This also explains why you don’t have a “right” to medical care. Someone else has to provide it. If you have a right to it, then the provider, who has no choice but to provide it, is no more than a slave.
I don’t understand why this logic would apply to medical care but not, for instance, the right to speech. Freedom of speech must be provided. Even in the narrow sense of the term—the right to not be persecuted by the government for your speech/expression—it requires a government with enough checks and balances and a society with enough rule-of-law style norms that any old judge/cop/politician can’t abuse their power to persecute you for what you’ve said. That in turn requires taxes, elections, all that jazz.
You could argue that, empirically, the cost to ensure a right to medical care happens to be greater than the cost to ensure a right to speech (I don’t know if that’s true, but, questions about what counts as a cost aside, it’s an empirical question), but I don’t think a right to speech is a different type of right than a right to medical care.
In that light, it’s not clear why animals couldn’t have rights. It’s clearly true that these rights would incur costs—if there were no cost to upholding the right, there would be nothing to uphold—and that these costs would mostly, if not entirely, fall on us humans. But why would the fact that the costs fall disproportionately on some people invalidate/disqualify the right? It costs a lot more to uphold some people’s right to speech than others.
In fact, Jordan Peterson is a great example of someone whose right to speech costs a lot more to uphold than the average person’s because he’s actually saying things that cause governments and other powerful institutions to try to silence him. Similarly, some people require a lot more medical care than others. The cost to animal rights would, by definition, be incurred entirely by animals who can’t provide anything back, so this makes it a sort of extreme case, but I (genuinely, not just for the sake of argument) don’t understand why the extreme should be handled any differently (again, modulo empirical findings like “this right is too expensive to uphold right now, but we’ll keep working on it and uphold it when we can”).
More concisely: if upholding animal rights makes us slaves to animals, why does upholding Jordan Peterson’s particularly costly right to speech not make us slaves (or almost-slaves) to him?
I don’t understand why this logic would apply to medical care but not, for instance, the right to speech. Freedom of speech must be provided. Even in the narrow sense of the term—the right to not be persecuted by the government for your speech/expression—it requires a government with enough checks and balances and a society with enough rule-of-law style norms that any old judge/cop/politician can’t abuse their power to persecute you for what you’ve said. That in turn requires taxes, elections, all that jazz.
You could argue that, empirically, the cost to ensure a right to medical care happens to be greater than the cost to ensure a right to speech (I don’t know if that’s true, but, questions about what counts as a cost aside, it’s an empirical question), but I don’t think a right to speech is a different type of right than a right to medical care.
In that light, it’s not clear why animals couldn’t have rights. It’s clearly true that these rights would incur costs—if there were no cost to upholding the right, there would be nothing to uphold—and that these costs would mostly, if not entirely, fall on us humans. But why would the fact that the costs fall disproportionately on some people invalidate/disqualify the right? It costs a lot more to uphold some people’s right to speech than others.
In fact, Jordan Peterson is a great example of someone whose right to speech costs a lot more to uphold than the average person’s because he’s actually saying things that cause governments and other powerful institutions to try to silence him. Similarly, some people require a lot more medical care than others. The cost to animal rights would, by definition, be incurred entirely by animals who can’t provide anything back, so this makes it a sort of extreme case, but I (genuinely, not just for the sake of argument) don’t understand why the extreme should be handled any differently (again, modulo empirical findings like “this right is too expensive to uphold right now, but we’ll keep working on it and uphold it when we can”).
More concisely: if upholding animal rights makes us slaves to animals, why does upholding Jordan Peterson’s particularly costly right to speech not make us slaves (or almost-slaves) to him?