Posted by IndyMedia UK
ELP has learnt of an arrest in Mexico where a 16 year old is accused of ELF activity. Below is a report about his arrest. If anyone knows the 16 year old and have contact details for him please contact ELP.
Picture from Liberación Total
http://liberaciontotal.entodaspartes.net/archives/7557#more-7557
Last 27 of October a 16 years old Mexican activist was arrested at night and acused of being part of the ELF. He was riding his bike with a back pack wen a police patrol started to follow him. He decided to get rid of the backpack and ran away with his bike. Sadly the cops managed to capture him. Afterwards they took the backpack and found 4 incendiary devices (each one made with two petrol bottles), another petrol bottle, a pair of plastic gloves, a balaclava, a lighter, a spray can, and environmentalists logos (see picture above).
He was sent to the police station were the police took pictures of him and found out that he is vegan. He was kept there all night and next morning. He refused to talk to the police or explain why he was carrying all that stuff in his backpack.
According to the press he is suspected of carrying out at least 6 attacks, 5 of them with incendiary devices.
According to the press Diego A, the arrested activist, admited to be Anarchist, part of the ELF and responsable of the 6 attacks. But according to the Mexican Animal Rights magazine Rabia y Acción, this seems to be false.
Last 29 of October he went to trial but the judge didnt find enought evidence to convict him in a special prison for young men under 18 years old, so he was released. Now his parents are responsable of his future behaviour.
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Why did you delete my comments?
Heather,
I deleted the first comment inadvertantly. I didn’t realize it until you mentioned it in your follow up comment.
But I deleted the next one and mine as well because, while Peter Singer is utilitarian as opposed to rights, he does NOT devalue mentally challenged humans. He makes the case for embracing nonhuman animals into out sphere of moral consideration, not excluding certain humans.
I wasn’t comfortable with the possibility of this being misinterpreted by anyone reading it.
You deleted my comment again – I gave you a clear example on how Dr. Peter Singer values animals about unborn and severelyu disabled humans. What’s the problem?
You also haven’t addressed my original question: our view on animal rights is speciesist, as we value animals which act like ourselves. Do you agree?
Heather, your comments have nothing to do with this blog.
Your insipid questions are annoying and illogical and, no, I will not entertain them.
If you feel the need to articulate your theories further, feel free to write them up and submit them for submission and I will consider it.
To answer Heather’s question, No. What you want more? Okay. Leaving Dr Singer aside for the moment since many ARA’s do not entirely agree with his views.
The basis of AR is that animals exist primarily for their own reasons, and are entitled to equal moral consideration. Human animals included. We can not avoid having an impact on the world around us, so compassionate beings have a moral imperative to cause as little suffering as possible.
Walk lightly upon the Earth.
Preface. Subjectivity vs Objectivity
While reading on the subject of animal rights I was deeply disturbed by the number of subjective arguments used to both support and discount the notion of giving rights to animals. Since giving rights animal is a legal issue, its validity should be determined on completely objective and materialistic grounds. I believe that this is the only acceptable approach to assessing this issue because emotional attachment to animals, the religious/spiritual significance of animals, and the importance of the pleasure/pain experienced by animals vary from person to person. Since arguments based on these criteria are subjective, they are not reproducible or universal and cannot be used to formulate laws that would be universal in nature.
Since the happiness of any human is also subjective, arguments based on utility will refer to the ability of the article in question to improve the physical well being of a human.
1. Why Humans Have Intrinsic Value to Other Humans.
From a completely objective and selfish perspective, each human is almost infinitely valuable to any other human because of two criteria, intelligence and utility. Since utility is derived from the creation of a physical/intellectual product though the use of intelligence, intelligence is also the controlling factor in determining utility. Any human might use their intelligence to invent a valuable tool (ratcheting box wrench, computer software, scientific method etc.), social construct (capitalism, socialism, democracy, religion etc.), or entertainment product (book, film, music etc.) that can improve the physical well being of another human. Our laws are designed to protect this value. For example stealing from or killing another human is unlawful and foolish because you impede them from possibly making a contribution to our society in the form mentioned above. Even if only one in one million humans invents something that drastically improves your own life, it is foolish to take the one in a million chance of destroying that contribution by in anyway interfering with any other human. Therefore it is always in our own best interest not to interfere with other humans, even if they get in the way of our own goals. Our laws are designed protect the rights of humans and were based on subjective criteria(emotionality, religion etc.) when they were originally composed, but most serve the objective function of giving each human the chance to make some infinitely valuable contribution to society that will improve the lives of many humans.
A. Special Case #1
Self defense acceptable from an objective perspective because a human attempting to murder another human not only has infinite negative value from the perspective of the human being murdered; they also are destroying the possibly infinite value that the human being killed has from the perspective of other humans. Although the future contributions of the attacking human may be lost if they are killed, the future contributions of the victim will definitely be lost if the attacker is allowed to continue. This creates a zero sum situation in which it is objectively acceptable to kill the attacking human.
B. Special Case #2
Humans who are currently incapable of creating a contribution to society due to mental or physical deficiency are suffering from a medical condition. Like any medical condition, it is possible that the damage or intrinsic deficiency can be repaired or mitigated at some future date. Therefore individual humans which are incapable of creating a contribution are given rights to protect the utility they may have in the future when they are capable of making a product that other humans can use.
