Animals have no moral status

The only biological entities on Earth which are self-conscious to any degree are the great apes - including humans - some kinds of cetacean such as dolphins, a couple of monkey species, elephants, and apparently corvids (crows, magpies, ravens etc.) This is known because not only do these species exhibit behaviour which indicates consciousness or semi-consciousness, but most of them have been found to pass the mirror test, which is a basic test for consciousness. All other known animals besides these select few are not self-aware to any degree, and therefore they do not experience sensations (including pain) consciously like we do. Suffering and happiness are the basis of morality. Since most creatures can experience neither, they do not deserve the intrinsic moral status that humans have. It is undoubtedly immoral to kill elephants, hunt gorillas, or choke the river Yangtze with pollution, which has recently resulted in the extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin. However, it is not immoral to use animals such as mice, rats or dogs for experimentation.

Many people find it very difficult to accept this due to anthropomorphism: the projection of human values and feelings on non-human entities. People may assume that when animals howl as a result of physical damage, or wag their tails in apparent excitement, they are genuinely emotional. Humans, and semi-sentient animals, are the odd ones out in this sense: since we are conscious we must also have consicous feelings associated with sensation, or we may simply ignore physical harm or benefits to our survival. Humans are the only animals on Earth that shed tears of happiness, or commit suicide as a result of depression and stress.

This is a moot point anyway - if all animals were truly able to suffer, then it would be our moral duty to prevent them from harming each other, which they do invariably and brutally. They are not responsible or intelligent enough to uphold even the most basic obligations that come with human rights. They behave unacceptably by our standards, far worse than the most disgusting of criminals, so shouldn't they be punished if they have moral status? Since they don't have the self-sentience to harness technology, they must remain bound to the harsh process of natural selection, and human altruism would cause them to devolve.

I am not playing devil's advocate. This is my reasoning based on sound scientific evidence. If you disagree, provide a sound counter-argument and I will reconsider my views.

Besides the fact that this threat is born with an evident taste of provocation (for not saying flame), just for the fun to remind you things that you already know and probably even share.
a) mirror test: tells us about the self conciousness. It does not tell us about what animals deserve. The human rights are not based on science but on ethic. Therefore the argument brought forward is pointless.
b) you are speaking about scientific evidence: following scientific evidence individuals touched by the down sindrome show us that Mongolians are inferior genetically. There is a superior race and it is white. All this was scientific evidence. Now fortunately evidence changes. But if at the time we would have formulated human rights they would have been the same as today. Regardless of science.

Question of ethics.
But I am sure that part of the people would have argued the same way as you in this thread.

Moral: we would impeed animals to harm each other. This is another standpoint that shows that you are not aguing but searching for effect. I know of a lot of people that suffer. Hunger, sicknss, pain. A whole continent dies of HIV and with terrible sufferences. Oh, and nobody cares, you know? Scientifically......

Never mix fake scientific argumentation with ethics.
Gives a flame.

What?

But seriously... what? I'll try and address each of your points, but they are quite confusing.

The mirror test detects self-awareness in subjects. Since most animals do not pass the mirror test or show any othe indications of self-awareness, it can be assumned that they don't feel pain on a conscious level, therefore they do not suffer. From this reasoning, it can be said that most animals do not deserve the same respect that humans do.

The whole point of science is that it progresses, yes, but that doesn't make it unreliable in any way. That is a childish misconception. You strangely referred to old scientific studies which attempted to justify racism. How does that relate to this at all, or refute any modern scientific evidence? It wasn't even science anyway, just white supremacist propaganda.

If ethics is not based on science or logic, what is it based on? Blind faith? If that is the case, I categorically refuse to accept your ethics.

I didn't really understand your point about morality and HIV. Could you word it differently?

What does 'gives a flame' mean?

