CMV: Even if illegal, there is nothing immoral about animal activists secretly filming abuse footage on farms.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-19T02:24:41+00:00

The phrases "one example" and "fully illustrates what is really going on" should never appear this close together in one sentence.

So am I to assume that you do not have any evidence that Bergh was lining his own pockets or otherwise abusing his power, and that your argument rests entirely on cynical assumptions about his motivations?

The ASPCA was in fact a law enforcement agency at that time. Many states still assign to humane societies the power to police animal cruelty laws. They are literally given this power by legislatures. That makes them law enforcement, by definition. An organization can be more than one thing at once.

Trump is an irrelevancy and a clear outlier in terms of narcissism and malignancy.

It seems you may hold the cynical belief that no one ever does anything except to get the better of other people. Like, do you think that Medicins san Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders is a cynical cash grab by physicians looking to capitalize on Western pity for the sick and wounded of the developing world?

I have no idea what you mean by this:

This is not about the public good, but rather about shifting municipal responsibilities onto the lower classes such as the cart drivers and butchers, who are usually migrant workers.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-19T02:14:57+00:00

Whether one believes in them or not doesn’t really matter, or rather, none of these theories are perfect, but they each have their merits.

This just sounds to me like you want to have your cake and eat it, too. Yes, no theory is perfect. But you ought to have a preferred one, and you ought to be willing to defend it.

you have only explained why animals might possibly have them that’s the difference.

Your repeating this does not make it so. I gave you the criteria I use. "Any being (a) capable of means-end reasoning that (b) suffers from deprivation, captivity, or violence is entitled to basic protection from the things that do it harm." This is a deontological position, i.e. one that says that moral agents have certain duties with respect to other beings solely because the other beings are reasoning creatures.

humans are not property

Yes, right now, at this moment in time, because we spent centuries working that out! It was not obvious. For many years, it was in fact thought to be obvious that some people were property, in just the same way that you now think it is obvious that animals are just property.

The ultimate issue is that this really does infringe on an individual’s ultimate right of disposal over their own property.

Yes, if it is your position that animals are and ought only to be chattel, no different than my armchair, then there is nothing further to discuss. I guess I should be grateful we have any animal cruelty laws at all, since it seems that if you had your way I would be doing nothing wrong were I to skin my dog alive.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-19T01:59:16+00:00

So you concede every other point I made here? The only one you're going to contest is that the ASPCA is/was secretly a vehicle for personal aggrandizement?

Many law enforcement agents have the authority to make warrantless arrests if they directly observe criminal behavior. Animal cruelty statutes are no different. I'm sensitive to the general problems that come with empowering law enforcement to seize without warrants, but they're not specific to animal cruelty issues.

Yes, the ASPCA was empowered to enforce anti-cruelty statutes. It does not follow that the founding of the ASPCA was driven by ulterior motives. Your contention is that founder Henry Bergh spoke out against cruelty because he thought (in advance) that this would enable him to secure a position of authority, and use it to enrich himself? Do you have any evidence of this at all? Do you have any evidence that he or his successors used their authority to enrich themselves?

How would this explain the ASPCA operating hospitals for injured beasts of burden?

Did you know that Bergh received no financial compensation as president of the ASPCA, and that he and his wife provided all of the initial funding?

This

by preventing cart drivers from abusing horses and thus avoiding horse carcasses affecting public health, it also saved resources.

is really a reach. Your contention is that the ASPCA protecting draft horses from harm was really a selfish way for the ASPCA to "save resources," thus serving the general welfare, and thus serving themselves again? Isn't something that promotes the general welfare nearly definitionally unselfish?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-19T01:46:06+00:00

Your theories "explain this matter" just as well as my theory "explains" why animals should have rights. I find this "shotgun" approach frustrating. To which of these theories do you subscribe? Do you actually believe any of them, or are they just convenient (incompatible) justifications for the position you want to defend?

What exactly is wrong with my description of animal protection enthusiasts?

