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 think most political opinions are opinions about priorities of issues, not issues per se. I remember from years ago, before most states had started legalizing same sex marriage, a relative of mine expressing the sentiment “I’m not against legalizing gay marriage, I just don’t want to hear about the topic ever again.” I think this is the attitude that the (admittedly very obnoxious and frustrating) party guest is concerned about. If more people held the opinion of my relative then we’d be stuck in a bad equilibrium, with everyone agreeing that they would be OK with same sex marriage but no one bothering to put in the effort to legalize it.
It doesn’t matter if everyone agrees X is an issue if everyone also believes that solving the much more difficult Y should always take priority over solving X—this has the same consequences as a world in which no one believes X is an issue. Of course that doesn’t mean you should go around yelling at people for not being obsessed with your favorite obsession, but I think “unconscious selfishness” and “mind viruses” are uncharitable explanations for what seems to be the reasonable concern that low priority tasks often never get completed and thus those that claim to support those causes but with low priority are effectively not supporting those causes.
Having said that, I completely agree with your larger point about diversity—I would much prefer a world in which people can obsess over what they want to obsess over even when their obsessions and lack-of-obsessions are contrarian.