Zoophilia/Bestiality should be legal and is not inherently immoral

"Animals cannot testify. The only way to be make reasonably sure that no animal is raped and someone legally gets away with it is to have a blanket ban. " I have heard this argument before, let me start off by ceding one of your premises at least. Animals can't talk, making it exceedingly difficult to obtain after the fact reports on anything they may experience or see. However that is about all I will cede. Your other premise is false and by the time it is resolved to a reasonable true premise it no longer functions in your argument. This premise is: we can make reasonably sure that no animal is raped and someone legally gets away with it. Unless by 'legally get away' you mean being found not guilty, no one ever legally gets away with a crime. If evidence beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be provided for any reason the person is innocent since they are innocent until proven guilty. The fact that guilty men go free is not proof that the law is insufficient or even the police force. It must be admitted that in an imperfect world there is simply not enough evidence to convict every criminal. This is true not just of animal rape but animal sex, I guarantee you can't prove that 99% of the human animal sex that has occurred in the past year ever happened. If 'legally getting away' means being found not guilty of animal rape (and all sex is classified as rape) then people are and will continue to be 'legally getting away' no matter how illegal bestiality gets. The idea that any society can be reasonably sure animal rape, animal sex, or any other crime under the sun does not occur is flawed because no matter how stringent the law it cannot produce evidence or alter the burden of proof. However I am far more interested in the third premise you did not explicitly specify, that is: If for some reason it is too hard to find the evidence needed to convict a criminal, the law should be altered or extended in order to criminalize more than it did before. Now this very well can affect the conviction rate for a certain crime, but only in so far as proving the previously non-criminal but related act is easier. I’ll use an example with your standard human sex. Say someone isn’t satisfied with what they perceive to be the number of rapist who haven’t been convicted. They think that the law is letting them off because in cases of ‘he said vs she said’ it convicts no one since that is not proof beyond reasonable doubt. Their proposed solution is to put a blanket ban on sex without signing consent waivers and having a camera record the event. This most certainly would solve the ‘he said she said’ cases and would probably reduce at least some kinds of rape. But does that alone justify it? I say it does not. Coming from the perspective of objective liberal ethics everything that is not immoral i. e. right-violating is itself a right. Therefore since sex between consenting adults is not immoral, it is a right. If it is a right, it cannot be contingent on any duty, such a duty would make it a privilege extended by the party demanding the duty. Therefore it is not just your right to have sex with a camera watching you, but to have sex without a camera as well. On the grounds of practicality every right can be trampled on, and if that is an acceptable mode of operation for a government I don’t see much point in governments. So while I cede that it would be easier to find evidence against a human rapist than an animal rapist (all else being equal) I reject the notion that it is proper to make a moral act illegal in the hopes of catching some immoral acts in the net. What you have essentially done here is say that even if an animal has not been raped, imprisoning someone and taking an animal out of a loving environment is the price ‘we’ have to pay in order to catch more real rapist. It is not a price I would pay, it is not an exchange you are qualified to evaluate unless the only one whom you are claiming should go to jail for doing nothing wrong is yourself. There are two separate problems here, what is wrong and should be punished, and how you prove that someone did something wrong. Conflating them is unjust and can only punish guilt more effectively at the expense of punishing innocence as well. Something legal tradition and the spirit of rational liberalism has been rejecting for hundreds of years. I’d also like to make another point, animal’s inability to report on past events is not limited to sex, but includes everything. They cannot tell you if they’ve been beaten, if they’ve been forced to stay somewhere very uncomfortable, if they’ve not been given enough food. If it is proper to ban sex because animals can’t tell you if they’ve been raped, why is it not also proper to ban having animals left alone with humans since they cannot report these abuses? It is the same situation, it is far easier to abuse an animal and not get caught than abuse a human; and the punishments are less steep to boot. If preventing the general class of interaction is the solution to lightening the state’s burden of proof then why not outlaw owning pets? “There is a specific instance, based on a doctrine of harm, where murder would be ethical. ” I must not subscribe to the ‘doctrine of harm’ because there is no such instance in my book. The only killing I support doesn’t fall under my definition of murder. Same deal for the law, there is no permitted murder, just permitted killing. “Should we then legalize murder? ” If there was even one instance of moral murder, then yes that proves the quality (element of definition) that makes something murder is not immoral. Therefore murder qua murder should be legal. “Clearly, we must keep in mind the results legalizing something has on the people as a whole. ” . . in order to minimize negative results, not to change our minds about legalizing or banning it. “Obviously, some people below that age limit have the emotional maturity of someone above it, but that is where we as a society have decided that there are too many people not emotionally mature below the line, and if we raised it above that we'd be harming many people. ” Yes the age of legal consent is arbitrary, and it does deprive those under and above it of freedom. But it just so happens I am not a fan of that idea either. I think a more objective system should exist, a test of sorts would be better than a hard coded age. At the end of the day I think the process of growing up is an exception to the standard rules of individual liberty because parents or legal guardians have a duty to protect children even from themselves. If and when both child and guardian agree that duty is void and the process of maturation is over the ‘child’ should be given the full rights and responsibilities of a human individual including the right to consent. I see an arbitrary legal age or arbitrary test of maturity as simply the cut-off point so neither guardians nor their wards can hang on forever as that would be unfair to the other. I do not see it necessarily as a society illegalizing something moral for the sake of preventing harm. “The same applies to zoophilia. Legalizing zoophilia is extremely risky, and will lead to it being pretty much impossible to prosecute people who rape animals, or drug animals to have sex with them, because people are proven innocent until guilty. ” That’s right people are innocent until proven guilty. .. and I say if they’re innocent of raping animals until proven guilty; that’s damn well what the law should say. Not “oh I don’t want to give you the benefit of the doubt because it would be too hard to prove you guilty”. Note: drugs can be detected via medical tests. “So until we in the ability to talk to animals (if that's possible), the solution that has the least harm associated with it would be to use drawn imagery. ” (1) First off I am very interested in the study of animal communication (for obvious reasons) and I have come to the inevitable conclusion that for the vast majority of animals there is no advanced communications to intercept. What we see and hear is the best they’ve got. Scent is a common communicator of state information but it is almost certainly involuntarily sent and at best is analogous to facial expressions. In other words the animated children’s movies with talking animals that just can’t understand humans is fiction. There is no reason to believe that domesticated animals communicate any better with each other than they do with us. As they learn our tones and body language so we can learn theirs and animal owners do this almost unconsciously everyday. There are some exceptions, but in those cases it’s quite obvious that we are out of the loop; cetaceans for instance. (2) Keeping 1. In mind, if avoiding the harm of animal rape is the goal, then what of all the breeding programs in the world? Surely if sex is so risky the biggest source is in an animal’s own species? Ah but this is not considered because that is supposed to be natural right? Can’t keep animals from having sex with each other or there won’t be anymore. So do you see that as a necessary evil or do you think that animals mostly aren’t harmed by sex within their own species? (3) Finally I couldn’t understand ‘drawn imagery’ in context.