I think a bioethics thread exists somewhere, but it is not found in the first four pages and I could not find it through search, so new thread it is.
So I'm interested in the discussion of animal rights. It isn't a topic that is directly linked to bioethics (although futurist ideas suggest a fascinating future connection), but is something I'm interested in. I am curious if there are a set of non-contradictory guidelines for animal rights that hold up to reason and are consistent. In order to do this, I suppose we would need to first understand how we value animal life, particularly scaling 'human rights' as being the highest priority and 'no rights' as being the lowest. For reference, I have done very little research in this particular area, although I have a decent bioethics background and have done quite a bit of research on ethics as it relates to abortion.
One possibility is to say that animal life is equivalent to human life. I do believe some traditional religions believe this and try to follow it as closely as they can, holding all or some animal life to be equivalent to that of humans or even to be sacred and thus deserving of more rights. By this standard, any sort of hunting or meat consumption would be deeply unethical and morally repulsive. The counter-argument is that "but for centuries we have hunted animals and it was necessary for survival," but we are arguing ethics here, and not an absolute truth, and the past is no longer relevant as we do not need meat to survive. The strongest counter-argument I could think of is stepping on an ant on the sidewalk by accident and finding yourself having just done the equivalent of manslaughter.
The other extreme is to say that animals do not have rights. The granting of 'rights' by human beings is arbitrary, after all, and thus there is nothing that says we cannot simply say that animals have none. It would imply that there is nothing morally repugnant about dogfighting or deliberately torturing animals. Its logic seems to be sound albeit the world seems to be moving away from this viewpoint. I like the social contract idea of morality, in which I forfeit my right to murder people in society in exchange for everyone else's agreement that they will not kill me either. Obviously, this model does not apply to animals.
There is also the gray zone in which we seem to be in, but my issue is that it feels incredibly arbitrary. For example, there seem to be regulations regarding how an animal may be slaughtered, which seems to be nonsensical from the outset. Is it not a greater moral harm, assuming one values the life of animals on some level, to slaughter an animal than to alter the conditions of its death? If I were to tell you, "I can either kill you now or ensure that your death in the future is painful," you would almost certainly choose the latter. Is it not nonsensical, then, to condemn the latter while viewing slaughter as acceptable? It seems as though the societal approach to this issue is somewhat similar to the one taken to the abortion debate, where fetuses have some rights but not all of the rights afforded to adult human beings, and this sliding scale is determined on the basis of intelligence. Gorillas and dogs, for example, are given more rights than wasps or ants.
Fascinatingly, this seems to reveal that our entire basis for animal ethics is simply to give more rights to that which is more like us, and revealing that for all the claims of fairness to animals, we are still discriminating based on a human standard. Thus, back to the thread's purpose of bioethics - if a genetically modified pig were produced that genuinely desired to be killed and eaten, would we be either morally obligated to, or at least not immoral in doing so? If a genetically modified chicken were made with literally no higher-order brain functions that solely ate, got fat, reproduced and died - would it not be far less immoral to slaughter it than a regular chicken in a coop?
So I'm interested in the discussion of animal rights. It isn't a topic that is directly linked to bioethics (although futurist ideas suggest a fascinating future connection), but is something I'm interested in. I am curious if there are a set of non-contradictory guidelines for animal rights that hold up to reason and are consistent. In order to do this, I suppose we would need to first understand how we value animal life, particularly scaling 'human rights' as being the highest priority and 'no rights' as being the lowest. For reference, I have done very little research in this particular area, although I have a decent bioethics background and have done quite a bit of research on ethics as it relates to abortion.
One possibility is to say that animal life is equivalent to human life. I do believe some traditional religions believe this and try to follow it as closely as they can, holding all or some animal life to be equivalent to that of humans or even to be sacred and thus deserving of more rights. By this standard, any sort of hunting or meat consumption would be deeply unethical and morally repulsive. The counter-argument is that "but for centuries we have hunted animals and it was necessary for survival," but we are arguing ethics here, and not an absolute truth, and the past is no longer relevant as we do not need meat to survive. The strongest counter-argument I could think of is stepping on an ant on the sidewalk by accident and finding yourself having just done the equivalent of manslaughter.
The other extreme is to say that animals do not have rights. The granting of 'rights' by human beings is arbitrary, after all, and thus there is nothing that says we cannot simply say that animals have none. It would imply that there is nothing morally repugnant about dogfighting or deliberately torturing animals. Its logic seems to be sound albeit the world seems to be moving away from this viewpoint. I like the social contract idea of morality, in which I forfeit my right to murder people in society in exchange for everyone else's agreement that they will not kill me either. Obviously, this model does not apply to animals.
There is also the gray zone in which we seem to be in, but my issue is that it feels incredibly arbitrary. For example, there seem to be regulations regarding how an animal may be slaughtered, which seems to be nonsensical from the outset. Is it not a greater moral harm, assuming one values the life of animals on some level, to slaughter an animal than to alter the conditions of its death? If I were to tell you, "I can either kill you now or ensure that your death in the future is painful," you would almost certainly choose the latter. Is it not nonsensical, then, to condemn the latter while viewing slaughter as acceptable? It seems as though the societal approach to this issue is somewhat similar to the one taken to the abortion debate, where fetuses have some rights but not all of the rights afforded to adult human beings, and this sliding scale is determined on the basis of intelligence. Gorillas and dogs, for example, are given more rights than wasps or ants.
Fascinatingly, this seems to reveal that our entire basis for animal ethics is simply to give more rights to that which is more like us, and revealing that for all the claims of fairness to animals, we are still discriminating based on a human standard. Thus, back to the thread's purpose of bioethics - if a genetically modified pig were produced that genuinely desired to be killed and eaten, would we be either morally obligated to, or at least not immoral in doing so? If a genetically modified chicken were made with literally no higher-order brain functions that solely ate, got fat, reproduced and died - would it not be far less immoral to slaughter it than a regular chicken in a coop?
