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Last year Leona Helmsley left $12 million to her dog, Trouble, setting off a heated courtroom battle. California just passed a proposition that says farm animals must be humanely caged. The legal line between humans and animals is blurring further everyday. When it comes to "animal rights," should your cocker spaniel be entitled to the same freedoms and protections as your kid?
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Why Do Humans Have Individual Rights?
Animals by default have the right not to serve our needs
Animals are much like modernist works of art- we should not attempt to justify them- their content is unknown- only their form is apparent to us. They have a right by default to exist outside of our influence and unaltered by us. Their existence and the right to that independent existence is present on its own terms and exists only for its own sake- outside of any human considerations of morality or lawfulness or religion . It is not necessary to prove that animals are like us, or that they have morality to justify their right to be in and for themselves and not in our interest or for us.
Furthermore, their very beingness and its nature is not understandable. Animals are self-sufficient and self-referntial- like modernist art works, except when we attempt to place them in the context of our value systems. It is then that they cease to have meaning.
- sor666
May 6, 2009 12:55PM
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