Originally posted by Bosse de NageOnly when one believes the legal system can "grant" rights.
Fantastic, the irrationality of the legal system justifies cruelty.
What if you wanted to change the legal system -- make it a little more rational?
If I wanted to change the legal system to make it more rational I'd run into an overwhelming amount of resistance and there would be excellent chances I'd leave loopholes that could be easily exploited. It would be impractical. Natural Rights despite it's flaws is a pretty good moral code. It points out that morality is more important than the law, which is not consistent with the idea of "granting" people rights.
I choose my battles, and this is a battle such tiny importance it's not worth doing.
Originally posted by Bosse de NageBy the way, natural rights theory does not assert that it's fine for people to kill animals because they're not people. It asserts that it's not the same crime to go fishing or hunt rats as it is to commit murder. Where does the dolphin fit in all this? Well, is it a person? If not, then it's less immoral to kill a dolphin than to kill a human person. That doesn't mean it's moral; just that it's animal abuse, not murder.
That's just speciesism, not to mention a flagrant abdication of thought.
Why is it fine for people to kill animals merely because they are not people? 'Tradition'. OK. Got anything better -- less irrational -- than that?
Besides, we've already established that natural rights theory is irrelevant to this discussion, so this thread can just die.
Maybe I can clarify a bit:
Natural Rights Theory places morality over the law in importance. The notion of "granting" rights places the law over morality in importance. The reason we refer to potential "rights" for dolphins and their status as "non-human persons" is because we are considering equating them to humans, not because that's the only way to define animal cruelty as immoral. If dolphins are non-human persons, then the Japense treatment of dolphins today is morally equivalent to how they treated Koreans and others in WWII, and is a far greater evil than doing the same to rabbits.
The article was about HOW immoral killing dolphins is, not WHETHER it was immoral.
Also, natural rights ties actions to morality very clearly. If you murder, you are immoral. If you torture people, you are immoral. Thus we can say to China "you are doing X and X is immoral because it violates peoples' rights. Without human rights theory, you can only say to China that it's being immoral because that's your opinion. China can say it has a different opinion. This places morality at the whim of the individual or organization who commits the crime instead of making it based on the experience of the victim. Natural rights theory avoids this.
Regimes resort to fiction when they seek to justify their oppression. The divine right of kings was one such fiction; the fiction of natural rights was invented to eliminate it (a frame for the grand narrative of Revolution).
- Bosse
Divine Right and Natural Rights are not fictions, they are moral opinions - except the one relies on the existence of a deity which may not be true.