I find the latter reasoning much better, but think that the whole argument could have been avoided by asking another question: instead of "does the primate have rights?" we could ask "do humans have the right to lock up a primate". In the latter case, it would have been fairly easy to reason that the interests of the human (seeing a monkey in a zoo) are in no way vital and cannot establish a right, without getting into the question whether the monkey has rights.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractualism/#ConProAni

That's a rather poor argument because it is non-specific. By that argument I can not own a potato either because there is no vital need for me to do so.

The point of framing the argument in the terms that konstruktor has, is to change the debate from, "Are apes sufficiently like humans to justify giving them rights?" to "Are apes sufficiently different from non-sentient entities to justify treating them differently." And I think this is a much more persuasive argument -- I think humanity is less willing accept freely that apes are equivalent to humans on some level, than they are to say that the act of viewing an ape for enjoyment does not justify locking up something that is clearly more intelligent and self-aware than your average apricot.

You could argue that caging an orangutan in particular is not important, however you could just as easily argue that the world might manage if we all stopped growing potatoes.

However, I would personally argue that a rights based system only works when you have a way to have rights clash and reach compromise positions. An open ended right is not very useful because just about every right becomes impossible to enforce or provide at the extremes. When you provide certain agreed upon rights to both humans and orangutans you can have meaningful discussions about where those rights intersect and how those confluences should be handled, and in this way you avoid the absurd implications of absolute rights.

Certainly we can find other philosophical approaches which are more reasonable.

(not taking a position, just pointing out the massive inconsistency)

"The Nonhuman Rights Project had addressed that argument in their brief, countering that young children and adults with severe mental disabilities are not expected to fulfill the social obligations of mature adults, but are still granted legal rights.

While that is true, wrote the judges, “it is undeniable that, collectively, human beings possess the unique ability to bear legal responsibility.”"

    “it is undeniable that, collectively, human beings possess
    the unique ability to bear legal responsibility.”

Also, did you know you can put a corpse on trial? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod

Plus you're a distressingly short trip from the bar being "having right and proper political beliefs".

"Speciesism" at least has the virtue of being fairly unambiguous. It may still be the better policy even if it isn't perfect.

Meaning ethically we have no ground, if cows could start having rational thoughts /talking all we could answer them is "sorry for killing millions of you all, you have tasty meat, it has nutrients... And stuff... and you didn't complain before".

Personally, in that case, I'd have ruled that they have no standing to represent the animal as they are neither related nor has the animal agreed to their representation.

I see your point though; if a person were doing as little harm as a mosquito does, most people wouldn't kill them in retaliation.

In a way, it's a pretty decent way to look at it. It means all that is required for an entire species to be given personal rights is to prove that they can fulfill the obligations that come with them. It decouples the rights from the good or bad inviduals, and reduces it to "what is this genetic grouping capable of".

I still orangutans should have rights, though.

Someone with a learning disability - or Down Syndrome, or mental health issues of almost any kind - can often sue to void contracts that they've signed; or their guardian can sue on their behalf.

Courts can rule you to be mentally incapacitated, and you lose your right to vote in many states in the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/keeping-th...

I'm sure you can continue your research by yourself at this point...

Our goals in a social context are always to make the best possible decisions with what we know, and to enable each other to do the same. We have goals, information, communication, and laws. Rights are inarticulate and overly-understand things -- almost to the point of purposelessness.

People should not be making arguments based on rights, but upon what is known about ourselves and our reality. We should use what can be rationally supported and what can be reasonably predicted based upon shared experiences and cultural knowledge. Rights are just a vague and small slice of this, easily made muddy by the fact that people can know they have rights without even knowing why they should have them, where they apply, or when to give them up.

This is a good thing because it provides a written moral standard and a legal basis for further argument - rather like a constitution.

Relying on 'rational argument' doesn't work as well because most 'rational argument' in politics, law, and economics is persuasion through sophistry, custom, tribalism, rhetoric, appeal to self-interest, and/or the application or threat of force.

None of these have much to do with rationality in the scientific sense of being able to build useful models of reality from data.

tl dr; Defining rights makes spurious political plays more difficult.

Most of the time you can just say something like "It should be unlawful to do X in situation Y because it undermines the ability of those involved to make predictably good decisions."

Rights are useful in the same way that asserting "pi = 3" is useful: it's simply better than nothing. It is hardly some kind of ideal, despite how easy life would be if it were true.