C. Special Case #3
Young children are incapable of making a contribution to society; however they will be able to do so once they have matured. Therefore human children are not given rights based on their current utility, but because of the utility they will have in the future.
2. Why Animals Have no Intrinsic Value to Humans.
Unlike humans animals are incapable of creating an intellectual or physical artifact which has value to any human society. The most intelligent animals cannot create an invention that has a utility to our society or offer new insight into any problem of physical significance to our society. Since they are incapable of offering an intellectual contribution (any physical invention or idea); the value animals’ is proportional to the value of their physical components, activities, and scientific insight derived from the observation of its behavior.
A, Special Cases in Comparison with animals
Infants, and invalid adults, and animals are not sapient and cannot make an intellectual contribution to our society. The functional difference between them is their potential to make contributions. Infants will grow and become sapient, the handicapped can be repaired and gain the sapience that they were denied, but animals are as intelligent as they can ever be and they are still not intelligent enough to make a contribution.
3. Pleasure and Pain are Insignificant.
Pain is simply a physical stimulus that initiates an avoidance behavior. Pain itself is not important. Instead it is the presence of physical damage indicated by pain that is significant. Pain can coerce humans only because it implies that physical damage is being done and humans have and instinctual fear of physical damage. Inflicting pain on humans is not acceptable only because it can damage the mental health of some humans and reduce their physical utility to society. Since it has already been argued that animals have no intellectual utility to society, the pain of animal has no intrinsic value. However pain can be an indicator of inefficiency. For example, if an animal feels pain for a lengthy period of time during slaughter it would indicate that the killing process is slow and therefore inefficient. The process of killing should be sped up as much as is possible, to increase the number of animals killed. This would also prevent the animal from thrashing about and disrupting the processing of its physical components.
Pain is also subjective by its very nature. Masochists damage themselves in order to feel pain because they find it aesthetically pleasing. Although I may think this a waste of time I can see no objective reason to discourage this practice, so long as they do no permanent damage to themselves that reduces their utility. In fact if they think the damage increases their utility I have no right to object to the practice even if my own objective assessment is not in agreement. Sadists damage others in order to observe behaviors associated with pain because they find them aesthetically pleasing. Although I may find this decedent and a waste of time since it is not creating any product that I value, that is a subjective assessment because others may find the product aesthetically or intellectually pleasing. So long as sadism is not carried out on an unwilling human, which would likely reduce their utility, I see no objective reason to discourage the practice.
Likewise pleasure is not important because it is subjective and does not always correspond to an increase in physical well being or utility.
Disregard for pain essentially invalidates the primary argument for animal rights, which is based on utilitarianism.
4. Animals Have No Value to Themselves (Note this argument is dangerously close to subjective as it relies on the non-quantifiable concept of “value”)
The term value by its very nature is a human construction. Implying that animals’ value their lives because they display avoidance behavior is anthropomorphism. No animal can articulate the abstract concept of value and therefore cannot conceive of it. And if animals have no concept of values then they have no ability to assign value to themselves. Instead it is the human who is subjectively stating that they believe that animals have an intrinsic value to themselves.
Whether they are valued for emotional reasons, religious reasons, scientific observation, industrial/commercial applications, or entertainment, the animal and its component parts are only valuable due to the action of humans and their assessment of the animal’s physical/emotional/spiritual value. The animal is worthless in of itself. It has value because humans have assigned that value to it.
A. Example Case #1
During the early nineteenth century in the southern United States the law dictated that humans of African decent had no rights based on the premise that they were not intelligent enough to serve a function to society other than brute slave labor. Dredd Scott disproved this hypothesis by educating himself and making a coherent argument for his own rights. By asking for rights, he proved that was intelligent enough to fully understand the concept of rights and its implications to his personal legal situation. More importantly through, his actions he provided evidence that a human of African decent had comparable intelligence to one of European decent and therefore could make a comparable intellectual contribution to society.
One objective test of the ability of an organism to conceptualize “rights” would be to encourage an animal to give an articulate argument for why it should have rights. However, no animal educated by humans has ever expressed a desire for the human concept of rights.
5. Inclusive Fallacies and Association Fallacies
True Statements: “All humans are animals.” “All humans have rights.”
Fallacy: ergo “All animals are humans or have the rights of humans.
Arguments supporting animal rights sometimes contend that because humans are phylogenetically related to animals this implies that they are the basically same. This is similar to stating: since all fish are vertebrata, all vertebrates can respire underwater. This is especially jarring when, in the same article, the author describes the differences between species that they interpret as evidence that animal testing does not function properly under any circumstance. This gives the impression of an internally inconsistent argument.
Anthropocentrism is often associated with racism or sexism. This is a fallacy because internal variations in intelligence within the sexes or races have been proven to be greater than the variation of intelligence between races or sexes. An assessment of the data implies that inter-racial the differences are due to social constructs. That is to say that there are few significant differences in intelligence between any two properly functioning human adults. However there is a significant difference in intelligence between the least intelligent valid human adult and the most intelligent animal.
7. Appeals to Nature
Arguments both for and against animal rights are often based on a naturalist fallacy. An example would be that nature is good and we humans disrupt and enslave nature, therefore we are bad. An argument against animal rights that contains this fallacy would be the argument that it is natural for humans to hunt and kill and animals therefore it is good.
These are fallacies since what is best and of the highest utility to a human should be determined solely from the article’s ability to physically improve the human condition. Neither the natural nor artificial is inherently superior.