Human Egoism - Pet Ownership is a Moral Flaw

[Rillion]

And pets are an emotional virus that inevitably takes affection away from other humans, leading to smaller and weaker human families as the result.

Evidence, please.   

[AL the Inconspicuous]

There's nothing that pisses me off more than people who inject requests for "sources" and "evidence" into the conversation completely out of context, just to make themselves feel intelligent without actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.

Do you really expect me to spend millions of dollars on a scientific study that explores the psychological projections of human parental emotions onto pets, or do you expect Mommy Government to fund a study whose highly predictable conclusions will be contrary to its population control / "bread and circuses" agenda? 

Are you completely incapable of using just a little bit of deductive reasoning and common sense?!

[Rillion]

In other words, you have no evidence whatsoever, and are vexed about being called on it.

No, I have seen nothing to indicate that people with pets demonstrate less affection for other humans than people without pets, but thanks for playing.  

[AL the Inconspicuous]

(1)  The burden of proof for "animal rights" is on people claiming that animals have "rights" and initiating aggression against other human beings for that cause.

(2)  In arguing that pet ownership is immoral I am sharing my own opinion, and calling for others to avoid pets and to look down on human pet nuts.  That is a cultural argument, not a legal one.  I've clearly stated that I recognize anyone's right to own animals on their own property, to eat animals, to have sex with animals, and so on.

(3)  Why is it that the most scientifically illiterate people seem have the highest esteem in their understanding of the scientific method?

(4)  Put ten million dollars in an escrow account, and I'll gladly prove you wrong.

[Level 20 Anklebiter]

It's nice to see some people here starting to get it, except those that don't...

Should I care?

That's what I am against.  Every human child (or mental patient, etc) is a potential rational economic actor whose rights to Liberty and Property are deferred to someone else, but who nonetheless has the right to Life and Emancipation.  Animals are natural resources that cannot possibly own themselves, they simply lack the neurological infrastructure to think on a level that is compatible with the rest of the civilized universe.

Yes and I have the potential to be the next Lance Armstrong, but that doesn't mean I am one right now or in the foreseeable future. Get me?

People are of course free to do whatever they wish with their own property (be it plant, animal, or otherwise).  Very few people have the same delusions about plants that most people have about animals.  There will inevitably be some degenerate idiots who would talk about "plant rights", just as there will always be thieves, rapists, and murderers.  Those retards need to be defended against.

What does rights have to do with animals or humans? Not a damn thing.

The word "inhumane" is a meaningless appeal to emotions; what we are talking about here are objective economic laws (i.e. right to own animals as property) as well as rational moral positions (i.e. ostracizing the pet nuts).

Nope, try again, friendo.

The immorality of keeping an animal is addressed throughout this thread.  Animals are a very inefficient food-source, raising food prices while some humans starve.  Wild animals are pests that can spread disease or otherwise damage your property.  And pets are an emotional virus that inevitably takes affection away from other humans, leading to smaller and weaker human families as the result.

Proof? Or are you just going to make a claim without even a coherent argument as you have for this entire thread?

Since humans are already thousands of times more productive than animals at acquiring food on this planet, and that advantage becomes infinite as we venture into space - there is no limit to how many pets we can produce.  Animals will breed as much or as little as we allow them.  We could fill the known universe with cute little puppy and kitty filled space-stations if we wanted it.  In case you missed the memo - man has conquered this planet.  An animal has no value in of itself, it's human beings that assign it value.

Cool story bro.

Animals are automatons created by natural selection, no different from rocks that are a product of chemical and planetary evolution.  What necessitates the recognition of Human Rights is the value that that rule-set brings to Civilization.

And thus justifies your bullshit position that possessing a pet is bad? Come on, niggah, get some intellectual chops and learn to debate. You clearly are better at coding, so either learn to debate or go back to coding. I have no time for your shit.

[Level 20 Anklebiter]

Moreover, by your logic everything that relates to emotion in any way should be discouraged or stamped out. That means no art, no music, no sex, no booze, no orchestral music, no video games, and no fun. Sorry, I recognize the reality that humans are emotional and rational creatures. In fact, emotion is a kind of reasoning by virtue of the fact that it is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history, as it is with all animals.

