torsdag 6 juni 2013

Does animals have the right not to be killed for food?

I wrote this to a person who claimed that animals rights are conditional, just like he claimed humans rights are 'conditional', using e.g. the example of imprisonment of a human:

We recognize that humans have a moral, and thus they have the right not to be treated as a commodity. This includes the right not to be tortured, not to be used and not to be exploited. I would certainly include the right here not to be beaten by a parent as a punishment- regardless of what it is called. A child has a moral value and the same right not to be beaten by his parent for ‘discipline’, as the parent has not to be beaten by the child for ‘discipline’.

Whether our society recognizes and acts according to the moral value of an individual or not doesn’t change the inherent rights that an individual has being a being of inherent moral value. Society disregarded the rights of individuals of another ethnicity, and still to a great extent do – today e.g. the Western world sponsors the well established slavery of the carpet and the cocoa industry and many other industries with a widespread slavery. See the documentary ‘Slavery: A Global Investigation ‘. However, this doesn’t change the inherent moral value of these humans, just like the widespread disregard of animal rights in our society, doesn’t change the inherent moral value of nonhuman sentient animals.

The only reason, ideally, why we would imprison people is only as a temporary protective measure for the time of the rehabilitation of an individual. And the only reason why we ever would have to temporarily limit some individual’s right is in order to stop violence, i.e. to stop someone using violence against a person. Violence is an action which is treating an individual as a commodity and that is disregarding his/her moral value. This conditional and temporal limiting of someone’s right is done in order to stop violence, it is done out of necessity.

To compare an action that is done out of necessity, is in no way analogous with an action that is done despite the lack of necessity, as the action of abusing and killing an animal for food.
To first state that it is unethical to kill and harm another sentient being for pleasure or convenience, and to in the next second harm and kill another sentient being for the pleasure of the taste of food – is unethical and doesn’t make logically or morally sense. It is so sad that people are outraged by animal abuse and rightly call it a moral atrocity, to in the next second take a bite of a dead animal – and sponsor the moral atrocity themselves of killing another sentient being for pleasure.

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