Animal Rights Are a Thought Crime

7/28/2019 Animal Rights Are a Thought Crime

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/animal-rights-are-a-thought-crime 1/3

Animal rights are a thought crime

A brief rebuttal of commonly cited sophisms

Sophism 1:

"It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases ."

Appropriately planned economies, including sustainable industries, and responsible growth restrictions, will mostcertainly help slow down the deterioration of the environment; but, this does not constitute a sufficient reason forchange in government and industrial policy, as the costs and benefits of collateral commitments entailed in such a

change are unforeseeable.

Sophism 2:

"The word "extreme" is defined as "of a character or kind farthest removed from the ordinary or average." In the case of animal rights, there is nothing wrong with seeking solutions that are "extreme" and far from the ordinary.In the United States, the ordinary treatment of animals causes animals to suffer and die on factory farms, in laboratories, on fur farms, in leghold traps, in puppy mills, and in zoos and circuses. An extreme change is needed to save animals from these fates ."

The ordinary and average human practice is to consume meat, and meat based products. By the standards of theargument above, to persuade these practitioners to abandon their lifestyles based on question begging premises,and naive sentimentalism, would also justify extreme tactics to manipulate, or cow down these free practitioners.How is the coercion of sapient beings compatible with the 'rights' of merely sentient animals?

Sophism 3:

"If we stop breeding domesticated animals, some would survive and some would go extinct. No one wants these animals released into the wild, but a few individuals always escape. Feral cat and dog colonies would survive.Established populations of feral pigs already exist. For those animals who are unfit to survive in the wild, extinction is not a bad thing. "Broiler" chickens grow so large, they develop joint problems and heart disease. Cows now produce more than twice as much milk as they did 50 years ago, and domestic turkeys are too large to mate naturally. There is no reason to continue breeding these animals.

Change can be scary, but society has evolved over the years due to other social movements and animal rights will be no different ."



This sophism bespeaks the cavalier violence vegans and animal rights activists actually enact toward the groundsthat actually necessitate, and make possible a discursive commitment to the protection of our shared ecology. Theridiculous idea that some animals are better off dead is shared only by activists, and not the animals who's allegedrights are being jeopardised by their domestication; animals do not have agency, unlike a heart patient, who stillprefers to live with his pace-maker than die from fear of his joint pains.

Sophism 4:

"Eating meat infringes on the rights of the animals to live and be free, so animal rights activists do not believe that people have a moral right to eat animals.

Regarding legal rights, in the United States, eating meat is legal and our laws allow animals to be killed for food.However, AR activists cannot remain silent in the face of injustice and have a legal right to free speech that is protected by law. To expect AR activists to remain silent is failing to respect their right to express themselves and advocate veganism ."

Animals do not have rights because they do not possess sapience; only discursive creatures who submit to the gameof giving and asking for reasons are capable of asserting, negating or proposing any determined idea of 'right'. But,this 'right' which the constitution guarantees under the right to free speech brings with it the collateralresponsibility to make a coherent case for an assertion, and to be able to propositionally decompose thecommitments such an assertion entails, while being able to demonstrate the counterfactual robustness of theassertion with reference to already held commitments. Yes, these commitments include explicating how non-

discursive creatures may influence the course of discursive practices to the detriment of the real pragmatic concernsof the latter, who are in possession of the very vocabulary that makes rights possible. Good luck with that.

Sophism 5:

"It is nearly impossible for a person to live on this planet without causing some suffering and death to animals.Animals are killed and displaced on farms to grow crops; animal products show up in unexpected places like car tires; and pollution destroys wild habitats and the animals who depend on them. However, this has nothing to do with whether animals deserve rights, and being vegan is one way to minimize one's negative impact on animals."

Being vegan is one way to kid yourself that lifestyle changes can redeem ecological damage that has taken millenniato accrete, and has needed very little help from man [speaking in geological time scales]. Of course, thesentimentalisms associated with finding a pup in a tyre has nothing to do with the 'rights' of animals; it onlydemonstrates the naivety of our ethical ideals, shining in the borrowed light of prematurely deposed gods.

Sophism 6:



"The ability to think like a human is an arbitrary criterion for rights. Why not base it on the ability to fly or use echolocation or walk up walls? "

Because, the ability to fly, or echolocation or walking up walls do not constitute a language game that could be

played though one played no other; yet, if a practice were to survive, and adapt to change, it would be necessaryfor it possess such a vocabulary if one was to allow development of further more complicated meaning-use relationsthat could in turn make further distinct vocabularies possible for further necessary adaptations. Clearly, only thehuman game of thought as propositionally expressible assertions provides the normative grounding which makecriterions of judgement of all types, including deontological ones, possible. Ergo, the argument offered is absurd,and unfounded.

Sophism 7:

"... having duties is an inappropriate criterion for rights holding because some classes of humans - babies, the mentally ill, the mentally incapacitated or the mentally retarded – do not have duties ."

Wrong. Because, the criterions which make ethical judgement possible, even such as the ones that illegitimatelyseek to create animal rights from nothing but fine sentiment, depend not only on the right to pose such a questionbut also on the reciprocal responsibility of the agent to defend inferentially his choice to make such an absurdclaim.

Sophism 8:

"Whether plants feel pain is debatable, but if plants do feel pain, that is not a reason to deny rights to animals ."

Damn right. The argument against animal rights is a matter that concerns the foundational normative infrastructurewe have in place as the discursive practices that refer to deontic commitments, and their free and rationalscorekeepers.

http://animalrights.about.com/od/animalrights101/tp/ArgumentsAgainstAR.htm

Animal Rights Are a Thought Crime

Documents

Transcript of Animal Rights Are a Thought Crime