Without emotion, empathy wouldn't exist, it is the lifeblood of species to exploit emotion (especially empathy) as without it no learning is possible. Want proof? Look at any low order autistic or any socio/psychopath, these people have very little capacity to feel or empathize. Because of this impairment, many of them can't learn. Many low order autistics may have wonderful gifts of computation, but that's it. And psychopaths, well they're just fucked all over, that's why you never see many psychopaths with college level educations.

So, until you can prove emotion is useless, I'm going to be smiling when my niece is petting or playing with her cats, cause she enjoys them, and I enjoy that she enjoys them.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Is Schrödinger going for the dumbest troll award?   

Yes and I have the potential to be the next Lance Armstrong  [...]

Did anyone imply that you and Lance Armstrong differ in your Natural Rights?

What does rights have to do with animals or humans? Not a damn thing.

There are rational empirically-verifiable reasons why a society should adapt a rule-set that prohibits murder, theft, rape, kidnapping, and other violations of Natural Rights.  (See also: evolutionary pragmatism, principle of materialistic competitive advantage, etc, etc, etc.  Even Ayn Rand's crude epistemology should suffice.)  But the benefits of non-violent cooperation only apply to "rational economic actors", and so far the only entities that can possibly fit that criteria are human beings.  Self-owning robots / AI is a real possibility, but all genetically-unmodified animals other than humans simply don't have the neurological infrastructure to own themselves.

Proof? Or are you just going to make a claim without even a coherent argument as you have for this entire thread?

I can prove that humans have Natural Rights.  I can prove that the burden of proof in any claim that anything else has Natural Rights falls on the claimant, and that no other species has ever been proven worthy of self-ownership.  But I cannot prove the main point of this thread, which wasn't intended to be factual.  It's like you proving that what you had for breakfast tasted good!

And thus justifies your bullshit position that possessing a pet is bad?

Yes, it does, in as much as any aesthetic opinion can be justified.

Moreover, by your logic everything that relates to emotion in any way should be discouraged or stamped out.  [...]

You clearly haven't understood a damn thing.  I recognize the economic benefit of people being able to spend their money however they damn please to make themselves happy - whether eating animals, loving them as pets, torturing them for sadistic pleasure, or none of the above.  But I also subjectively decide that the character traits implied by certain hobbies are undesirable, that I should stay away from such hobbies, use my speech discourage others from participating in it, and avoid people who engage in said hobby at my discretion.  Or do you want Mommy Government to dictate what people are allowed to like or dislike?

That means  [...]  no fun.  [...]

You are free to own pets and you are free to have fun however you see fit, as long as you don't violate the Natural Rights of others.  But you are not free to force other people to like you / respect what you do, and not ostracize you.  And in this thread I am expressing my opinion why pet ownership is a moral flaw - you are free to disagree, but no one has yet made a single rational point in its defense.

So, until you can prove emotion is useless  [...]

I am a big fan of emotion (as you could have been able to tell from my posts over the past few years), but some emotions are more rational than others.  A lot of psychoactive drugs are very addictive and very destructive to your capacity to reason - you should be free to take them, but you will not have my respect if you do.

Emotion can even be taken to the extreme in the form of EEE (Eternal Electric Enjoyment) - total immersion in pleasure by inserting electrodes into certain parts of the brain.  It refers to wide-known experiments on rats which, when provided with ability to trigger a switch connected to the electrodes, kept constantly pressing it until they starved to death.  A similar effect is possible for humans as well, and, once again - you should be free to use such devices, but you will not have my respect if you do.

Rational people must learn to alter their emotional needs on the basis of reason.  I am not condemning pet owners to a fiery hell, I am simply communicating that their hobby is a sign of irrationality, and is thus immoral to a person who values reason.

[Level 20 Anklebiter]

Did anyone imply that you and Lance Armstrong differ in your Natural Rights?

Who said there have to be natural rights?

There are rational empirically-verifiable reasons why a society should adapt a rule-set that prohibits murder, theft, rape, kidnapping, and other violations of Natural Rights.  (See also: evolutionary pragmatism, principle of materialistic competitive advantage, etc, etc, etc.  Even Ayn Rand's crude epistemology should suffice.)  But the benefits of non-violent cooperation only apply to "rational economic actors", and so far the only entities that can possibly fit that criteria are human beings.  Self-owning robots / AI is a real possibility, but all genetically-unmodified animals other than humans simply don't have the neurological infrastructure to own themselves.

