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Hello teamliquid, so just to start off with a little background. A friend and I tend to discuss topics on the train on our way home from university. Often philosophical, we questioning why things are the way they are, justifying them, and reason for people to make those choices or behave in certain ways. I would like to bring our discussions to teamliquid, and see the input of others - to give you guys something to think about, or to show me a perspective that we didn't consider. In general, I believe we would all benefit from having a better understanding for why we behave in certain ways, and believe the things we believe. Justifying our beliefs, and being critiqued on the way we think may get us to critically think about what we do, and the society we are surrounded by. I would like to create a "Thought for the Week" blog 1-3 times every two weeks depending on allowable time and having interesting topics of discussion. I'm sure some people have thought about the points I bring up before, so some of the ones I will post in the future may not interest you, but if you have something interesting to add, questions you'd like to ask, or desire for a high quality debate, I'd be nice to see some comments.
To quickly give a quick background about the kind of people we are: I am a hard agnostic and he is a moderate Jew. We are both the science type, currently enrolled in engineering, and very open to other perspectives and have a desire to have ours challenged. We are both young, 20 and 22, we do feel we act mature relative to our surroundings, but who knows for sure.... Regardless, we are both still shaping our views on the world about everything, and there are many open-minded people like us out there too.
The topic I would like to discuss today is Animal Cruelty. A lot of controversy arises any time the subject is brought up, but I would like you to try and exactly pinpoint your standpoint on it, so without further adieu, allow me begin.
Initially we start with the two extremes.
1) What has more value, a human being or an animal? Right now, you have the choice, kill a random animal, or kill a random person. I think most people will agree that the life of a person is more valuable than the life on an animal. But does the worth of an animal ever exceed the life of a person. For example, would the life of a dolphin or the life of an endangered bear exceed the life of a hard drug user, or a life of a miserable person living in Africa? How about your pet, would you value your kitty or puppy more than the life of some random person you don't know? When exactly would the value of an animal exceed the life of a person? I think for me, in the ideal case, the life of a person should always be more valuable than the life of a person, and I think many people will think the same... But I would not be surprised if many would rather see another human die than to see their beloved pet die. Truthfully I'm uncertain whether I'd spare a random human being than to see my kitty go, however my friend would certainly not save an animal at the expense of a person under any circumstance.
2) The other extreme... Should we as people be allowed to torture another animal in an instance that has absolutely zero benefit to us. It's hard to imagine why we would harm an animal when it has zero benefit to us due to the fact that harming an animal for entertainment is a benefit, but say we could harm animals with no benefit, I believe almost everyone would say we should not harm animals when there is no benefit.
Now that we have the basic foundation, we might be able to agree in the following statement. Humans are more valuable than animals, and therefore in extreme circumstances there is no issue harming an animal to ensure the safety of a person. At the same time, we should not harm an animal when it will be no benefit to us. Now comes the interesting part, where do we draw the line for how much benefit must be gained. Lets approach this example by example:
Should we kill animals for food? It is not a necessity for us, we would do fine by eating protein substitutes like soy, live like vegetarians and survive. It's definitely a benefit to kill animals, but does the benefit justify killing animals? Now, instead of killing animals, what about the cattle and hens suffering in bad barn conditions to increase production and lower costs. Does the benefit of having 30% cheaper prices for livestock justify miserable conditions for the animals? I'd say yes, but this might be the point I start being called barbaric, I don't know. I'm just trying to see how everyone else would approach it. I try to limit how judgmental I am, so I would really appreciate pure and unfiltered thoughts.
Now an interesting and very controversial subject. Bestiality. Assume my biggest sexual fantasy is to make love to an animal, should that be allowed. Would it affect anyone than me? I thought people are more valuable than animals, so shouldn't a humans pleasure and benefit (I'd argue a significant benefit), be not worth the animals suffering? Why is it illegal? Should it be illegal? What factors effect your decision? Religion, beliefs and values? Was it decided by your gut feeling or by logical reasoning?
