Debunking Animal Rights

Ethical propositions are something I do not take lightly. They require rigorous examination and consistency, and animals rights is one ethical proposition of many that doesn’t pass the test of consistency.

But maybe ethics are subjective? If they are subjective then they should be rejected because they are no longer useful and carry no meaning. If murder is both good and bad at the same time, then what's the point of moral propositions in the first place?

Also if ethics is subjective you face the problem that you cannot rely on any objective standard to tell me it is morally wrong to kill animals.

So if a moral standard of animal rights is to stand it must be consistent, otherwise 1: it is meaningless (something that is both true and false as the same time by definition is meaningless) and 2: it has no possible standard to begin with to condemn.

Now that we have laid out why consistency is necessary in ethical propositions we can examine the arguments for animal rights.

I believe that animal rights is the result of misunderstanding of what exactly morality and ethics are (along with many other things). Ethics are a result of man's nature as a social animal. Because of man's nature a workable (and consistent) morality is essential to our prosperity. Crabs that kill each other in competition for mates function on a very different social principle. Applying morality to things other then humans is absurd considering that animals are not capable of coming to come kind of agreement called morality. Human beings are expected to me moral and animals are not. Thus ethics is not longer consistent and therefore meaningless.

However let us assume that morality for some reason is beyond human nature and not just a useful tool that we have made for our own prosperity. Isn't then the wolf just as evil for eating the sheep as I? If morality is not based on nature of the organism then the claim that a wolf doesn't know better is irrelevant. The natural conclusion of some morality that is beyond human nature is not that human being should quit killing animals, but that all animals should stop killing animals. Is nature relevant? Well then human beings have not obligation towards animal’s rights. Or is nature irrelevant? If so then you cannot claim that the nature of the wolf wanting to kill the keep to survive is suddenly irrelevant.

Surely a wolf doesn't know any better. But neither would a child who found his fathers gun and wants to play with it with a friend. Wouldn't you stop the child?

Another problem is that animal rights reduce to a form of slave morality/altruism. Human beings have a standard called morality because human beings are capable of having interactions based on mutual self-respect. There is no possible way to have a relationships based on mutual self-respect with animals.  The only way to have peaceful interactions with animals in general would be enslavement.  In which case it must be asked, why is it not ok to kill animals but ok to enslave them? In any case enslavement is hardly a relationship based on mutual self-respect. So if a relationship is not based on mutual self respect, and I carry all the moral obligations, and the animal has no moral expectations, it is clear that what we have is a form of altruism, and as always the question to asked in the face of altruism is "By what standard do I owe you anything?'” The simple fact that I exist implies that you are entitled to my time and energy?

We can get into the flaws of altruism some other time, but for now I will simply say that any plea to altruism always requires references to things that don’t exist such as god, or “society” (society is a concept, not something that exists in reality, it is simply another name for a group of individuals, and it a meaningless term if there is no reference to the individual).

There is no way to apply principles of morality to animals. Perhaps once we apply morality consistently to human beings our relationship with animals may become more clear to us, but I can say that relationship has nothing to do with ethics.