Beastiality brothels in Germany

Who is going to be their MLK?

 

I don't dispute that there is a difference between human and animal intelligence.

I do think, however, that you haven't presented a reason why that difference justifies murder.

That the same rationale is being used does not mean that the same conclusions are to be drawn.

You mistake my position. I was not trying to prove that animals were the same as humans.

I was only intending to point out what I considered to be flaws in your initial arguments (which, paraphrased, were: 1)animals cannot be murdered because they lack sentience 2) there is no comparision between gays and animal-lovers because animals cannot give consent).

My answer would be that, in refining your terminology, you have changed the argument I was addressing (or shifted the goalposts, as we like to say on the internet).

Otherwise my reaction to your post is as follows:

1) I agree that animals cannot give legal consent (that's just a fact, which is part of why I assumed you weren't using the legal definition before, since you would just have been stating the obvious).

2) I don't think the comparison to retarded children is justified.

 

Because you cannot murder a non-thinking being. That is why, in fact, the definition of murder specifies a human victim. You say you were not trying to claim equivalence between humans and animals, but unless you can demonstrate that mental capacity between the two is at least comparable, I don't see where your use of the term is justified. Which was my original point.

That does not mean that there aren't circumstances where injury (or lethal injury) to non-thinking organisms is wrong. But it does mean that A)such circumstances are not "murders" and B)the rationale for their wrongness is wholly separate from the reasons why murder is wrong, and can't really be invoked in an argument about bestiality.

What are you even saying here?

It's certainly a different argument than the one you chose to address. But it's not shifting the goal posts. Every other poster in the thread recognized what I was trying to say initially, and in fact tried to correct you once you had made your initial response. That suggests the misunderstanding was more a problem of your comprehension than my ability to express myself. There's certainly not support for the notion that I somehow changed my argument.

Why not? Again, you've stated that animals have an ability to indicate they want something. Indeed they do. But what does this mean, if they are not capable of doing things like counter-factual reasoning, or grasping consequences? A "choice" between two things that the chooser neither has any information about nor can ever hope to comprehend is no choice at all.

 

I did say at the beginning that your argument was based only your being able to be the final authority on what words mean.

If I came home and found my dog's head cut off and blood everywhere, i would consider that to be a murder. You would just consider it "wrong".

While I understand that argument, I don't agree with it.

All that is beside the point anyway, as killing is just as bad as murder. Perhaps not at the lower end of the food chain (shrimps and the like), but certainly the higher mammals are sufficiently self-aware that they should not be killed IMO.

It all depends on where you want to draw the line.

Anyway, returning to bestialists, if a human stimulates an animal sexually (which is totally plausible) , I don't see how that is worse than killing and eating the animal.

Here's an example:

There is a all-male club where women are excluded because they don't have something. Later on, it is decided that women should be allowed to join the club.

Does this mean that the women are now men??

No, of course not. It simply means that they have been extended the right to join the club.

In this example, you will see that the same rationale was used as in my slavery example and in your animal argument, but all the outcomes were different.

So that's what I mean when I say the same rationale doesn't lead to the same conclusions (perhaps outcomes is the better word).

Again, your argument against animals being able to give consent was predicated on sentience. Here is the sentence :

"Because human beings are sentient and can therefore give consent."

That you are now saying that you meant legal consent is fine, and that other people magically understood what you were intending to say is great, but that's not what your sentence indicates, so you shouldn't be insulting my reading comprehension.

As for other people not calling you on it, it's probably because 1) it doesn't seem like anyone is interested and 2) it doesn't seem like it was intentional.

I agree with you that animals do not have the ability to give legal consent. I don't have any issue with that claim. If you had said "animals do not have the right to give legal consent" at the beginning I never would have responded.

It's like if I ask you "why can't gays get married?" and you respond with "because it's against t

 

i was being facetious

 

I guess I still don't understand, especially in the context of your original point. You seem to be saying here that just because someone uses a certain kind of argument, it doesn't mean that the context is the same (ie women are not the same as men biologically just because the rationale for letting them join a club is similar to that used to justify letting a black man join a formerly all-white male club). That's a good point, and I agree. But if you admit that's the case, why did you bring up the slavery thing? As you say, that's a completely difference situation, and similar rationales don't necessarily lead to the same outcomes. Animals are no more being "enslaved" or denied their rights than women are men. So what were we supposed to get out of that?

My sentence referred to being sentient. Let's follow that a bit.

So then, what does "consciousness" imply?

Being aware of one's own thoughts and existence is remarkably close to what I offered later, "the idea of self-awareness."

I pushed back to hard in my initial response to you, and my calling your use of the word idiosyncratic was unmerited. But the fact that people understood what I was trying to say was not magic or luck. It was because it was, in fact, a valid meaning to be derived from my original sentence. I said before no one would fault you for misunderstanding my original post, and I still think that's true. But I don't think it's really sustainable for you to argue after the fact that I "shifted the goal posts" when I in fact merely clarified what was an admittedly unclear thought. If you can't see that after having it explained, then I think that is more of a deficiency of yours than mine.

As for other people not calling you on it, it's probably because 1) it doesn't seem like anyone is interested and 2) it doesn't seem like it was intentional.

As I've said, my point was not strictly legal consent. I was using that to invoke our broader understanding of decision-making. That is, we recognize that substantively agreeing to something is about more than simply saying "Yes" to something we have no concept of. That's a point we'll come to shortly.

If a bestiality advocate were so flippant about this, I'd call them hypocritical. There are any number of implications to consider, many of them identical to the ones that humans must think through when deciding to have sex with someone. For instance, how will that person respond to them later? Will the sex act change the relationship in an unwanted way? Might their partner become jealous, vindictive, petty, or overly attached? Does the potential partner have a communicable disease? Never mind the pretty extensive literature about the importance of sexual activity in animal behavior and relationships overall.

Rather than address any of these problems, the position you put forward ridicules them. One cannot, on the one

 

Okay