I suppose what it comes down to is how much benefit must be gained to justify the suffering of an animal. If people are more valuable than animals, shouldn't everything that yields any benefit to us be worth it at the expensive of the animal? Why do we put the value of an animal ahead of the happiness of people. Cock fighting is banned for example... But were those people hurting anyone? Were they not simply creating pleasure for themselves at the expense of no other people? It seems similar to the gay rights discussion that seems to happen so often in the US, and so prevalent discussed on the internet. Gay people should have the right to do what they want because they are not effecting the rights of other people, where does this similarity between animal cruelty and gay rights diverge?
It spurs lots of scenarios... Should you be allowed to use the magnifying glass to burn ants and bring enjoyment to yourself? Testing beauty products on animals? Starve your pet so you have more money for a video game? Using rats for science or biology experiments? Where do you draw the line and why?...
Then, the last thing to really think about when a topic like this is brought up is anything can be changed, and if it should be changed. Do you think animal laws are ideal the way they are right now? If not. are your values implementable in the long term without major consequence to society? Don't think the exact same thing as the law says if you don't know why... Have a reason!
I don't want to make these too long, and as such I will end here. Hopefully some teamliquiders will have some interest, and we can keep a discussion going... And if not, maybe you at least thought about something and if maybe you even changed your mind a little on the way you view things. Yep, that is all, thank you for reading! 
  
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You say it's ok to harm an animal to protect a human being. On those grounds its ok to harm another person to protect someone, assuming the animal / person you have to harm is acting with intent. There is no difference, If an animal is threatening life it will be either killed or tranquilized and put in a place it cannot be a danger to somebody. The same goes for human beings, police do not hesitate to kill if somebody has the clear intent of killing people and they cannot stop them through other means.
There is a definite blurred line when it comes to the value of a person over an animal. In its most basic form, yes, humans > animals simply because we are of the same race and humans are intelligent, civilized creatures. Would i choose to kill my dog over some random crack addict? I'm unsure, although the thought of killing either by my own hand sends shivers down my spine.
Bestiality is wrong, animals do not have sex for fun, its in their nature and an uncontrollable urge due to hormones and such things. They would not happily fuck something of a different species because their body would not be telling them to reproduce with it naturally. People who commit acts of bestiality have to jump through hoops using methods such as drugs, pheromones and provocative touching / positions to coerce the bestial urge from whatever animal it is they are trying to "make love to", if not outright forcing it (usually the way for men.). Animals can not give consent and naturally wouldn't if they could due to the above reasons.
As for killing for food, i am a firm believer of free-range goods and will buy them at every opportunity, animals should not made to live in disgusting conditions, especially if all they are living for is to be killed and eaten. I am honestly unsure of how i feel about killing animals for food, since i am an avid meat eater but could not kill an animal to eat it unless i was on the brink of starvation. It makes you wonder if some superior alien race was to arrive on earth, would they just use us as cattle to eat?
As you said we could survive without meat and killing for food but we don't, but at the end of the day what allowed us to reach that was civilization and research / discovery. 100, 200 years ago meat was very much a required part of our diets, i don't think because we have discovered artificial alternatives through research that meat is suddenly a redundant and barbaric act. I still can't say i think its completely "right" though, despite being a meat-eater.
As for insects, i will stomp cockroaches and spiders until the sun comes up, i fear creepy-crawlies with a passion and i don't consider them animals. I do however realize how wrong this is but when a spider is so big you can't kill it by simply stomping on it, rationality goes out the window.
In short, i am a massive hypocrite and an example of much of the human race in some aspects.
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1) It's interesting to take this path of reasoning with people who would sometimes save animals: First ask them whether they would rather save 1 stray cat or 1 human, and unless they are misanthropic, they will say 1 human. Then, proceed to ask them whether they would save 1048576 cats 65536 dogs 1024 giraffes 256 elephants as well as every single one of a certain breed of endangered sea turtle or a human, and a number would say they would let the human die. Then, the problem is about where the arbitrary cut-off point lies (kind of like sorites paradox).
Some virtue ethicists believe in incommensurability of life (i.e. you cannot quantify the value of life, and cannot say things like 2 lives are worth more than 1). But if you want to go for a sensible deontological or consequential argument based on the social contract, then obviously saving a human is more important than any other animal.