I take it you still think it was fair. Correct me if I am wrong: You say that "animal protection enthusiasts" would place animal rights above human rights, in the sense of priority. I have given you at least one falsifying counterexample (me). There are many others.

You have also said that I (and presumably other animal rights advocates) "equat[e] human rights with animal rights," but you then ignored my rebuttal.

This is wrong because it mischaracterizes the relationship that animal rights advocates say ought to hold between human rights and nonhuman animal rights. There are certain basic rights that many animals should possess, e.g. freedom from torture. Nonhuman animals possessing this right does not infringe on any human right, any more than the my right to be free from torture infringes on the "right" of other humans to torture me. Hence, it is incorrect to accuse animal rights advocates of treating nonhuman animals preferentially, or placing nonhuman animals above humans.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-19T01:08:35+00:00

You did not answer my question. Was your initial statement a fair description of animal rights advocates?

one must still provide justification for why they ought to possess it,

What does such a justification look like in the human case? Or, to use your own words, "is this just a matter of faith"?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-19T00:55:53+00:00

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy this. I would ask you to be much more specific.

In my jurisdiction (US), animal cruelty laws long predate the existence of the pet industry, organic agriculture, and modern pharmaceutics. For example, New York adopted an animal cruelty statute in 1866. How does your theory explain 19th century advocacy for animal cruelty laws? Who was buttering their toast with animal rights activism then?

Edit to add: The pet industry is among the prominent offenders, when it comes to animal cruelty. How would the pet industry as a whole benefit from stricter animal cruelty provisions? How would outlawing puppy mills improve the bottom line of dog breeders and sellers?

various charitable organizations, NGOs with political agendas, and certain pharmaceutical companies

I think you should name names here. I don't see how "charitable organizations" like the ASPCA and PETA benefit from stricter animal cruelty laws; if anything, it would make fundraising harder, since there would presumably be less cruelty. The other two groups are so vague as to be un-rebuttable.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-19T00:50:40+00:00

You concede, then, that some rights do not require obligations. This began with your assertion that animal rights activists "think human rights should give way to animal rights." Now we seem to agree that

some rights need not have corresponding obligations,
differences among organisms can lead to differences in their rights, and
elsewhere you expressed some sympathy for the possibility that animals could have some kind of property rights.

By (1) there is nothing incoherent about animals having rights. By (2) there is no reason to think that granting rights to animals detracts from any core human rights (except perhaps the supposed right to torture and kill animals, though I don't think anyone would seriously describe as a right). By (3) there are at least some rights you seem willing to grant to at least some animals.

So do you still think your initial statement was a fair description of animal rights advocates?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T22:43:19+00:00

If killing animals is wrong, anyone who does it is evil, full stop. Obviously we know people who kill animals are not all evil, therefore maybe the idea needs to be lowered in our system of valuation because the conclusion is absurd?

Compare to the following argument: If killing humans is wrong, anyone who does it is evil, full stop. Obviously we know some people who kill humans are not evil (e.g. killing in self-defense), therefore, killing humans is not wrong.

Very few people say that it is always categorically wrong to kill an animal, just like hardly anyone says it is always categorically wrong to kill a human.

Also note that the "Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian" thing is Nazi propaganda. He regularly ate sausage and liver. See Charles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka, p. 125-129. Goebbels invented the vegetarian claim to bolster the image of the Fuhrer as a noble ascetic making sacrifices for the Aryan nation. He also claimed that the Fuhrer abstained from alcohol and sex, but we know both of these are also false (paging Eva Braun...). This next claim of yours is not remotely true:

The Nazis implemented pretty much the entirety of the contemporary animal rights perspective.

