Sex with animals is ethically permissible

I thank Jarhyn for his thoughtful opening statement. In this round, I honestly have more questions than comments or critiques. Hopefully once I get clear on some of these important issues, I'll have more to say. What does it mean that people have value to other people? Does this refer to instrumental or intrinsic value and is everybody just as "ethically valuable" as everybody else? Are you allowing for family members to be more valuable to a person than complete strangers? What does it mean for a being to have ethical value vs. pragmatic value? Is it the case that the former is based on a being's being to be "useful" to persons in general, i.e. to humanity. Or is it that persons can help with survival, which is of the upmost importance? Why game theory? How does game theory represent a satisfactory theory of normative ethics which is preferable to some form of consequentialism or deontological ethics? I only ask because I've never seen someone appeal to game theory in order to justify ethical arguments. It seems to me that if we are both assuming the burden of proof, then any controversial and comprehensive doctrine that you are appealing in order to justify your entire case stands in need of at least some justification. "people have intrinsic value to other people" Don't animals have intrinsic for some people? I honestly do not understand what evolution has to do with ethical arguments. Are you arguing for some kind of maximizing utilitarianism wherein the morally right thing to do is that which results in that which is most optimal according to Darwinian or memetic evolution? Something which I think it is essential to understand is that any claim that you make about animals can equally be made about infants who will die before the age of consent and mentally disabled infants. Let us refer to this category of infants as infants* Like animals they do not"and cannot"contribute useful adaptations in the form of ideas. Infants* also cannot take part in the ethical responsibility that you claim persons can, because, like animals, they cannot and will never be able to "accept or understand freedom from first principles" and so on. If you want to argue for the value of infants* based on the fact that they have family that can grieve if they suffer or are abused, then this will not provide a way of differentiating between animals and infants*, because many people see their pets as children. I still do understand what evolution and surviving planetary events and so on have to do with ethics. I agree that memetic evolution is faster, but so what? Persons can avoid catastrophic disasters and it is certainly in animals' interests if we do so, but it does not follow that it is in their interest for us to treat in any way we seem appropriate. Our ability to keep animals alive does not entail that we may do anything we want with or to them. II.B.2 - by definition infants* will never grow up. You have provided me with no reason to think that animals are ethically any different from infants*. In fact, infants* fail to meet the necessary conditions for being a person as I defined persons in my opening. I also noted that this personhood was a ethical category and you did not seem to disagree. III.A.1-2 - I agree wholeheartedly that people tend to allow horrible things to be done to animals"and some even perform such horrible acts on animals. Initially you phrased this argument in terms of what society allows and I agreed with that. I do not agree that common sense tells us that it is morally permissible to abuse and kill sentient animals. Moreover, even if most people thought that it was morally permissible, I never agreed that we could assume such actions are morally permissible. I personally think that much of this kind of treatment of animals cannot be morally justified and is thus not morally permissible. I am not even a big animal rights activist, but I think philosophers such as Jeff McMahan have made pretty convincing cases against treating animals in certain ways (e.g. eating them). III.B.1 - you know perfectly well that humans do not have to treat sentient animals cruelly in order to raise them for food. Furthermore, we do not need to rely on eating animals for our existence. There are plenty of people who do not eat animals or animal products. Thus, treating animals ethically in this respect does not produce an ethical threat to people. III.B.2 - I am not sure exactly what you mean by imposition, but if you live in many parts of the United States, Canada, or Europe, there is no official imposition on semi-wild animals. There are no squirrel or bear internment camps. If we had to built a fence to prevent foxes from getting into a neighborhood that would be permissible, but we do not need to harm animals in order to impose a bit on them. Furthermore, treating animals ethically does not mean that if a bear tries to maul you, then you have to stand there and take it. If your life is threatened by an animal, you can harm or kill in order to prevent it from harming you. The same holds true for persons. If a person runs at you wielding a large knife, you can shoot that person. However, that does not mean that you can go around shooting random people. III.B - Again, I never agreed that the treatment of animals in the US and parts of Europe was morally permissible. In summation, we are owed an explanation of why animals differ morally from infants*, why game theory is superior to other theories of normative ethics, as well as exactly why do persons have special (ethical) value, i.e. in virtue of what feature or features do persons have ethical value? And, do infants* have this feature or features? I look forward to Jarhyn's response.