system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Animals are not deserving of fundamental rights

I believe that animals as a whole do not deserve rights.

I believe that fundamental rights (such as the right to life, freedom, choice, etc) are derived from the social contract.  It's the best system I've found to build a working society without requiring rational actors.  You can be entirely self-interested, and still decide something like "I don't want to be killed, so my best chance of not getting killed is to live in a society where people agree to not kill eachother, so in order to not be killed, I should respect other's right to life".

So a fundamental part of rights is reciprocation.  Others are deserving of rights because they're capable of respecting the same rights towards me.  This falls apart for animals, since animals aren't capable of reciprocation.

If I'm out in the wilderness, a fellow human is capable of respecting my right to life, and thus not killing me.  A bear is simply incapable of that level of thought, if it's hungry, and it thinks it can get away with it, it will eat me.

If it could be demonstrated that an animal was capable of understanding and respecting rights, then and only then would they be deserving of all the same fundamental rights humans enjoy.

Someone might bring up human babies as an example of something that should have rights but can't reciprocate, I'd argue that while they can't as babies, we know they're going to grow up into a human that can, so we respect their rights the same.

Someone might also bring up "feral humans" or uncontacted tribes.  This can get a bit muddy, but if it could be demonstrated that they are incapable of respecting our rights, then they wouldn't be deserving of any either.

So because of this foundation for the existence of fundamental rights, I believe animals are not deserving of rights, and thus treatment of animals should be viewed in the same way as treatment of plants, or rocks, or any other thing that doesn't have rights.

I also think that if you believe animals have fundamental rights, you're morally obligated to be fully vegan, not own pets, not kill/trap rodents or other small living creatures, etc.  If animals have rights, pet ownership is slavery, the egg/milk industry is forced captivity, thus should all be wrong.  We also might be obligated to go out into nature and protect prey animals from predators, but that starts to get confusing and I haven't fully worked that out yet.

To address two common alternative ways of defending "ethical" treatment of animals:

 - The suffering argument

People often say we're obligated to prevent suffering wherever we can, and thus causing suffering to animals (or anything) is wrong.  This doesn't ring true to me for two reasons.  The first is I've never heard a good argument of why suffering is inherently wrong or to always be avoided.  The second is where you draw the line of "suffering", and our collective un-willingness to apply that universally.  If preventing suffering is always important, then I would go back to above where I say we'd be morally obligated to be "extreme vegans" and possibly go out into nature and prevent all the suffering that occurs out there.

 - The consciousness argument

The other argument is since animals are fellow conscious beings, they deserve rights.  The same first argument applies here, I haven't seen a good argument as to what "consciousness" even is, or why it's an important factor in determining the distribution of rights.  Then the second is mostly the same too.  If everything that's conscious deserves full rights, then that leads to extreme veganism and an obligation to protect nature from itself.

There's also the argument to be made that animal rights should be respected because most people believe they should be, and thus going against that causes harm to the people who think it's wrong, but while that might be a reason to respect animal rights in the real world today, that seems like argumentum ad populum, and doesn't address whether the argument is *right*, just popular.

Change My View!
gpt
What does it mean to _deserve_ fundamental rights? You either have the rights, or you don't. To suggest that one can _deserve_ fundamental rights seems to be equivalent to saying that one can have the right to have fundamental rights — but in that case, wouldn't it be the right to have the rights that is fundamental, and not the original fundamental rights themselves?