An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules

Re:An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules by jerf on Tuesday December 23, 2014 @10:05AM (#8788359)

You have to be careful, though, because the train of thought that makes rights contingent on actual ability to perform leads inexorably to a justification of eugenics. Once you agree that even humans may not really have rights unless they meet a certain bar, you create all sorts of incentives to start screwing with the bar. And we shy away from eugenics not because of the idea itself, but because of what fruit it bore, and there's little reason to believe it would go any better a second time.

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.

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Re:An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules by ivanca on Tuesday December 23, 2014 @11:10AM (#8788679)

The ambiguity fear is born from self interest, of course no one wants the possibility of being legally allowed to be killed. The thing is that the other species don't want that neither, they just cant express it with words nor communal violence.

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".

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Re:An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules by Natsu on Tuesday December 23, 2014 @12:30PM (#8789059)

Of course, it's "speceisist" to swat mosquitoes, as well, if you take it far enough and I'm not a big fan of labelism in general.

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.

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Re:An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules by irremediable on Saturday December 27, 2014 @07:49PM (#8804639)

Is it speciesist to swat mosquitoes? I'd swat a person if they tried to suck my blood...

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Re:An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules by Natsu on Saturday December 27, 2014 @08:41PM (#8804774)

You wouldn't kill them for it, though... probably. And you'd be in trouble if you did.

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Re:An Orangutan Has Some Human Rights, Argentine Court Rules by irremediable on Monday December 29, 2014 @09:27PM (#8812998)

Well, to be fair, I think you could claim self-defence against someone attempting to practise vampirism on you. ;)

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.

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