2) By current laws, pain caused to animals is only okay if it serves a legitimate purpose e.g. killing for our consumption. But if you compare causing harm to animals for the sake of something extraneous and unnecessary, such as testing for cosmetic products, to torturing animals for fun, you will realise that it is actually consequentially similar - harm caused to animals just for our enjoyment, except that one is direct and the other indirect. The most common argument I have heard from people trying to justify that inconsistency is the view that causing pain for fun cultivates enjoyment of schadenfreude in the person and may eventally lead to the person performing further destructive behaviour to humans.
It's interesting to note that, in most jurisdictions, beastility is only illegal if humans are not involved. For example, you can go make a donkey fornicate with a horse to produce a mule, and nobody cares. It seems that beastility laws are based on the repugnance people feel about humans copulating with other animals (although a logical fallacy in itself). A side question: Do you think necrophilia or cannibalism of a corpse should be allowed if a person states in his will that he allows his corpse to be used for such purposes? After all he has given his consent, and his body is fully his property, hence he has the right to do whatever he wants with it.
Also, about the point on insects, insects are also animals and there is sufficient scientific evidence to show that insects can feel pain as well. But most people view insects with disgust, and they only care about animals they sympathise with. Their morality is based "emotional empathy" and not any good reason.
Indubitably, if you have a certain amount of intelligence you can already see that prevailing morality is rife with double standards and logical inconsistency. This is because in most people, morality fills an emotional and psychological void, i.e. helps them feel like they are good people and provides meaning to their life. Such people are incapable of approaching morality from a logical point of view.
On March 07 2014 16:43 Omnishroud wrote:
Bestiality is wrong, animals do not have sex for fun, its in their nature and an uncontrollable urge due to hormones and such things. They would not happily fuck something of a different species because their body would not be telling them to reproduce with it naturally. People who commit acts of bestiality have to jump through hoops using methods such as drugs, pheromones and provocative touching / positions to coerce the bestial urge from whatever animal it is they are trying to "make love to", if not outright forcing it (usually the way for men.). Animals can not give consent and naturally wouldn't if they could due to the above reasons.
Both animals and humans have sex for sexual pleasure, with is governed by how the brain releases chemicals such as dopamine as rewards for sexual activity. It's how the process of evolution has resulted in a system, which encourage reproductive acitvities to be performed.
If animals cannot give consent, then when you see a stray dog fucking another dog on the street, would you call vet services to have that dog put down? After all animals are put down when they commit crimes.
It is also not difficult to cajole an animal into having sex, even with other species. A common example would be how many farmers get donkeys to have sex with horses to get mules.
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Initially we start with the two extremes. By going this route you assume that we have to figure out the moral status of animals first, because we can then use somesort of moral principle or rule to determine whether animals should be given a certain set of rights appropriate to their moral status (see Regan's deontological approach with animal life being of 'inherent value') or whether their interests should have similar moral weight as that of other creatures with their moral status (i.e. their happiness is just as important as ours, see Singer's utilitarianism). You rightly show that this comes up against the problem of ranking animals based on their features for the sake of determining conflicts of interests, but you treat the issue as binary:
I suppose what it comes down to is how much benefit must be gained to justify the suffering of an animal. If people are more valuable than animals, shouldn't everything that yields any benefit to us be worth it at the expensive of the animal?
Either animals have moral status X and are thus awarded moral rights Y, or they don't and we can do whatever we want. Kant faces that problem too (if we read him ungenerously), but we can sidestep the problem by saying that there are different grades of moral statuses with various rights accorded to them. The difficulty is figuring out what features would get you what sort of moral rank; this in turn tends to be 1) arbitrary when it comes to picking out the features that have value (we draw distinctions between domestic and wild animals, for example, which is absurd) and 2) elitist by the very nature of its ranking.
There is an alternative, however, one that does not fall into the problems above. You can have a virtue ethicist take on the issue without having to determine the moral status of an animal or ranking them in seemingly arbitrary ways. This is especially helpful because the animals in question vary in their facts and circumstances dramatically: Be they pets, zoo animals, livestock, animals for experiments etc. It's hard to see how you can just sweep them all under the rug of a rights-based moral philosophy (not to deny that you can't: I respect the other traditions, just that I don't think they are best suited for the job).
So from a virtue point of view, you ask (for example) whether the practice of vegetarianism is something a virtuous person would do. To determine this, we ask the following: Can we deny without dishonesty that there is ongoing animal suffering involved in getting my steak on the table? If not, can we shrug that suffering off as irrelevant without being callous? I don't think so. But if not, then we cannot deny that the practices are cruel. If we cannot deny that, then we cannot be compassionate while being party to this cruelty. We do not have to, after all, directly engage in cruelty to be party to it and to lack the virtue of compassion.
If I were starving and would be forced to eat meat to survive, that would be a different situation altogether, but it would be dishonest to claim that I, someone who can afford to read this post on the internet, -needs- meat for survival and doesn't do it merely for the pleasure of it. There is nothing wrong with doing it for pleasure, but what temperance requires of me is that I do not seek out pleasure while ignoring the other virtues: If I am not compassionate in pursuing my pleasure of eating meat, then I am greedy and self-indulgent.
So there you go as a first primer. You can try to come up with similar arguments against bestiality.
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Giving rights to animals and limiting freedom to humans is a paved road to hell.
If everybody in the world kills one ant this day then most probably nothing will change.
If however everybody today decides to kill a cat the effect may be greater.
If everybody decides to kill an elephant then there would probably be no more elephants in the world.
The first american colonist could take their land as needed and kill buffalos.
Because there where a lot of them resources weren't scarce and there was plenty for everyone.
If we decide to give animals rights...:
1. What would be the punishment - jailtime, financial penalty.. or?
2. How would you punish youngsters that find pleasure in burning ant with lens?
3. Wouldn't it turn into humans being slaves to animals in the end?
4. Wouldn't it descourage people from owning a pet?
5. What if someone kills animal will there be animal police investigation?
In the end my concern is overpopulation and problems that come along with it.
More and more resources become scarce each day, resulting in people needing to be more responsible each day for their actions.
But people aren't responsible, often act irrationally and selfish at their core.
So agencies/government try to ensure people to be more responsible by enforcing law.
How to reduce overpopulation:
1. Pandemic (quite unlikely to cause severe harm to population)
2. War (most potential, but now with all the weapons of mass destruction may end up too bad)
3. Responsibility = only 1-2 children allowed; Intelligent people and people from higher societies generally don't have problem with this;However the rest of the world(the majority) doesn't act as responsible.
4. Space travel and colonization - seems like a far future from now...
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As (almost) an engineer, this kind of mental weighing of the cost of killing an animal or a human is interesting to me. Given about 350 million people live in the US and probably around 3.5 billion dogs live in the US, and given that I'd like dogs around in general (though being no animal lover), 1 dog for every 10 people sounds like a reasonable amount to be satisfied with. So if 90% of people killed 10 dogs today and 10% of people killed 9 dogs, I wouldn't care at all. There would be plenty left.
Now, if there was only 1 dog for every 100 people, I would be kind of upset. Dogs are part of our culture. So going from 1 dog for every 10 people to 1 dog for every 100 people would be equivalent to me to killing 1% of people in our country. Thus, every person would be worth almost 10 dogs.
Extending this argument, killing 1 dog when dogs are on the verge of extinction in a country of 350 million would be like killing 10 people I don't know. This is all theoretical, of course, but I find it telling that a meat-eater like me would potentially value an animal as 10 people. There is a sliding scale for all of this if you think carefully about the matter, as the OP implies.
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@Komentaja: How many there are of X is a morally irrelevant property in all but the most extreme cases though. Also, feeling is not a reliable basis for making moral judgements. And from saying that you like a certain ratio of humans:dogs living together does not follow their actual value in relation to one another: I like tea with a certain amount of honey, but I wouldn't say this amount of tea is therefore worth this certain amount of honey.
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On March 07 2014 16:43 Omnishroud wrote:
Bestiality is wrong, animals do not have sex for fun, its in their nature and an uncontrollable urge due to hormones and such things. They would not happily fuck something of a different species because their body would not be telling them to reproduce with it naturally. People who commit acts of bestiality have to jump through hoops using methods such as drugs, pheromones and provocative touching / positions to coerce the bestial urge from whatever animal it is they are trying to "make love to", if not outright forcing it (usually the way for men.). Animals can not give consent and naturally wouldn't if they could due to the above reasons.
That's just not true, once I was playing video games in my buddy's basement and his dog jumped on the couch and started humping my back, it was tough to shake him off while still playing (was probably Smash Bros., which takes priority over being humped by a dog). Animals like sex just like humans do.
Anyways if some woman wants to spread herself and lets her dog do it's thing, what's it to me? Doesn't hurt anybody.
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This argument was on a Team Liquid thread a long time ago, and from that one I remember someone saying that without any farms in general most of these animals would probably never have lived. I think there's an interesting question there: Is it worth letting an animal live for some time (say its free range) and then be killed, as opposed to never having lived at all? I think if we look at it as a question of tradeoffs, some life is better than no life at all. I still think the act of killing the animal is immoral, but if we look on the system as a whole its persuasive to think that it overall creates a net good.
Imagine the analogy to humans. If aliens birthed humans and let them live "free range" lives for say 20-30 years or so, and then killed them for their organs to be used in their experiments (fairly painlessly), would it be a net good? Wouldn't you rather be alive than not have any life at all? Its actually a difficult question for me to really answer confidently. I'm still not sure that its okay to combine moral and immoral actions together and say the whole thing is good overall.
As for the other questions, like all moral areas there is always a grey area which no one has any clear answers for. All we can do is establish some kind of baseline that we all agree on as a practical matter, and I think that probably involves eliminating any unnecessary suffering on the part of the animal.
On the topic of bestiality, you can never really tell whether the animal is giving consent, so it very well could be an emotionally disturbing incident for the animal. So for that simple reason generally it should probably not be allowed, unless we have very good reason to believe that an animal enjoys something or that it can't experience any pain from the sexual act. So perhaps trying to mate with a horse would just 'weird out' the horse, but do little else (all assuming we could figure this stuff out).
Anyway I enjoyed this blog. It takes my mind off of how Russia can basically invade a country and no one does anything about it. And Syria. So much crap going on in the world, its nice to change the subject once in a while.
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This argument was on a Team Liquid thread a long time ago, and from that one I remember someone saying that without any farms in general most of these animals would probably never have lived. I think there's an interesting question there: Is it worth letting an animal live for some time (say its free range) and then be killed, as opposed to never having lived at all? If you have never existed and don't exist, you cannot be deprived of the goods that life offers, and the badness of your non-existence is contingent on being deprived of the goods that life offers (non-existence is only ever comparatively bad), meaning that if you have never existed, then your non-existence cannot be bad for you. If it were indeed comparatively bad, the infinite amount of possible and potential persons that could have existed but will never exist (nevermind animals) would be completely deprived of all the goods that life offers, which would make one single potential person's non-existence worse than the death of an actual person, and with there being an unlimited amount of potential never-to-be-born people, you'd have to feel sorry for all of them all the time. gl hf. So it's safe to say that we can qualify this by saying that something can only be bad for you if you exist at some time or another.
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On March 08 2014 01:32 Alzadar wrote:Show nested quote +On March 07 2014 16:43 Omnishroud wrote:
Bestiality is wrong, animals do not have sex for fun, its in their nature and an uncontrollable urge due to hormones and such things. They would not happily fuck something of a different species because their body would not be telling them to reproduce with it naturally. People who commit acts of bestiality have to jump through hoops using methods such as drugs, pheromones and provocative touching / positions to coerce the bestial urge from whatever animal it is they are trying to "make love to", if not outright forcing it (usually the way for men.). Animals can not give consent and naturally wouldn't if they could due to the above reasons. That's just not true, once I was playing video games in my buddy's basement and his dog jumped on the couch and started humping my back, it was tough to shake him off while still playing (was probably Smash Bros., which takes priority over being humped by a dog). Animals like sex just like humans do. Anyways if some woman wants to spread herself and lets her dog do it's thing, what's it to me? Doesn't hurt anybody.