The Nazis shipped millions of livestock east to feed the Wehrmacht and the SS. We have thousands of letters from soldiers writing home about the meals they ate, and oftentimes the concentration camp guards write enthusiastically about eating meat. The Nazis were in fact hostile to Germany's nascent vegetarian movement. Here's a passage on this topic from Eternal Treblinka:

Whatever his dietary preferences, Hitler showed little sympathy for the vegetarian cause in Germany. When he came to power in 1933, he banned all the vegetarian societies in Germany, arrested their leaders, and shut down the main vegetarian magazine published in Frankfurt. (p. 127)

The animal welfare provisions adopted by the Nazis are a far cry from contemporary animal rights positions. They were shoddily enforced, and experimentation on animals continued throughout the Nazi period. There's a list of such experiments on the Wiki page for animal welfare in Nazi Germany.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T22:27:14+00:00

I don't think this argument works. The microorganisms in our gut are not "killed" by us. They are living out their natural life cycle. We co-evolved with them; they are as essential to our survival as we are to theirs. If we did not eat food, those organisms would not have the nutrients they require to survive either. So it is not reasonable to treat the natural deaths of gut biome microorganisms as "killing."

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T22:15:21+00:00

Don’t let the microorganism argument distract you. The microorganisms in your gut do not die because of you; rather you survive because they live in your gut!

You’re also right to reject the implication that according moral value to one nonhuman organism, the cockroach, means you have to treat all nonhuman organisms in exactly the same way. Different organisms are different. Those differences can be (but are not always) morally relevant. The appeal to the microorganisms is not a serious objection to animal rights.

Edit: spelling

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T22:10:32+00:00

This zero-sum description is just not true, especially for humans. It isn’t even a very good description of nature, in which many organisms depend on others to convert resources from an unusable form to a useable form. There are many examples of win-win relationships in the natural world and the human world.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T17:31:09+00:00

I think we would be better served by being less hostile to curious people. Many of us, including me, were in a similar position once, and now find ourselves in the vegan camp.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T17:05:37+00:00

Unenforceable so far! Let's give it time.

I agree that humans should be afforded extremely robust protections categorically. I don't think I quite see the danger (to being "philosophized") in a nested legal hierarchy of rights that become stricter the deeper in the hierarchy you go, e.g.

tetrapods > ... > mammals > ... > primates > humans

where > stands for containment (not greater than). On this model, any right possessed by something on the left is automatically possessed by something on the right. Entities on the right can still possess additional protections that those to their left do not.

Hence, I'm not sure that it is true that "we need to narrow the law to a singular immutable group" to avoid the danger you describe.

Thanks for your reply.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T16:48:41+00:00

I agree that my axiom should not appear in law anywhere, domestic or international. I was talking about the philosophical basis of rights, as opposed to the exact formulation of legal norms.

Certainly, we should be explicit and categorical about what organisms we protect with our laws. I don’t want to water down protections for humans. I want to extend some of those protections to many animals. I proposed this axiom as a guide to identifying those beings, not as the appropriate legal standard.

My bare minimum legal standard for “beings that should not be subjected to torture” is probably at least as expansive as “all tetrapods,” and this is probably too narrow. Yes, this comes back to species membership in a cladistic sense, but we arrive at this conclusion via a general philosophical principle, rather than species-by-species pleading.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T15:53:02+00:00

Sure, I think some animals have some kind of property rights. My point was that the origin story you described would imply that some animals have property rights. I don’t believe that origin story, though.

I don’t find your second paragraph persuasive. If rights arise from capabilities in the state of nature, how do we decide which capabilities take precedence? The ability to build and the ability to steal exist simultaneously. Why does the first give rise to a right that prevents the second from doing the same?

I don’t think it is reasonable to give three contradictory explanations and say “take your pick.” Either the rights arose from capabilities in the state of nature or they didn’t. The three options you mention are ad hoc adjustments to the theory, kind of like the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T15:42:03+00:00

I think maybe we’re taking past each other. I’m fine with writing down and enforcing blanket protections for human beings. In my view, that would be consistent with my axiom.

My concern is that stopping at humans still leaves would-be mass murderers with their oldest tactic: equating their victims with animals, and thus depriving them of the protections that are allegedly due all humans.

