"Circular or not, there is an ACTUAL argument to be made in favor of, or against, animal rights, and I do not believe I understand your position."
I too bore quickly with lawyer-like word play, so why don't you address all the other points I made instead of obsessing over what I did or didn't call silly and making up arguments to assert on my behalf so that you can attack them.
My position is simple and I don't think I was being unclear about it at all. But I'll try to clarify for you nonetheless.
1) Arguing over whether animals do or don't inherently possess rights is pointless - unless your hope is to assert later that, having found that they DO have rights, that those rights include a right not to be eaten.
2) What is NOT pointless (or silly) is to assert that, based on human values alone (or even rational self-interest), we should not be unduly cruel to animals, whether wild animals, pets or livestock.
And I qualify it with "unduly" because it is generally necessary to kill an animal to eat it and some will surely argue that killing is, by definition, cruel. What constitutes undue cruelty is another judgement within the capacity of humans to make and doing so does not require determining that they have "rights". |
