When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans

by hamilcarr 47 Replies latest social current

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips

    We are just a rope stretched between the worm and the Ubermensch.

    I've only read the prologue. Narkissos got me curious.

    Treating those on the rope closer to the worm badly...not so nice.

    The universe is rushing towards consciousness.

    BTS

  • catbert
    catbert

    I wonder if Noah was annoyed by the sexual practices of Bonobo's on the ark.
    Everytime Noah came to feed them, they would start humping each other.

  • Narkissos
    Narkissos
    They're learning to become like us, the interspecies differences are not due to biology, but can be ascribed to culture.

    So, if we grant them "rights" within a meaningful community (in which they learn to interact or use language (I guess the logos community isn't that remote )), we could elicit their unexpected potential of acting as human-like moral(?) agents.

    Maybe we could, but (why) should we?

    As far as speciocentrism is concerned, is the idea that man is (provisionally) the top achievement of evolution any different from the Biblical doctrine that man is the top achievement of creation? We are still construing ourselves as the top of a hierarchy of beings and doing other species a favour by acknowledging their partial resemblance and compatibility with us (be it our DNA, our brain capacity, our language and our culture) and "helping" them become more like us...

    Modern biology used to be wary of this kind of anthropocentrism and insist that every extant living species is, in a sense, the (provisional) end product of evolution. A poppy, an oak, a spider, a sparrow, a hedgehog or a bonobo doesn't lack anything because it is not "human" and doesn't share in our language and culture. Trying to feed apes human culture and make them somehow part of our logos community is strangely reminiscent of intra-human colonialism which forced Western education on "underdeveloped" peoples, resulting in the irreversible destruction of ethnodiversity. How we may now pay lip service to biodiversity and at the same time try to "elicit [other species'] unexpected potential of acting as human-like moral(?) agents" is beyond me.

    There may come a time when mankind gets tired of projecting its own face onto whatever it looks at.

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips
    to feed apes human culture and make them somehow part of our logos community is strangely reminiscent of intra-human colonialism which forced Western education on "underdeveloped" peoples, resulting in the irreversible destruction of ethnodiversity.

    Maybe we can baptize them!

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips

    DUPLICATE

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips
    dUPLICATE
  • Narkissos
  • hamilcarr
    hamilcarr

    How we may now pay lip service to biodiversity and at the same time try to "elicit [other species'] unexpected potential of acting as human-like moral(?) agents" is beyond me.

    Do you think bonobos have a bright future if we leave them in the forest (We think we're saving indigenous Amazone tribes by leaving them alone but we may be wrong)?

    That's not the way natural selection works.

    Adaptation to novel situations is a key to diversity. Eliciting the potential doesn't fall outside the process simply because it may seem a conscious act, which it certainly isn't.

  • logic&reason
    logic&reason

    Burn - It's funny that you mention it... I started reading it about 2 weeks ago, but got distracted by another book.

    "It was suffering and impotence - that created all afterworlds; and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply."

    Nietzsche had an amazing sense. What do you think of it so far?

  • BurnTheShips
    BurnTheShips
    Nietzsche had an amazing sense. What do you think of it so far?

    It is thought provoking for an Afterworlder like myself, I started a thread on it:

    http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/162333/1.ashx

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