From: Michelle (michelle@barrymenasherealtors.com)
Date: Tue Feb 26 2002 - 14:07:31 MST
Have y'all seen this about the cow who's taking matters into its own hooves?
http://www.cincypost.com/2002/feb/22/cow022202.html
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ridge <richard_ridge@tao-group.com>
To: virus@lucifer.com <virus@lucifer.com>
Date: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 8:11 AM
Subject: RE: virus: The world keeps on spinning... but with a question
>
>> http://www2.utep.edu/~best/ethics.htm
>
>Continuing to muse on this, I felt that the argument for animal 'rights'
>fell apart when it noted that:
>
>"When a lion kills a yuppie jogger, the lion is not to blame and it has
done
>nothing wrong because its life is not governed by self-reflexive ethics;
>indeed, yuppies have no business jogging in lion territory; when a hunter
>kills a lion, however, the hunter has knowingly, unnecessarily, and wrongly
>taken a life, killing an animal for sport and pleasure, for purely trivial
>reasons."
>
>I'm a bit disturbed by the way it implies culpability on the part of the
>part of the jogger, rather than just foolishness ('kills a sixteen year old
>jogger' would have given the sentence a rather different complexion), but
>the main point is that the lion is indeed not to blame; it cannot honour a
>right to life and observe the duties inherent in that right. It cannot
>observe any social contract (I consider the problem being that the author
>treats 'rights' as a purely ethical concept, where I see it as also being a
>political concept). Given that the author argues that regarding ourselves
as
>stewards is insufficient against a full promise of rights, it seems to be
>problematic that he notes "Animals are bearers of moral status and rights,
>and often live in complex social systems of mutual aid, but they are not
>moral subjects with explicit ethics; we owe things to animals that they can
>never owe to us. For better or worse, we are the shepherds of this planet
>and it is time that our responsibility to life becomes commensurate with
our
>power to change it." From his own argument, this is arguing for two things
>simultaneously.
>
>The crunch comes at this point; that if rights must be symmetric (i.e.
>balanced by the duty to observe them oneself rather than have them
>bequeathed to one) then "Fetuses, infants, comatose patients, some elderly
>people, and the severely retarded would have no claim to rights." The thing
>is, I'm wondering what the problem here is. None of those groups do have a
>complete claim to rights (those that they do enjoy typically being perhaps
>better described as a set of obligations the state and society are bound to
>honour rather than a set of rights that can be demanded) - and what claim
>they have is founded on a judgement of what social capability they will
>either attain or possibly regain. A comatose patient may conceivably
recover
>and become a moral subject once more - a lion will never do so. The foetus
>has no rights at all (not in the UK anyway, to the best of my knowledge).
>Children are probably more problematic - the age at which a 'child' was
>deemed capable of social commitment used to be 21, then 18, and now moving
>towards 16 and younger. In other words, I would be tempted to say that
those
>groups do not have a claim to rights in the fullest sense, though this
>possibly just reflects confusion as to the myriads of ways in which we use
>the term 'rights.'
>
>Thoughts?
>
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