: : : :Humans possess mental faculties that place them a rung above animals on the moral scale. : : : And if you have a chimpanzee with the equivalent intelligence of a human 5 year old, and a severely retarded man with the intelligence of a 2 year old, then by your logic, we should experiment on the man? So much for the mental faculties argument...
: : Not at all. Chimps cannot by definition have human intelligence. The moral worth of the human is in any case greater.
: Excuse me but from whence do you derive the moral worth of a human? If it is from intelligence than should all those with an IQ of less than 100 be the slaves of those with an IQ of more than 100? Should we be able to kill and eat those who can't pass a MENSA test? Do tell
When i say cognitive faculty, i did not just mean IQ (which by the by i consider a dubious measure anyways) but rather used it to refer to human cognition in a broad sense ie thinking, feeling, judging, etc (cognitive after all just means mental). Such faculties give humanity inherent value which is greater than any animal (but note i did not say that animals are merely instrumental or of no vlaue).
Consider for a moment the position of a person thta holds that animals have equal rights to humans. Say that a necessary choice is required by a rational actor between killing either a man or a rabbit. Anyone who holds the moral value of animals and humans to be equivalent would be forced to flip a coin to determine which course of action to take.
(Sorry but killing a man rather than a rabbit in my book is clearly immoral).
: : As you have not even bothered to look into the matter, HOW DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THE HOPI WILL SUFFER. You make the crucial mistake of assuming that they are just like you or that they CAN be just like you.
: : The question being is the suffering of the hopi going to be greater than that of a few birds. As you seem so incredulous, lets take a balanced look (drawing on what i have laready said).
: : : : An aNIMAL can die only in a physical sense. A human on the other hand can suffer a spiritual as well as a physical demise. Who has ever seen an animal so broken in spirit that they have been unable to raise themselves from their bed or so sunken in despair that they throw themselves off a cliff. I myself have never seen this. (I do not doubt that animals possess some crude form of emotion but i think it a mere trifle in comparison to humanity).
: : : Shows what you know about animals: zip. Anyone who knows animals, from zookeepers to people with pets, knows that animals possess rich emotional lives and can become so depressed, they starve themselves to death. As for souls, I can guarantee you that animals have souls -- it's humans, the only animals who knowingly and willfully torture other animals (including humans) I wonder about.
: : That is just crap. there is noi way in the world you can equate emotional life of an animal to that of a human. Is an animal failing to eat food depression? Or is it more likely something else. Like a form of distress that falls way below any conception of human emotion. Or can you now read the minds of animals?
: I really can't follow this argument. You were offered examples of animals suffering from depression and yet you blindly disregard them. Please give me a reason why we can't equate the emotional suffering of an animal with a human and why an animal not eating its food (as do a lot of humans when depressed) is 'something else'.
This wasn't really central to my argument, so i didn't really pay it much heed. Consider the requirements of a diagnosis of depression in a human, a variety of factors may indicate the presence of depression:
Concentration is often impaired
Inability to experience pleasure
Increase in self-critical thoughts with a voice in the back of one's mind providing a constant barrage of harsh, negative statements
Sleep disturbance or unable to fall back to sleep
Feeling fatigued after 12 hours of sleep
Decrease in appetite or food loses its taste
Feelings of guilt, helplessness and/or hopelessness
Thoughts of suicide
Increased isolation
Missing deadlines or a drop in standards
Change in personality
Increased sexual promiscuity
Increased alcohol/drug use
So my objections are twofold.
First the variety of factors that lead to a diagnosis of depression in humans could never be duplicated in an animal. An animal as i have freely admitted may be capable of forming SOME of those symptoms, but certainly they could never develop them all (an animal for instance could never contemplate suicide).
Second to determine if a person is suffering from depression what is required is an interview (depression is not a biological condition, if it was would we not be able to test for it by means other than an interview).
Such interviews involve reports of mental states by the patienbt to the interviewer. Now, unless you are going to start taking meows or sqeaks as an accurate reporting of a mental state, one cannot do this for animals.
Thus one is left to physical observation to determine if an animal is depressed. Clearly this can be a dubious exercise.
Note i am not saying that animals do not or can not suffer some basic form of depression it just cannot be as deep or complex as humanity suffers.
None.
