Originally Posted by Hercuflea
If you do not believe in rights, then it is impossible to believe in morality. Without rights any human could be singled out and subjected to any number of tortures, robberies, insults, abuses, or death, by the hands of another. Rights are the things which keep people from having their houses burned to the ground, from having themselves and their families attacked and killed by vandals.
See OuroborosEterna's post above for clarification.
Originally Posted by Hercuflea
There may be no physical object called a "right", but as far as I'm concerned I have a right to my own life as long as I do not harm others.
For you to have a right to something you have to provide justification for it.
Originally Posted by Hercuflea
Whether or not it is written in a legal code, all human beings individually have certain rights which can never be taken away, they can only be abused.
You can't take something away that was never given. By what merit do humans have humans rights?
If you are going to parrot the consciousness line again, explain to me what quality consciousness provides that gives humans "rights".
Originally Posted by Hercuflea
When I talk of rights, i'm not talking about any tangible sentence which is written down in law, but an intangible attribute which every being with conscious status possesses.
You are making a statement without giving any evidence for it being true. When you make statement like every conscious being possesses this attribute you fail to provide any evidence for why it is thus.
Saying conscious beings have rights above all other creatures just because they have consciousness is circular logic.
It's no different than someone saying that you are right about something for being taller or knowing how to do back flips. It's just an arbitrary attribution which has no inherent logic behind it.
Furthermore, i can only assume that all conscious beings have this attribute (rights) because you say they do. That's the only thing giving them this attributes, there is no other reason as far as i can detect.
Also, like i said this intangible attribute does not exist. To put it like OuroborosEterna, human rights are just a societal construct, not an objective part of reality. Therefore they don't even exist.
Originally Posted by Hercuflea
As to your question, the reason I say that it is okay to kill animals for human survival, but wrong to kill a theoretical animal who contains "consciousness" is because of the simple idea that the animal without consciousness is simply an object. An animal with no conscience is equivalent to a modern robot or computer: it might have some degree of intelligence or the ability to perform certain tasks such as foraging and walking and breathing, etc, which would make it more capable than a rock, but it still is just an object.
Animals without consciousness are not mere objects. They can feel fear,confusion,fright and happiness just as much as any "conscious" being can. Just because they can't intellectualize on that subject or reflect to the extent that we can does not make them any more of a robot than we are.
Originally Posted by Hercuflea
]However, an animal or machine with a conscience would posess rights as humans do. Once it gains consciousness, it ceases to be just an object, and it becomes a fellow sentient being.
The only problem is that nobody can really come to an agreement as to what exactly "consciousness" is.[/QUOTE]
Your whole argument is based on the supposition that consciousness gives us a quality that other animals don't, "rights".
But, now you claim to not know what consciousness is. If you don't know what it is, then how can you know if humans (by your logic) have the inherent attribute of "rights"?
That's your whole argument gone out of the window. It was entirely based on consciousness and the rights that come with it, but you don't even know what that is.
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