little heavy-handed. If you saw a man raining down 100 heavy blows with the whip on a horse within a 5 minute period, would you consider that "arbitrary amount" to be "too much" or is it entirely up to the Observer or Actor? This is splitting hairs and nonsense.

If you must split definitional hairs, just make the hypothetical an amount that you and basically everyone would consider "too much" and take it from there. The man does not have the right to inflict SEVERE ABUSE on the animal; I am sure you know what "severe abuse" means, or at least you'd surely know it when you see it.

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If the man seems out of control, then of course you could walk up to him and say "Hey buddy, take it easy." He'd probably stop beating his horse then. Or he'd tell you to go and [censored] yourself and keep beating his horse. I just don't think it's the state's job to tell people how to treat their animals; if you people think it should be a matter for the federal cops, we're just going to have to disagree on the matter.

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I think the man does not have the right to do it (to wantonly and severely abuse the horse). I'm arguing with those who say he does have the right to do it because the animal is his property. What should be done about it, if anything, is another related discussion. My argument is that property ownership does not absolve one of the responsibility for treating animals humanely as opposed to treating them in a deliberately sadistic manner.

[morphball]

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No, it's not absurd that animals have a right to not be wantonly tortured and severely abused for no good purpose. Humans have the responsibility to exercise their powers over animals with some measure of responsibility and compassion.


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What's a good purpose? What's torture? Animal torture and murder for food is okay, except that do you need to eat animals? Animal torture and murder is okay for life saving drugs? But what about animal testing for non-life saving drugs?

Think of other things animals are used for. Diary cattle are bred to have udders that are larger than what would happen in nature. They get so large they cause sores. In the winter they can freeze. The cow is bred to produce so much milk that it will literally deplete itself of calcium and die. Isn't this wrong? Can't they just have more cows with smaller udders? That's torture just to save or make money, depending on which side of the glass you want to look at it on. So when you dog fight for money, how is that so different than the current state of the world's dairy industry, or at least that of Canada and the United States. There is not a clear line as you so emphatically argue, it's shades of gray.

The problem with shades of gray is you can't legislate shades of gray. Farmers can torture and kill for profit, drug makers can torture and kill for profit, hunters can kill and torture for sport, but Michael Vick can't? That's assinine and I suspect people who look at these issues closely know it. These people choose to overlook their own hypocracy because well, they have a Fido of their own, and gosh darnit Fido is just cutest thing ever!

[UATrewqaz]

In your zeal to find hypocrisy, what you so are willfully overlooking is the fact that almost universially people are AGAINST torture of animals in the food and medical industries.

Animals can be used and even put to death in various ways, some way more humanely than others.

Just because you aren't vegetarian doesn't mean you WANT baby cows and pigs to be tortured. I eat meat and use animal products and I hope and desire that they are treated as well as possible in the process.

Last time I checked animal use in the food/medical industries is legally regulated just like dog fighting. There is no hypocricy.

Decent people don't want to cause completely unnecessary pain and suffering to other living things.

If you can't grasp such a simple concept there is no hope for you in this argument or life in general.

[Copernicus]

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Jefferson might not have advocated the state punishing the man,


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But state intervention on this matter is the issue we are addressing!

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but I doubt he would have objected very much if a couple of the man's neighbors were to have taken it upon themselves to intervene, and if the man persisted, to have given him a good thrashing.


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If Vick's neighbors want to try to thrash him, they are more than welcome to try

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Ownership of animals carries with it the responsibility to not wilfully and severely abuse those animals.

I have trouble understanding how several people in this thread can be arguing otherwise. Surely Locke, Jefferson and Aquinas would not have taken the position that ownership of an animal gives its owner the right to severely abuse the poor creature.

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Most people don't abuse animals because the animals are their pets or valued property. And Locke, Aquinas, and Jefferson were simply not concerned with the "rights" of animals, because such a notion is absurd. We eat them, for chrissake. Depriving a man his liberty for 6 years because he mistreated his animals is equally absurd. He can eat his dogs, but he can't make them fight? How is this offense worth 6 years of his life?

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WGAFF about what Jefferson would have thought? He owned slaves at a time when slave ownership was acceptable. Mores have changed since then and speculation about his opinion is irrelevant.

[John Kilduff]

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No, it's not absurd that animals have a right to not be wantonly tortured and severely abused for no good purpose. Humans have the responsibility to exercise their powers over animals with some measure of responsibility and compassion.


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What's a good purpose? What's torture? Animal torture and murder for food is okay, except that do you need to eat animals? Animal torture and murder is okay for life saving drugs? But what about animal testing for non-life saving drugs?

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Playing the definition game really doesn't answer the point. It's also probably easier to define what a good purpose IS NOT: and a good purpose for cruel treatment IS NOT the gratuitous or sadistic pleasure of inflicting cruelty for the sake of inflicting cruelty. I think we can agree on that, right?

