I find the notion that humans should have rights, not because they have a capacity to suffer and form conscious goals, but just because they are a particular form of biological life that I happen to belong to, absurd. There is nothing magical about being human in particular that would make such rights reasonable or rational. It is simply anthropocentric bias, and biological chauvinism.
First of all, I was mainly talking about morality, not rights. As a contractual libertarian, I find the notion of natural rights indefensible to begin with (both ontologically and practically); we instead derive rights from a mutual agreement between parties, which is orthogonal to moraity.
Second, morality, like all values, is arational and inseparable from the subject. Having value presuppositions isn’t bias or chauvinism, it’s called “not being a rock”. You don’t need magic for a human moral system to be more concerned with human minds.
(I won’t reply to the other part because there’s a good reply already.)
First of all, I was mainly talking about morality, not rights. As a contractual libertarian, I find the notion of natural rights indefensible to begin with (both ontologically and practically); we instead derive rights from a mutual agreement between parties, which is orthogonal to moraity.
Second, morality, like all values, is arational and inseparable from the subject. Having value presuppositions isn’t bias or chauvinism, it’s called “not being a rock”. You don’t need magic for a human moral system to be more concerned with human minds.
(I won’t reply to the other part because there’s a good reply already.)