I'm against legalizing bestiality because the animal consent problem hasn't been solved, but probably actually will be quite soon thanks to Al (at least for the higher animals with complex languages). So why not wait a few more years. I don't see disgust as a good reason. It was an evolutionary adaptation of the agricultural era against the spread of zoonotic illnesses, but technology will soon make that entirely irrelevant as well.
There's no animal I'm aware of that has a mental capacity beyond that of a child. We don't think children are capable of giving consent - are we clearing the way to legalise paedophilia too, or are there animals with the mental capacity to provide informed consent that only lack the ability to communicate that consent?
Spoiler: It's not a communication issue. If this technocratic psycho was more concerned with actually contemplating the morality of the question, and less focused on rearranging the insides of a parrot, his takes might be a little less monstrous.
If this technocratic psycho was more concerned with actually contemplating the morality of the question, and less focused on rearranging the insides of a parrot, his takes might be a little less monstrous.
It's always funny realizing those who think they're asking the tough questions that others aren't smart enough to consider only ever talk about the same handful of topics: putting down minorities, advocating white supremacy, whining about anyone to the left of Pinochet and fucking animals/kids.
Like that's 95% of the content on the Motte or "I"DW.
A bit of a tangent but I loathe the Chesterton's fence argument. Not only does it shift the burden of proof to proving a negative ("show me this thing is not actually beneficial") but it straight up demands you to make the conservative argument for them. Before you get rid of this bad thing, please demonstrate your understanding of why it's good actually!
Kinda makes you wonder what they'd be capable of if they stopped spending all their time whining that they can't say the thing they never fucking shut up about.
I don't want to endorse dolphin fucking or whatever but idk if we can necessarily very accurately map non human intelligence onto stages of human intelligence development. Like human children can idk stack blocks but they're also very emotionally volatile and forgetful. Whales can't stack blocks but they have a lot of emotional stability, good memories, and large stable social groups. How do you map between that? They're not human.
In some ways non human animals appear very similar, especially other mammals and their social relationships and emotions. In other ways they appear very different. They're their own thing and I think overly simplifying their minds by trying to work out some human age equivalent will just mislead us. It's not like a pig that can do calculus would suddenly become a reasonable romantic partner haha.
Philosophical question: if brutally torturing and murdering billions of animals is fine, why do we draw the line at sex? I’m a vegetarian and have never ideated it, but the position is untenable.
edit: What I’m saying is apparently nobody gives a fuck about consent when we’re talking about putting intelligent beings in a box barely bigger than themselves and feeding them slop until we think they’re overweight enough to unceremoniously dump dozens at a time into a gas chamber where we choke them while they’re conscious. But now that wieners are involved we’re suddenly holier than thou? Come on.
I think your framing is flawed (I don't think it's an issue of consent so much as it's an issue of creating animal suffering for personal benefit), but I broadly agree - I personally get past the hypocrisy because I have no interest in fucking animals, and push the suffering I cause by eating animal products to the back of my mind and pretending it's not a thing. Responsibility is also meaningfully abstracted in the food example, making it far easier to pretend you're not at fault compared to having a chicken impaled on your dick.
In a similar way, people consuming products made in sweatshops and people downloading CSA material are both exploiting children.