Resolved: Animal Rights Ought To Be Recognized In Society

Rebuttal 1-Morality A-God Commands It: Why should a society (remember the resolution) accounting for everyone account for God? Not everyone believes in God (about 2 billion by Pro’s count), and that’s not even counting those who do, but don’t believe he has a moral code. B-Happiness Requires It: My rebuttal stands completely, I’ll repost it:“Pro’s argument here essentially boils down to the fact that moral actors are happier and those who act immoral are less happier. However, Pro offers no scientific support for this in his argument and a moral nihilist or even an egoist would have no reason to feel this way. If I (as a nihilist) don’t believe morals exist, then it’d be impossible for me to feel bad for not following someone’s made up moral law. As an egoist, I would never purposefully commit an act that would cause me to be unhappy in the first place, it wouldn’t be in my interest to do something to make me feel bad. Also, let’s link back to the topic at hand, animal rights. One can easily live a happy life and even moral one (by their own standards or understandings) by living a life that violates animal rights. The way Pro’s arguing would have it that anyone who has ever killed or led to the death knowingly of an animal, for any reason, cannot be truly or fully happy. The idea of this is virtually impossible. Essentially, not everyone believes in animal rights, so not everyone can feel less happy by violating them. Since a society accounts for a whole group of people, not everyone can feel unhappy by violating animal rights.” As for Pro’s framework, it is utterly ridiculous. It starts off with a false dichotomy, stating that if animal rights is not honoured, animals will go extinct. No egoist would kill animals absolutely essential to human survival, seeing as it would kill him/her off. Not to mention, even though egoists may try to protect some animals, they’re not giving them rights. If circumstances change or they find a reason important enough to kill one, they still will. Also, termites don’t have any rights now (in fact, humans often try to kill them), but they’re not close to extinction (and reproduce very quickly), so that also disproves Pro’s false dichotomy. (1, 2) C-Acting Immorally is Irrational: Pro lies here and should be stripped of his conduct point.. His only real response to my rebuttal was that he “specifically said: a moralist.” This is completely untrue. He said “amoralist”, which is completely different. Amorality is disregarding morality. (3) Due to this my argument stands. Egoism: This response is why Pro lost the debate. He says his framework address anything regarding egoism, essentially conceding to the viewpoint. I explained the benefits of egoism, which Pro had no real response to, thereby dropping the argument. Seeing as I rebutted his arguments for morality, and my argument for egoism stood, regardless of what else happens, I’ve won the debate. However, I’ll respond to the rest anyways. Rebuttal 2- Needless Suffering: Pro starts off criticizing me for not using a source. However, what I stated was common sense. “It cannot be needless, since they feel it is needed or wanted”. This statement is impossible to deny. If someone does something by their own free will, they chose to do so, therefore they felt what they were doing is needed or wanted. Even if someone holds a gun to their head and tells them to shoot someone, and they do it, they still wanted to (since the alternative was dying). Pro rejects my definition, but it doesn’t really matter, since he never brought in his own definition. This whole argument will come down to who the voters thought won the moral framework. Rebuttal 3-Responsibility: Pro never seemed to bother reading what I had to say. I’ll post it for the 3rd time and break it down: “Pro actually does explain his argument here (compassion>selfishness), by saying that love towards humans and animals is better than selfishness, based on scientific findings. He presents a correlation that, “compassion and love is positively correlated with happiness and healthiness”. Just because a correlation exists doesn’t mean that the cause is due to that. Plus, none of his sources even mention compassion towards animals. For all we know, this only applies to humans.” I start off saying a correlation, is not evidence in of itself. Pro offered no rebuttal. I then say that his sources refer to compassion towards animals. Since he never showed anything to suggest it applies to animals, it cannot factor into the debate. Argument 1-Dead and Exploited Animals Are Useful: Pro introduces a definition for exploited. The fact is, killing anything is unfair to the thing being killed. A deer being killed because a human is starving could care less that the human is starving. The deer is living its own life, but has it suddenly ended. This isn’t fair at all. Also, it still violates the definition of animal rights, seeing as it puts them through abuse (pain associated with dying). In the same way, a mouse who dies to help cure a disease killing a lot of humans could care less that its death would help a bunch of humans survive. Also, Pro seemed to completely forget what the debate was about. My argument depend on egoism and I’m arguing a society should be egoistic (regarding animal rights). Obviously I’m going to argue what an egoistic society would do. Argument 2-Impossible Without Going Extinct I’ll just repost part of what I put last round, since Pro made no effort to rebut it:“Pro also posts blatant anti-science by saying that, “however, these are not essential nutrients since otherwise vegetarians and vegans would not exist.” This isn’t true, certain nutrients only found naturally in animals (such as vitamin B-12) are essential. (2, last round) Most vegetarians and vegans supplement this, but it is unrealistic to expect everyone in the world to do this. As for my other argument in this argument (which was dropped). I’ll repost the main part of it, “Plus, with more farmland not only do animals lose their habitats (almost defeating the purpose) they are also killed in clearing the land.” (5, last round) To meet food demands in a post-meat world a lot more farmland would need to be cleared for it to realistically occur. However, that would kill animals and take their habitats, so that’s definitely violating animal rights. This means that for humans to meet food demands, they’d need to go to the wild to find them. However, they cannot kill animals so they are at risk of being killed by them and are less able to gather food (seeing as you’re eliminating a major food source).” 1-http://www.wikihow.com... 2-https://en.wikipedia.org... 3-https://en.wikipedia.org...