ISIS will say everyone has the right to have a slave. The UN says everyone has the right to paid vacations (yes, it really does say that).

Who decides which rights should be accepted?

There is no one who can do so. Rights are arbitrary and reflect the culture of those who defined them.

You either decide to accept them or you don't. i.e. it's pretty much identical to "rational argument".

He has tried to define a difference between them that doesn't actually exist.

A rational argument is one that compels a rational person to agree -- one that provides a natural threat of catastrophic failure should it be ignored.

The problem that everybody thinks they are rational and that they don't know what rational means is not a problem with rationality. It's a problem with irrationality.

In respect to the OP, setting down the rights of Orangutans surely is making a rational argument, then allowing that argument to be applied in all similar cases, rather than making the same argument repeatedly?

[1] as fought for cross-culture/worldwide/etc (eg human rights) and positive, not culture-specific & negative (eg rights of one tribal group over all others in a country).

So if rights are always secondary to rational arguments, what extra value do they bring to the ethical picture? They only mean anything if you are making irrational decisions, 'blindly' protecting them and whatnot.

>[rational arguments] produce much more fragile legal structures than rights infer.

I don't believe this, and I don't think there are any examples to suggest this. Laws are notoriously less flexible than they would need to be to be engines of rational decision-making, and thus there are no 'rational' legal structures. The fact that we have judges, juries, and opportunities for defense against the law are constructs that we invented to inject rational flexibility into a legal systems which would otherwise be blind draconian monoliths.

But this means you step outside of the legal structure and into the ethical structure of the minds involved: a judge/jury can rule that, even if you violated some law, you might be _justified_ in doing so and should not suffer any consequences. This kind of argument is often made in terms of rights, but then, so are the laws that are being ignored. One must always apply a rational argument, because every right is in conflict with some other right -- being that they are vague, underspecified things to begin with.

In today's world, that means two things. If you cannot pick up and fire a gun, you have no rights. If you can pick up a gun, but cannot restrain yourself from using it against others who also can, you have no rights.

It is convenient for some people who have rights to act as a guardian to someone who does not, to provide the illusion that they also have rights. Babies enjoy the illusion of some rights, because if you try to harm one, the parents will probably try to harm you, along with hordes of other offended adults.

The entire system is built upon a civilized arrangement, where people agree that certain actions do not merit retaliatory violence. In order to insult someone else's mother without getting punched in the face, I must be prepared to hear insults to my own mother and restrain my own fist.

This implies that the only requirement for having rights is the ability to respect the same rights for others. It would seem that a necessary prerequisite for that is the ability to communicate. Orangutans have demonstrated this ability with manual signing, lexigrams, and keyboards. But it is uncertain whether an orangutan could also generalize its social interactions to include other humans or orangutans that had never been previously encountered. They have learned to use money, so it's very possible they could learn the other social constructs of civilization.

Orangutans have at least demonstrated learning and cognition abilities on par with some humans, so I'd be willing to pretend they have rights in line with human children or those otherwise legally incompetent. They can definitely learn to use the gun. The question is whether they can also learn not to use it.

After that, it's a matter of negotiation. An orangutan might care more about fig tree rights and habitat protections than about the right to own property or freedom of religion.

Well, I suppose if I break my wrists, I don't have a right to live anymore.

>This implies that the only requirement for having rights is the ability to respect the same rights for others

This is obviously not true at all. If I tell you I have a right to own property, surely an ant doesn't have the same right. So what do you mean by "others?" Other things that I would choose to call equal humans? Who gets to say who that is?

This is fundamentally why I hate the concept: people like to pretend it means something if only everybody ignores all the obvious inconsistencies in the discussion.

You're saying fundamentally incompetent things, and the vagueness of your terminology lets you feel secure in the fact that nobody has the ability to correct you.

So you have replaced a debate about values and shared definitions to one predicated on groupthink. Basing your moral decisions on shared experiences and cultural knowledge leads to the exact kind of in-group/out-group thinking that the idea of rights was designed to combat. It isn't a perfect moral framework, but it is one that has achieved a great deal of good in the last few centuries.

I'm not talking about in-group/out-group thinking, but _generally applicable_ constraints on human behavior. Economics, psychology, science, etc. Things that can be optimized on _arbitrary_ cultures using techniques that are already known to succeed everywhere.

Rights do not fit into this picture. Rights are not based on measurable and general principles, but upon cultural expectations handed down through tradition.

Philosophically, the same could be applied to an ant. I find your argument very poor.