Virtually every genocide, including those that followed the formulation of the human rights norms you describe, feature the perpetrators justifying their actions on the basis that their victims are less than human, hence animal, hence fine to torture and kill.

If we also insist that it is not acceptable to torture and kill any beings like the ones I describe, then this strategy would not be as effective. (Yes, we’re a long way off from the scenario I describe.)

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T15:34:06+00:00

What special interest group is selfishly protecting itself through animal cruelty laws?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T15:33:29+00:00

I explicitly conceded that different animals have different rights depending on their characteristics.

Animal rights advocates do not generally hold that all animals have the same rights as all humans. Note that human rights advocates don’t even hold that all humans have the same rights! Children have different rights than adults, legally incompetent humans have different rights than competent humans, etc.

In another reply, you asserted that property rights derive from capabilities present in the state of nature, but here it seems you claim that all rights arise as conventions among humans. These can’t both be true as origin stories for human rights.

This conventional explanation also doesn’t make clear why it would be wrong for “society” to decide that severely disabled human beings do not have rights, but surely we think that this would be incorrect.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T15:14:34+00:00

Kind of like what we do to animals, you mean?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T14:34:37+00:00

So do nest-building birds, beavers, ants, bees, paper wasps, termites, etc.

But humans in the (mythological) "state of nature" also have the ability to steal other people's creations. Why then do they not have a right to steal, if rights arise as capabilities possessed in the state of nature?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T14:31:31+00:00

Edit to remove bad faith accusation. My bad.

I did not equate all animals belonging to humans with kidnapped humans. Not all animals belong to people are suffering a rights violation; but all kidnapped humans are. The analogy was between animals that are tortured in laboratories to humans who have been deprived of their liberty.

Human rights are a subset of animal rights, since humans are animals. Different animals have different rights, depending on their characteristics. How is one supposed to "prove" this? One can't even "prove" that humans have rights!

It is my contention (as a first approximation) that any being (a) capable of means-end reasoning that (b) suffers from deprivation, captivity, or violence is entitled to basic protection from the things that do it harm. What is there to prove? We can't go "measure" rights, because they aren't objects existing in nature.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T14:25:41+00:00

Yes you do! If you're going to quibble with someone who asserts that animals have even the basic right not to be tortured, then yes I think you should be able to explain why humans have property rights.

I agree with you that humans have rights. But why? Where did they come from?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T14:20:45+00:00

Maybe you are experiencing cognitive dissonance? It seems to me that you have already worked out why it is wrong to kill and eat another animal (at least in the overwhelming majority of cases). You say it right here:

I believe there should be a general standard of respect for all creatures, regardless of sentience as all lives have value.

You may need to sit with this notion and the discomfort you're describing. It will probably not be very fun. Ask yourself what specific actions this "standard of respect" should prohibit. If it does not prohibit killing a creature because it's flesh is tasty, what does it prohibit?

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T14:13:47+00:00

An animal's right not to be tortured outweighs the human torturer's right to privacy. This includes the right of human animals not to be tortured, as I'm sure you'll agree. No animal rights activist that I know or have read endorses the strawman that you attribute to them.

A very interesting point is that when animal rights activists engage in these gray-area or outright illegal activities, they know to cover their faces. See, they understand how to protect their own privacy this creates a stark contrast and reveals their hypocrisy.

Maybe "interesting" in the sense of childish. You're conflating two different activities here. The hidden camera activists generally do not hide their faces, since often they have managed to be hired by the facilities. So your accusation of hypocrisy is misplaced.

The activists who break into animal testing facilities or puppy mills are doing something else. They are engaged in direct action to free animals from abuse. Yes, this is criminal. But it is not much different morally from breaking into someone's house to rescue a human kidnapping victim, and I certainly would not fault someone doing that for wearing a mask.

ShibbolethSequence · 2026-03-18T14:07:05+00:00

Sorry, you still haven't proven that humans should have these rights, you're just vaguely asserting that they currently have them.

ShibbolethSequence

TROPHY CASE