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Think of other things animals are used for. Diary cattle are bred to have udders that are larger than what would happen in nature. They get so large they cause sores. In the winter they can freeze. The cow is bred to produce so much milk that it will literally deplete itself of calcium and die. Isn't this wrong? Can't they just have more cows with smaller udders? That's torture just to save or make money, depending on which side of the glass you want to look at it on. So when you dog fight for money, how is that so different than the current state of the world's dairy industry, or at least that of Canada and the United States. There is not a clear line as you so emphatically argue, it's shades of gray.

The problem with shades of gray is you can't legislate shades of gray. Farmers can torture and kill for profit, drug makers can torture and kill for profit, hunters can kill and torture for sport, but Michael Vick can't? That's assinine and I suspect people who look at these issues closely know it. These people choose to overlook their own hypocracy because well, they have a Fido of their own, and gosh darnit Fido is just cutest thing ever!

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All of those other things serve good purposes as well. When I was a child in junior high school, we watched a movie called "Violence Just For Fun". It was about all sorts of horrible things humans have done to each other, such as binding someone to a wall and then throwing a javelin into their torso from a distance. There's no excuse for it whether it is done to humans or to animals: the entertainment value of cruelty is simply not justification.

Animal-testing for products or medicine at least has a redeeming value (not saying it is always justified either); hunting serves a valuable purpose because without human predators the larger herbivores would overpopulate (since most of their natural predators have been marginalized or removed); farming serves the purpose of producing food.

That doesn't mean it is always justified to treat animals cruelly for those purposes, and particular examples may need to be examined more closely. But wanton cruelty purely for the sake of entertainment or sadism has no redeeming value whatsoever. It is simply immoral. So forcing dogs to fight then electrocuting the losing dog is the same sort of immorality as forcing two pugilists to fight and then executing the loser; the former isn't as bad in degree, but it IS the same type of thing. It's immoral and evil, plain and simple.

The thing that bothers me most about this thread is that the people arguing for a human's right to act with pure cruelty for the sake of cruelty, seem to have no compassion or moral compass whatsoever. Property ownership of an animal does not take away the fact that that animal has feelings and can suffer. It is immoral to cause another being pain merely for the pleasure of inflicting pain or for nothing but entertainment. I don't see why this is not clear. "Ownership" does not give one the moral right to become a sadist against a helpless, feeling being who is capable of suffering. Eating animals for food is one thing but torturing animals just for the hell of it is another. Is this not obvious?

Thanks for reading.

[John Kilduff]

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Decent people don't want to cause completely unnecessary pain and suffering to other living things.

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QFT.

I am really amazed at the lack of a base of morality in some of the posts in this thread, and how the concept described above seems completely alien (or irrelevant) to several posters.

[morphball]

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In your zeal to find hypocrisy, what you so are willfully overlooking is the fact that almost universially people are AGAINST torture of animals in the food and medical industries.


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I think this sentence would be more correct if you said "westerners" but even with westerners it's far from universal.

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Just because you aren't vegetarian doesn't mean you WANT baby cows and pigs to be tortured. I eat meat and use animal products and I hope and desire that they are treated as well as possible in the process.


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Wow, I mean this is outstanding that you would even go there...I mean lol...have you ever watched an animal get butchered up close?

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Decent people don't want to cause completely unnecessary pain and suffering to other living things.


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So, all millions of Spanish and Mexican people who like bull fighting are not decent? Of all the millions and millions of people who watch enjoy cockfighting in Latin America, South America and Asia, none of them are decent?

[Shoe Lace]

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Farmers can torture and kill for profit, drug makers can torture and kill for profit, hunters can kill and torture for sport, but Michael Vick can't? That's assinine and I suspect people who look at these issues closely know it. These people choose to overlook their own hypocracy because well, they have a Fido of their own, and gosh darnit Fido is just cutest thing ever!

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There's a pretty big difference in all the examples you provided. You can't compare them fairly.

Farmers kill to provide people food and drug companies kill to provide people drugs/medicine. This serves an actual purpose.

They aren't killing animals for entertainment.

Hunting for sport alone is more cruel (IMO) than dog fighting. I think the reasons why are obvious. Also I'm kind of curious how it's even legal considering you don't even "own" the animals you are hunting.

Various birds are local to NYC. If you were in central park (a large park in NYC) and started killing the birds that people were feeding just for the heck of it, surely you see the difference between doing that and a farmer mangling some turkeys to sell?

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So, all millions of Spanish and Mexican people who like bull fighting are not decent? Of all the millions and millions of people who watch enjoy cockfighting in Latin America, South America and Asia, none of them are decent?

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I don't think any of them are decent (if they really enjoy watching it). It's part of their culture though so I imagine most of them are brainwashed into thinking it's perfectly fine.