I agree with other commenters that the slavery framing is unhelpful. However, I mostly do agree with Jordan Peterson otherwise.
Human rights set expectations how we treat each other. From my perspective, respect for them is conditional on reciprocity. I will not respect the rights of an individual who doesn’t respect mine. Their function is to set standards of behavior that make everybody better off.
A benefit of human rights, rather than mammal rights or just smaller-identity rights is that they benefit everyone who can understand the concept, so they’re memetically adequate to cover the basics in a globalized world without incurring the huge cost of including the very large number of nonhuman animals. Basically, everybody who can participate in the discussion should be able to agree on the concept—and benefit from that agreement—without having to commit to universal species-independent collectivism.
For this reason, I don’t see the suffering of animals as a problem except for empathy management and perhaps creating a culture of anti-cruelty, if we need it for other purposes.
One problem with human rights is that they are not necessarily well-defined in all contexts, and sometimes people can do strategically better by respecting the rights only of a subset of people. A possible solution would be to insist on minimal standards for the very basic expectations, e.g. don’t randomly torture or murder people you dislike, while setting higher standards only for subgroups, e.g. citizenship transferring the right to live and work in a certain territory.
I agree with other commenters that the slavery framing is unhelpful. However, I mostly do agree with Jordan Peterson otherwise.
Human rights set expectations how we treat each other. From my perspective, respect for them is conditional on reciprocity. I will not respect the rights of an individual who doesn’t respect mine. Their function is to set standards of behavior that make everybody better off.
A benefit of human rights, rather than mammal rights or just smaller-identity rights is that they benefit everyone who can understand the concept, so they’re memetically adequate to cover the basics in a globalized world without incurring the huge cost of including the very large number of nonhuman animals. Basically, everybody who can participate in the discussion should be able to agree on the concept—and benefit from that agreement—without having to commit to universal species-independent collectivism.
For this reason, I don’t see the suffering of animals as a problem except for empathy management and perhaps creating a culture of anti-cruelty, if we need it for other purposes.
One problem with human rights is that they are not necessarily well-defined in all contexts, and sometimes people can do strategically better by respecting the rights only of a subset of people. A possible solution would be to insist on minimal standards for the very basic expectations, e.g. don’t randomly torture or murder people you dislike, while setting higher standards only for subgroups, e.g. citizenship transferring the right to live and work in a certain territory.