That still doesn't really answer the question, because what you call natural rights others would call positivism. I lean toward you method of thinking on rights, but just be aware of the fact that it's not [classical] natural rights.

I can prove that humans have Natural Rights.  I can prove that the burden of proof in any claim that anything else has Natural Rights falls on the claimant, and that no other species has ever been proven worthy of self-ownership.  But I cannot prove the main point of this thread, which wasn't intended to be factual.  It's like you proving that what you had for breakfast tasted good!

Then there are no natural rights then, thanks.

Yes, it does, in as much as any aesthetic opinion can be justified.

Then justify the argument against owning pets without falling for the faulty notions you've prescribed (hint: they're not related at all to rights).

I recognize the economic benefit of people being able to spend their money however they damn please to make themselves happy - whether eating animals, loving them as pets, torturing them for sadistic pleasure, or none of the above.  But I also subjectively decide that the character traits implied by certain hobbies are undesirable, that I should stay away from such hobbies, use my speech discourage others from participating in it, and avoid people who engage in said hobby at my discretion.  Or do you want Mommy Government to dictate what people are allowed to like or dislike?

You clearly aren't thinking in terms of what owning a pet is all about, thus conflate natural rights arguments with pet ownership, where there is no such connection in the first place. A cat or dog has no capacity to reason, it has no morality to call its own, and etc, so please stop trying to turn something simple into something complex.

You are free to own pets and you are free to have fun however you see fit, as long as you don't violate the Natural Rights of others.  But you are not free to force other people to like you / respect what you do, and not ostracize you.  And in this thread I am expressing my opinion why pet ownership is a moral flaw - you are free to disagree, but no one has yet made a single rational point in its defense.

Again, what does natural rights have to do with Mark's pussy: Senor Grouchypants? Or any other person's pet?

I am a big fan of emotion (as you could have been able to tell from my posts over the past few years), but some emotions are more rational than others.

Emotion can even be taken to the extreme in the form of EEE (Eternal Electric Enjoyment) - total immersion in pleasure by inserting electrodes into certain parts of the brain.  It refers to wide-known experiments on rats which, when provided with ability to trigger a switch connected to the electrodes, kept constantly pressing it until they starved to death.  A similar effect is possible for humans as well, and, once again - you should be free to use such devices, but you will not have my respect if you do.

Rational people must learn to alter their emotional needs on the basis of reason.  I am not condemning pet owners to a fiery hell, I am simply communicating that their hobby is a sign of irrationality, and is thus immoral to a person who values reason.

Cool story, bro.

[Rillion]

(1)  The burden of proof for "animal rights" is on people claiming that animals have "rights" and initiating aggression against other human beings for that cause.

(2)  In arguing that pet ownership is immoral I am sharing my own opinion, and calling for others to avoid pets and to look down on human pet nuts.  That is a cultural argument, not a legal one.  I've clearly stated that I recognize anyone's right to own animals on their own property, to eat animals, to have sex with animals, and so on.

(3)  Why is it that the most scientifically illiterate people seem have the highest esteem in their understanding of the scientific method?

(4)  Put ten million dollars in an escrow account, and I'll gladly prove you wrong.

More vexation.  I didn't say anything about animal rights, one way or another.  You're welcome to your opinion about pet ownership, but so far as I can tell it's complete bollocks and you refuse to give me any reason to believe otherwise.   Now I'm off to feed my parakeet. 

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Who said there have to be natural rights?

Who said there should be mathematics?  No one legislated them into being, they were discovered as humans attempted to pursue their self-instinct (whether on an instinctive or rational level), and it has been proven over and over again that trying to build a hut or a warp drive under a faulty understanding of mathematics puts you at a relative competitive disadvantage.  Your existence on this planet is a consequence of the human civilization achieving a certain understanding of mathematics - without them life was nasty, brutish, and short for the very small number of cavemen this earth can support.

The same also applies to Natural Law - societies that violate it the least have an evolutionary advantage over ones that don't.  History and modern econometrics can be used as a guide to measuring different theories about Natural Law, but it's not a perfect experiment of cultures in a petri dish, so some deductive reasoning is helpful as well.

It is clear, however, that a society which tolerates murder, theft, rape, etc simply cannot build the level of civilization that we already have today, and that we already depend on for survival.  If magically theft and murder became acceptable, civilization would collapse back to an earlier era of pre-agricultural hunting and gathering, which means a massive famine, disease, etc - the odds of you being born at all, much less surviving in your present state, become astronomically small.  Natural Law is something you are born into, just like you are born into a universe where Pi is greater than 3 and less than 4.

You of course have free will to ignore all natural laws, from mathematical to social, but in both cases there will naturally be consequences, and sufficient violations of those laws are equivalent to suicide.

[...]  what you call natural rights others would call positivism  [...]

Um, wrong again.

Then there are no natural rights then, thanks.

Non-sequitur.

Then justify the argument against owning pets without falling for the faulty notions you've prescribed (hint: they're not related at all to rights).

Yes, we have two debates going on in parallel here.

One is me disproving any notion of "animal rights" - leave Brian Travis and Michael Vick alone (and I don't mean to equate the two), legalize dog meat, stop fining people over animal issues, that sort of thing.  It is based on the simple economic fact that attributing arbitrary rights to animals, gods, and other things in reality only violates the Natural Rights of real "rational economic actors", that is human beings.  Many Buddhist cultures failed to develop economically because they didn't want to hurt earthworms while tilling the soil.  A modern society that restricts animal experimentation will have a severe scientific disadvantage resulting in lower quality of life and lower life expectancy for human beings.  And if you have the "right" to force others to follow your subjective rules on how animals should be treated, why can't someone else force you to pray to Allah five times a day?  You get the idea.

The second debate, which is the main point of this specific thread, looks deeper at the source of the "animal rights" delusion at how human beings condition themselves and their children from birth to elevate animals to a human level.  Just like addiction to narcotics or artificial electric stimulation of the brain, addition to pets is a serious moral flaw that the modern suffers from, and it needs to be exposed as such.  Putting dumb helpless animals into a family where they fulfill the role of children (as opposed to being used as guard dogs, food livestock, etc) is unnatural and harmful to the human needs of the family.

The money, time, and most importantly emotional energy that a person spends on a pet is inevitably taken away from another human being.  I might not be a world-class programmer today if my parents had gotten me a kitten instead of a lego set (a very difficult thing to acquire in Russia at the time) when I was a kid.  I know plenty of people who waste so much "love" on their pets they could have adopted several undernourished human orphans for whom that love would make the difference between life and death, between first-world economic opportunity and third-world squalor...  Etc.

Pet ownership might just be a "gateway drug" to the "animal rights" insanity, but that is a sufficient reason to call it immoral.

[...]  Now I'm off to feed my parakeet.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a correlation between the nasty treatment I've received from the various forum members here (i.e. their irrationality) and their attachment to their pets.  I know John Shaw has half-dozen cats, for example... 

[The ghost of a ghost of a ghost]

Hmm, I wonder if there's a correlation between the nasty treatment I've received from the various forum members here (i.e. their irrationality) and their attachment to their pets.  I know John Shaw has half-dozen cats, for example... 

Hmm.... I know there is correlation that people indifferent to the suffering of animals especially ones that like to torture them have a much higher propensity to end up being loner sociopaths.
Does the act of "persuading others to frown upon pet ownership fall under this category?  Probably not. 
Just saying.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

I'm not saying that pet-torturing freaks shouldn't be ostracized, but at least they're doing what (pre)human beings have done for millions of years to aid their survival.  Even domesticated cats will torture the mice they capture for their own amusement, which probably sharpens their hunter instincts in the process.

Getting emotional enjoyment out of animals is sick one way or the other.  By elevating animals to a human level -- no matter if it's as a family member or as an opponent in battle -- you bring humanity down to a lower evolutionary level.  Slaying monster trolls in the holodeck is far more civilized. 

[Rillion]

Hmm, I wonder if there's a correlation between the nasty treatment I've received from the various forum members here (i.e. their irrationality) and their attachment to their pets.  I know John Shaw has half-dozen cats, for example... 

No, it couldn't possibly be that you're telling people that something they enjoy means they're sick for no reason that you can demonstrate or explain, and they recognize and mock the absurdity of it.  Nevah.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

I've explained my position numerous times above.  Your failure to comprehend it is entirely your own.

[Brooklyn Red Leg]

And here I was thinking Libman had turned over a new leaf. Stupid me.