• @ganymede@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    well said.

    re. ‘capability to suffer’: this seems (imo) to have been a stumbling point or crack which has occasionally been widened to facilitate destructive behaviour.

    how to determine this capability to suffer? for every obvious example there will be some cruel person making a devils argument for why we can’t be 100% certain (and therefore “all bets are off”).

    i think its good to give a very wide berth on all species with mobility. not foolproof (eg. plenty of plants fall under this category), but its a good start imo

    • @Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
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      2 years ago

      Sentience is a feature of all animal species known with only two exceptions, one being sponges and another I don’t remember.

      This was already measured, using even unethical methods, several years ago and received ratification in 2012, even when this was known since a long time ago.

      This is to complement of what you mean.

      About sexy_peach, there is a point, even if is just centric in animal welfarism (not caring about their inalienable interests and natural rights but just what allows you to maintain your consciousnesses clean while maintaining exploitation) having the first part partially right.

      It is not that responsibility is a human-made concept itself, but one that applies to you, being in a certain state of knowledge and awareness, as a moral agent (moral judgment), whether this is not the case of individuals from other animal species which are moral subjects (as most humans in their infancy and in some hard situations).

          • @ganymede@lemmy.ml
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            2 years ago

            That is good information that it has been ratified.

            To put it in ethical terms, it may be good to give a very wide berth on where the definition of sentience might be. (ignoring or including that the capability for suffering may not be identical to sentience. but agreed its a good starting point to establish a bounds.)

            To put it in intellectual or scientific terms, no numeric value can be correctly assigned to a real world quantity without an associated error. The maximum radius of that error is roughly what I would ascribe to the “wide berth” mentioned above.

            The limits of our perception meaning there’s a chance we may be wrong, and in this context i’d rather be wrong for the right reasons - so to speak.

            There’s alot of discussion around humans being more valuable because of our elevated perception and sentience. I would put it the other way: with the increased sentience comes a duty of care, that is where our responsibilities to other species comes from imo.

            I know I didn’t say anything to disagree with either of you, just continuing the enjoyable discussion.

            • @Echedenyan@lemmy.ml
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              2 years ago

              I would like to interject here for one thing: individuals of other species have autonomous lifes, and we would be only responsible in the limits on which we have to take care of them as if they were our children or similar, which is mostly when we adopt them because they have no place in human society in an autonomous way.

              • @ganymede@lemmy.ml
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                11 year ago

                sorry late reply, got sucked into work and thing. finally back.

                yeah i agree with you here. all i meant re. responsibility was along the lines of, when people ask “is it ok to mistreat animals for <whatever> gain?”.

                my response would be, no, not only is it wrong because its plain wrong, but also because we have responsibility.