disdainfullyyours asked: sorry for being ignorant, but what IS a factor in morality, and therefore rights, if not the sentience of the being?
Don’t apologize. As long as you’re still willing to learn, you’re still miles ahead of most people.
I’ve written about it before if you need me to go from the beginning, but for now I’ll stick to the brass tacks.
Rights come from rationality. That’s not to be confused with emotions or consciousness or the ability to feel pain—but rationality. The ability to reason. The ability to perceive the world around us and not just identify it, but to understand what it is. And when it comes to the Living World, human beings are the only rational creatures on the block. The only ones. We are the only ones with rights—with a “dignity” that is capable of being morally infringed. (And please, spare me the “plenty of humans are irrational” argument. It’s nonsense. There are plenty of humans who act in an irrational fashion. That does not make them non-rational beings.)
Humankind transcended the animal kingdom—because we ceased to be bound by the natural world. We can do better. Instead of the letting the world define our parameters, we defined our own parameters for the world. We don’t have full control yet—like, we can’t stop a hurricane (yet!) but our crops aren’t dependent on the rain for water, our homes aren’t dependent on the sun for heat, etc etc. Animals can be trained and domesticated—but that’s only thanks to our intervention. Plants can be grown in an underground lab, devoid of sunlight or natural air, because we can control its atmosphere. And that—all of it—is thanks to our rational capacity. A capacity that every other creature on this planet lacks.
