Monkeys should be considered persons

I now agree with what you are saying about people and humans. For all the places you stated human, you should change it to persons, as well as inserting an extra premise in which you define a person. I agree that there are some humans in the world that cannot be considered persons, and it is for this reason that I stated that you can not use persons and humans as the same thing, otherwise it would indicate that all humans can be persons, not just that most humans are persons. I now better understand your premises in which you used the word human instead of person. Thank you for clarifying this issue. 2. I am trying to clear up to you that pain doesn"t have to be an emotion. If someone stabs me, I would not say that the pain is only in my head, it is a physical pain. It would be an emotional pain as well if it was one of my friends that stabbed me, but it would primarily a physical pain. Ok, so if you mean to indicate all pain, please switch premise two to something of the effect as follows, "Pain is something that a subject feels when something out of their control affects their feelings." However, stating this still doesn"t agree with me totally, because I also believe that there can be pain in control of a person, if you think of the example of someone cutting their wrists, or something to that affect. Please adjust the premise to reflect this as well. 5./6. If you do not believe that we can kill or harm any animals in any way, how do you say that we wouldn"t all have to be vegetarians? How could we not be vegetarians without killing or harming any animals. I cannot be lead to agree with your argument that all animals should or even do have the same rights as humans. As an example of this, humans have a right not to be killed, unless it is in war or in cases of the death penalty. However, the deer that wander NJ don"t have a right not to be killed, or we would not be able to have hunting. I know many people that hunt deer. If the deer had the same rights as us, we would not be morally allowed to kill them for meat. This is just one example of how animals don"t have the same rights as us, especially in the right to life, and I could think of many more. However, I think that you might have a leg to stand on if you stated that the animal must not feel pain in being harmed. I understand that there are laws against killing certain types of animals, but you do not have any reason or backing to state that all animals have the same rights as humans to not be killed or harmed. 9. I cannot agree with your statement, because there is no reason for me to believe that animals have the same value as humans. I could bring in a lot on morality, and the fact that humans have cognition, thought, feeling and independence, which animals do not have, as far as has been scientifically proved. These factors alone in humans would lead me to believe that humans are much more valuable than humans. Unless you have a way to prove that animals do actually have the same value as humans, I will have to completely discard this premise. 10. I don"t think that your argument for this has standing. Because you say that all animals have the same value and rights as us as people, I am still inclined to state that you cannot say that we can still eat meat. If you told me that I couldn"t harm any animals, I would immediately believe that I would not be able to kill any animals for meat. If there was a way that you could show me that I would be able to eat meat without an animal being harmed, then I would understand. You could tell me that we could eat animals that were already dead, but if animals have the same rights as humans, don"t animals deserve a proper burial instead of being eaten? If a human dies, we bury him or her, or cremate them or whatever the family choses, but it would be a total violation of the person"s rights to eat them. However, you are saying that animals have the same rights as us, so we cannot logically eat animals then either.