RE: Vegan Anarchy Pt 4: Who Owns The Animals? (Dispelling The Myth of Human-Animal Authority)
I have sympathy for your views.
But the world is not run based on how it should be. Even between humans. It is instead run based on how things are.
Humans do not do things because they are "right." They do things for rewards or to escape punishment. "Rights" are not real things. They are ideas, and they only really represent an agreement between humans. My "right" to free speech in the US isn't a real thing -- it is only an agreement between myself and other citizens that we both agree to not squash each others freedom to speak our minds. But this "right" only exists as long as both parties adhere to it. Once one party reneges on the agreement, the "right" vanishes. This is true of all of our "rights" -- they are imaginary constructs, and only represent reciprocal agreements between entities.
So this becomes important when dealing with animals, because animals and us inhabit different planes of intellect. I agree that animals are fundamentally like us in that they have desires, wishes, hopes, fears, etc. But they are not capable of anywhere near our level of intellect. Thus trying to forge a concept of reciprocal "rights" between us is like trying to reason with a 2 year old (have you ever tried to do that? Not at all productive....)
So the relationship between us and animals is not one of equals but of guardians and dependents -- not because of force or because humans are evil, but because of the reality of our relative intellects, and no amount of wishful thinking will change this.
Animals, except those we forge close bonds with like pets, do not care about us. There is no universal agreement between us and the animal world. Those big enough to eat us would do so given the opportunity, and those small enough to parasitize us do so to the best of their ability. The real world is one where the strong survive and the weak die. This cannot be changed. The best we can hope for is to abolish cruelty.
Rights do not cease to exist just because someone violates those rights and/or doesn't understand them. Man doesn't create rights any more than a mathematician creates 2+2=4. Rights exist independent of our understanding or cooperation.
I understand the deep desire to believe in rights. And the concept of "rights" is a seductive one because it suggests to us that there is some entity, some structure, larger than ourselves that keeps things in order. But can you tell me on what basis you argue that "Rights exist independent of our understanding or cooperation" other than your wish for it to be that way?
The universe is not a cosmic accident and I am not just a biological machine running on autopilot. Man is not god. Man does not get to decide what is 'right' and what is 'wrong.' Years ago the US government had the 'right' to imprison and even murder those who 'illegally' sold alcohol. Did the government have that right, or was it universally wrong?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
I do not 'believe' that I own myself. I am born with sovereignty over my thoughts, emotions, and actions and anyone claiming otherwise is in the wrong. It isn't my belief that I am a sovereign; it is a self-evident truth.
So in your post you are already acknowledging that there are many different versions of rights, no? You mention that the government had the "right" to enact prohibition, but you very clearly believe that this was not "right." So it starts to get confusing, because there is obviously a distinction between "moral" and "legal", which is what I think you are getting at, yes?
There is a similar confusion between the "rights" of the Bill of Rights and the Unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The way I read the Declaration of Independence is not that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are "moral" or "legal" but rather that they just "are." That's why they used the words "self evident", because they were merely stating the way things are, and they used those words because they were specifically trying to divorce themselves from the previous way of looking at the world, which was all built on religion. The old way of thinking was that God gave us life and therefore it was conditional, or that God gave us divinely blessed kings and thus that our liberty was conditional.
So, the Declaration of Independence set out to frame the question differently. They expressly refused to frame the reality of what they saw in any framework. They said -- "look -- this is just the way it is and we don't need any specific reason why it needs to be this way, because trying to come up with a reason doesn't change that it is, and only mucks up our future decisions about what to do with what it is. So let's stop trying to reason out why it is this way. It just is. It is self evident. We all have life, and we are all free to do whatever we want regardless of whether there are kings or whether we are slaves, and even if there are kings or even if we are slaves we still continue to make decisions to pursue our own happiness. And -- we are all equal in this regard. So -- we can try to set up a hierarchy, or we can all agree that at least on these basic conditions of the existence of life, our ability to choose our own course no matter what external restraints we find opposed against us, and our desire to all pursue our own happiness -- we are all equal."
This was their way of disposing of the previous belief that somehow God ordained the way things are and ordained who was supposed to be in charge.
So, here's the question for you -- if you are in the jungle, do you think you would be able to come to a reasonable compromise with a hungry tiger? Do you think the hungry tiger cares about your right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness?