| | RM: you've as much as said you eat domesticated animals and not non... do you, then, confer 'rights' to non-domesticated animals?
Deer are not domesticated. Elephants are. Domestication is not my standard. It does seem indicative that the ability to domesticate animal may have something to do with some interaction of intelligence and temperment. Hunters -- cats; sharks -- are somewhat harder to domesticate. However, I've eaten shark, though never cat.
Like "red, crimson, ocre, scarlet, vermillion" the problem may be a continuum and for perhaps a better (or at least another) analogy, there is the box of 64 crayons with red, red-orange, orange-red, and orange. And if you are deft, you can blend them. So, as to which animals I eat and which I do not, that might be subjective to me, or perhaps we can discover some objective standard.
As for rights, that is a different question entirely. I understand the usual argument that man by his nature requires rights in order to live in society. Crusoe on an island has no need of rights. Social context requires them. Rights are held by rational, volitional sapient, conceptual beings in order that they may have praxeological freedom (human action) in a social context. It may be that you have rights without being self-conscious or self-aware, simply by being conceptual.
Also, I am not sure that "volitional" and "rational" are the same thing. I just went through a song and dance with the three cats who have captured us. Two wanted to go out after breakfast, the third waited for them to leave before she asked for breakfast. Of the two outside, the younger female asks to come back in, whereas the older male is often content to sit on a chair in the garage and wait. Those all seem to be volitional intentions to me. However, I cannot say that I can beat them at chess because I cannot even get them to play chess. So, they probably are not rational -- though, indeed, they are self-interested, unlike dogs who are genetic altruists.
So, basically, as ethics depends on epistemology, I just wanted to nail down some definitions.
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