By the way, I'm not trying to justify environmental destruction or mistreatment of animals in their natural environment. This has a negative effect on humans and other consicous species, so animals do deserve respect in this sense, if only due to an indirect respect for humans.

i basically just disagree.
for one, the mirror test in't 'sound science'
in the case of a hell of alot of animals they don't use the same primary senses as us, so it doesn't even apply to dogs who have poor vision in relation to their scent.

there's other reasons why its not sound, like the fact that alot of animals associate eye conact with agression so can't really do the test accuratly.

so basically you're judging the level of conciousnes of an animal....based on a test that only applies to human standards and their stero typical abilities.
which animals differ from greatly, and differ greatly from animal to animal.

children fail the mirror test untill they're about 2,
whats your opinion on them?

so thats complete bulls*** anyway.

i also draw a line at comparing an animal feeding to an immoral act by a person, its in no way comparable, with completly different motives.

as for animals having feelings, its clear to see they have basic feelings, they can grow attatched to somebody and miss them when they're gone, they can suffer mentally after traumatic experiences, thats surely an emotional response. they can get excited, angry, happy is an odd one since we don't clearly define it ourselves and so can't apply it.

animals of course are not the same as us, we have removed ourselves from the natural order. which puts us in a position of huge responsibility and consequence, our actions as a whole have more impact that any other creature in history.

also are you saying dogs can't feel pain?
yes they can.

sure, why do they yelp? just faking it i guess? of course they feel pain! they just express it differently! so, i agree with you!

"it can be assumned that they don't feel pain on a conscious level"
So my dear "scientist": in science you do not assume. An economist assumes. In science you have a result. It is reproducable. You draw conclusions. It is when you are not abel to draw conclusions, that you "assume".
I love assumptions. They permitt what so ever. But they are not science.

It is the old problem you know. Grass is green. But the question is WHAT do you perceive as GREEN.
You actually not know. Science does not answer this problem. I cannot know that what you are seing is the same thing I do. I can only deduct that every human being is defining a wavelength with the name of a colour. But I do not kow that they see the same thing. I therefore assume.......that we are all seing different things. What is red for me is green for you. But we do not notice the difference because we are reacting exactly on the same stimulations.
So my "assumption" is scientifically sound?

Please. This is what I mean it is a flame. You are mixing scientific evidence with methods of philosophy and religious argumentations.
Why I refer to old scientific evidence and fashism? Well, because when I read the way you argue, I have a "deja vue".

And if you do not understand the HIV thing....I assume I cannot help you on that. For me case closed.

you assume they can't feel pain....
ok why do we feel pain then?
where does that come from and what is it for that we have attained it and animals havn't.

if you believe in science i can assume you believe in some of the core concepts of evolution.
animals are not so seperate from us.

Well first off it's immoral to kill certain animals because there exstinction effects us. Same with the need to keep there habitat clean. We use it to. As far as your first paragraph goes we do these things because it effects us. Not so much because it's immoral to them.

If animals were truly able to suffer then, sinse alot of people assume they do truly suffer already and still leave them to there own ways nothing would change. Nore should it because even in the case of these semi-sentiant animals there mental and emotional development is like a small child. If a 4 yr old shoots and kills somone we look to the parents and other associations to blame. For these semi-sentient animals morals still have no meaning and they cant be held resonsible for there actions.

Humans do not feel pain consciously either. They only acknowledge it consciously after the fact. Just because an animal does not have a concept of itself as seperate doesn't mean it doesn't feel pain. Pain is as evolutionarily useful to another animal as it is to us. And btw, who's to say that seperating anything in terms of the individual is the 'correct' way of looking at the world.

