"Vick Dog Fighting Violated Human Dignity"
With the Michael Vick guilty plea, I updated my earlier column on how his dog fighting activities violated our human duty to treat animals humanely for the San Francisco Chronicle. It is a little stronger on the human exceptionalism than the former column, and all in all I think, a somewhat better piece.
But this fascinates me: Every time I bring up human exceptionalism, some people get into high dudgeon--insisting that we are not special. I am not sure why these folk seem so attached to human unexcetionalism. But if being human isn't what gives us the moral obligation to treat animals (and the environment) properly, I don't know what does.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:59 AM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
To The Editor,
In Mr. Smith's editorial on the Vick case and human dignity Mr. Smith makes a couple of serious errors. First, he says that animals don't have rights because because they don't understand the concept. Babies, the mentally retarded, and people in comas don't have the consciousness to understand rights, but they still have them. The ability to reciprocate a right is not a prerequisite for having it. Second, Mr. Smith says that only humans have any sense of right and wrong. This is patently untrue. Not only do many animals have a basic sense of right and wrong, compassion, and fairness but many primates and other animals, such as elephants, have relatively advanced ethical systems. None of this is to suggest that animals are morally equivalent to humans. But I suspect that Mr. Smith is more interested in promoting a religious worldview that humans are completely distinct from animals, instead of as part of an evolutionary continuum, than in actually trying to make a scientific and even coherent philosophical argument.
Sincerely,
Jason Scorse
Nice try, Jason. But no cigar. Human rights apply to the entire species, otherwise there is no such thing. That is, for human rights to truly be rights, they must be universal. NO animal understands what a right is. And NO animal has any duty to others, a concomitant aspect of species-wide rights.
Second, the only one raising religious is you.
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