I don't really want to get in on this, but no, no they don't. Some animals don't have mating seasons, but that is the minority. That is anecdotal evidence dude. I'm not gonna say what you experienced wasn't real, but it certainly isn't the norm. A horse isn't going to stick it's junk in a human just because it's horny. It takes enormous amounts time in very close corners for species to interbreed, i.e. ligers.
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Okay, regarding the myriad arguments against beastility along the lines of animals being unable to consent, you do realise humans are allowed to kill and eat animals right? Having sex with them is obviously not as bad as killing and eating them. To maintain logical consistency, if we permit the greater crime, then we cannot ban the lesser one.
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On March 08 2014 10:10 Pangpootata wrote:
Okay, regarding the myriad arguments against beastility along the lines of animals being unable to consent, you do realise humans are allowed to kill and eat animals right? Having sex with them is obviously not as bad as killing and eating them. To maintain logical consistency, if we permit the greater crime, then we cannot ban the lesser one.
"We are allowed to shoot enemy soldiers in war. So we should also be allowed to rape them!"
EDIT: Ok to put a bit more effort into this, although it really doesn't warrant a response: Laws tend to be inert and change slowly, but whether killing and eating animals is immoral is very much still under discussion, so if it turns out that killing them is bad, then having already banned bestiality was good progress. But even if it turns out that it isn't immoral at all to kill and eat them, it doesn't follow that everything goes: To assert that would be to fall into the problems I outlined previously. There can be different ranks of moral statuses, so that even though animals might not be granted equal status with us humans and thus might be killed for food, they could still be ranked such that, because of their capacities as living beings, they are not allowed to be tortured or whatever.
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On March 08 2014 17:47 GERMasta wrote:Show nested quote +On March 08 2014 10:10 Pangpootata wrote:
Okay, regarding the myriad arguments against beastility along the lines of animals being unable to consent, you do realise humans are allowed to kill and eat animals right? Having sex with them is obviously not as bad as killing and eating them. To maintain logical consistency, if we permit the greater crime, then we cannot ban the lesser one. "We are allowed to shoot enemy soldiers in war. So we should also be allowed to rape them!" EDIT: Ok to put a bit more effort into this, although it really doesn't warrant a response: Laws tend to be inert and change slowly, but whether killing and eating animals is immoral is very much still under discussion, so if it turns out that killing them is bad, then having already banned bestiality was good progress. But even if it turns out that it isn't immoral at all to kill and eat them, it doesn't follow that everything goes: To assert that would be to fall into the problems I outlined previously. There can be different ranks of moral statuses, so that even though animals might not be granted equal status with us humans and thus might be killed for food, they could still be ranked such that, because of their capacities as living beings, they are not allowed to be tortured or whatever.
That's obviously a false analogy. If you go 1000 years back, looting and raping in war is okay and even considered the victor's right. But in modern times, people have signed treaties such as the Geneva convention, to guarantee humane treatment of soldiers. Basically, they have mutually agreed that they can kill each other, but not rape or torture. Although killing each other is definitely more extreme, it is necessary to fight a war (unless everyone agrees to play laser tag instead of shooting real guns). Hence, they try to prevent any other forms of treatment that cause additional pain and suffering to soldiers.
Also, regarding your previous points, I strongly disavow any viture ethicist take on grounds that the teleology they are contingent upon cannot be proven and are often illogical. A better way to approach animal morality would be through a modified social contract theory which includes animals. Since some animals provide us with services (and in some cases require their death), we should try to keep their suffering to a minimum. This also resolves inconsistency regarding cruelty to insects such as mosquitos inherent in other approaches.
That aside, it is still quite clear that animals have the capacity to enjoy beastility and even sexual practices considered extreme by most humans, such as necrophilia (or davian behaviour, to use the scientific term). E.g. Frogs have been regularly observed to hump other frongs which have been literally flattened by cars.