Animals do not have ethics because they are not self-aware, this does not mean that it ethical from a human perspective to cause harm; true, this is a rather self-indulgent human perspective to take, but to extend the idea that we can forego ethics in animals as it is only humans who are ethically bound is neither moral nor logical to me

This is not to say i disagree with animal testing, but that is because 1) i feel we have a higher moral duty to our own species and 2) Overall more suffering will be prevented by saving from disease long living humans throughout the generations than short lived animals

This was taken from Wikipedia, concerning the Mirror Test:

"There is some debate in the scientific community as to the value and interpretation of results of the mirror test. While this test has been extensively conducted on primates, there is also debate as to the value of the test as applied to animals who rely primarily on senses other than vision, such as dogs. As dogs have very poor visual resolution and acuity with red/green blindness, they have little chance of recognizing themselves or a dot (commonly red) in a mirror. However, dogs do recognize their own scent invariably with 40x more neurons than humans dedicated to processing smell. The key point being that the mirror test is only a measure of ability closely matching humans, not a statement of consciousness, as is popularly believed. Additionally, as mentioned with gorillas, many animals may regard eye contact as a threatening gesture, so the application of the mirror test is unclear. Some mammalian species do not have stereoscopic vision, including rabbits and deer, which may be a factor in determining the value of the test."



With that being said, the very credibility of the mirror test is substandard at best. With so many things factoring in on the mirror test, and it being reliable only on a few senses, it's easy to say that the mirror test can be discredited right off the bat.
Now, even so, if the mirror test were correct, it shouldn't have any effect on what kind of treatment you think animals are subject to.

Did you read that children under the age of 2 also fail the mirror test? Does that make them any less susceptable to moral and ethic treatment? What about mentally disabled people? Even well past the age of 2 most of them are unable to pass the mirror test as well, does this make them and less susceptable to moral and ethical treatment? On a whole, most people would say no, right?
So what would be the difference between the afore mentioned and all the other animals that did not pass the test? There is also the fact, that many of the animals that were not mentioned are more aggressive animals, that may instead attack their reflection, thinking it to be another of their kind, protective of their territory. It doesn't mean they aren't self aware, it means they take the reaction most common to them and administer it first.

Our choice, (and yes I mean our choice because believe it or not, sadly it's true) to keep animals from going extinct should not be based on what it will do to us if they're gone. It should be based off the fact that the animal deserves to live every bit as much as you do.

Sorry I haven't replied yeet, I'll adress each post in turn.

True enough, the mirror test doesn't always give perfect results, but it is a well established method used by most scientists, and was ercently used to determine that elephants are semi-sentient. It basically works like this:

A bright mark is placed on the animal at a part of their body they can't see without a mirror, such as the side of the head. Then, after being placed in front of a mirror and seeing their reflection, if the animal interacts specifically with the mark, it must recognise that its reflection is indeed an image of itself, and therefore be consciously aware of its own existence. Most animals simply register the reflection as another member of its own species, and react accordingly; I did this test on my mate's cat and it startled it.

Babies under a certain age don't recognise themselves in the mirror because they haven't fully developed their brain and therefore are not fully sentient. This does not exempt them from morality; they will eventually grow to become fully sentient humans, and retain memories from those early stages.

It's a moot point anyway, since their are other patterns of behaviour which denote sentience, and are only shown by a few animals - most of which pass the mirror test. These include the use of tools, the anticipation of other animal's thoughts (empathy, which can result in altruism or sadism, as in chimps), and the ability so solve puzzles creatively.

Animals don't have emotions - they exhibit behaviour which is similar to human emotions as a reaction to certain stimuli, but they do not genuinely feel upset, happy or excited. They do it in order to communicate their current state to other members of their group, or to frighten off potential predators, or something similar. They may howl or yelp when attacked in order to send a message of alert; this is naturally selected behaviour. It is predictable and repetitive. They don't do anything creative, like making music or artwork, or use complex language or technology. This requires consciousness. Humans are conscious, and therefore we need conscious sensations and emotions to accompany stimuli in order to react appropriately. Most animals are not conscious so they can't have conscious emotions and pain.

They yelp in order to scare away attackers and/or to alert other members of their group that danger is present. Remember I am talking about conscious pain; the unconscious recognition of physical harm does not cause real suffering.