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I find the contractarian approaches pretty interesting too, but I don't think they're very successful in arguing for animal welfare, i.e. the protection and liberation of animals in general; on the other hand, I don't think you are arguing for animal welfare either, so for you that would probably be a strength of those approaches rather than a weakness... So although I'm trying to argue for something on behalf of animals, I can see how contractarianism can be used to argue for eating meat or excluding animals as recipients of justice, and, following your argument, saying that only those animals should be treated well that we like to exploit (pets, foodstock). I don't think those arguments work very well, regardless:
We can adapt the contractarian theory by placing emphasis on social-cooperation, saying that only those who add to the sum benefits of society should be owed principles of justice. According to this theory, animals would only be owed justice if they were in a cooperative relationship of somekind with humans, so, I guess your argument would go, eating animals would be just because this would be the way animals contribute to society and are thereby guaranteed minimal suffering, but being vegetarian is neither just nor unjust, since vegetarians are no longer in a cooperative relationship with animals, and the animals themselves, once liberated, would not be owed justice to anymore, so we could do whatever we want to them (including killing them for food).
However, if we focus on relational facts of cooperation rather than characteristics of the individuals, then many humans would be excluded from justice as well: Infants and the mentally disabled may contribute nothing, so they should be excluded from considerations of justice? At the same time, inanimate objects like rivers contribute a lot, so what about them? We could limit contributions to the ones that are voluntary for the sake of excluding inanimate objects, but then animals do not volunteer to be raised and killed for food, and neither do slaves to provide labour (so neither should be owed justice to). If we say that contribution is but a necessary and not a sufficient condition for being the recipient of justice, then what would be sufficient? Rawls would claim 'personhood', which gets us back to square one and the complete exclusion of all animals from considerations of justice.
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Yes, you do raise good points. Now that I think about it, the experimental contractarian approach to animals does not seem very good. In fact, animals cannot have any contracts or obligations, because they lack the capacity to understand them. That's why I am not too keen on animal rights.
While I don't really argue strongly for or against animal rights, I am very adamant on consistency. I think it's ridiculous that some people eat chickens, but have something against eating dogs. Either eat both or neither. Random sidestory: Once during a GSL commercial break, an advertisement showed a kitten and a chick, saying both are intelligent but why only eat one? It made me contemplate the taste of cat meat for a while.
@radscorpion9
It's true that animals on animal farms might not have lived, but a life of suffering may be considered by some to be worse than no life at all. Arthur Schopenhauer once made the argument that life only creates more suffering. He asked to consider: When a predator devours a prey, which is greater in magnitude, the enjoyment of the predator or the fear and suffering of the prey? He then made the conclusion that humans should voluntarily go extinct.
However, I dislike his philosophical pessimism, and instead believe that humans can and should be able to use animals towards their own ends. Animal rights are often based on sentimentality and emotion rather than good reason. One who causes animal suffering for the sake of schadenfreude may make a human his next target. But animal suffering for a human good is a justified sacrifice.
Bestiality causes much less suffering than other actions. Let's imagine that you are an animal. You have biological sexual desire and have no notions of sexual taboos (such cross-species sex, as evinced by well documented research on davian behaviour). If something tries to have sex with you, it's either you enjoy it, or you go WTF and try to escape.
A bit off topic: I see bestiality as merely an extension of other sexual moralities. However, I believe sexual morality in its entirety to be a psychological perversion. Assume you are a person with no sexual desire (if you aren't already one). Obviously you would say "I have no interest in sex. I don't see why people are so keen on it or so against it. Sex is a complete waste of my time; I'd rather do something more entertaining like watching Starcraft" Then you realise that people have all sorts of sexual fantasies, which they never tell anyone, born out of unfulfilled sexual desires that they cannot tell anyone. Hence they go on condemning other people for sexual immorality (to different extents; conservatives may oppose sex outside marriage, "liberals" only condemn more "extreme" things like bestiality and incest) and these people gain a sort of perverse satisfaction from doing so. It is what Freud terms a reaction formation.
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I definitely agree on the topic of having double standards: If a person decides on moral grounds that they don't want to eat red meat, it's hard to justify them accepting to eat chicken or fish. It's why I've been wondering whether (dietary) vegetarianism is really consistent at all.
The issue you raise about moral agency is a common problem for contractarians. There have been some recent attempts to argue that you can put rationality and moral agency behind the veil of ignorance as well, mostly on Kantian grounds, but they're not very successful from what I can tell. I do believe a case for animal welfare can be made, but I'm not sure social contract theory can do it.
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EPT
