Bestiality should be illegal in all cases in the United States

In her ROUND 3 response, my opponent makes the following statement, in defense of moral nihilism - the view that nothing is inherently right or wrong, that anything can be and is fundamentally permissable in the world of natural/cosmic interactions [1]:"My opponent just makes a bare assertion that we have a moral obligation to safeguard animals. I could just as easily assert that Moral Nihilism is true. The theory of Expressivism states that when people claim something is 'immoral,' they are just stating their personal feelings on the subject. Their views have no objective basis and therefore have no power to bind the actions of others. My opponent fails to offer any ethical system to disprove Nihilism, which is the default position if no ethical system is offered."But if she's going to argue this, then why have laws at all? Here again she doesn't seem to grasp the very philosophy she's using to defend her own position. Moral nihilism asserts that everything is fundamentally permitted in the world, and this implies that humans don't have rights, that rules can be broken whenever and for whatever reasons. Why even bother establishing a society consisting of laws and order? Moral nihilism is the position that everything is permissible, simply because it can happen...it is a position that defends every possible reckless entropy within human society and interaction, since there is no objective basis for anything, which it asserts [1].She's incorrectly applying moral nihilism, by saying that humans have rights but animals do not. Moral nihilism asserts that neither human nor animal have an objective foundation for morality and rights! Anything and everything goes; to put it bluntly, she had better be prepared to extend the implications of moral nihilism to her own rights just as much as she's applying them to animal rights (which she claims have "no objective basis" [2]).Well, human rights are not objective either. They are exclusively subjective.But the social theorist John Stuart Mill solved this problem for us. My opponent cites him as a source in ROUND 3, but once again it doesn't appear she fully comprehends what's being said. Here I'm going to repost what my opponent stated in her quote above:"The theory of Expressivism states that when people claim something is 'immoral,' they are just stating their personal feelings on the subject. Their views have no objective basis and therefore have no power to bind the actions of others."But for John Stuart Mill emotions were everything; they were the bedrock of morality and of social order in the world. John Stuart Mill was a founder and contributer of Utilitarianism, which is summed up in the creed of the Greatest-Happiness Principle:"Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the...[prohibition] of pleasure" [3].To John Stuart Mill and in the philosophy of Utilitarianism moral rightness is decided, not by an objective quality, which Mill believed was impossible to establish on this topic, but by the feelings conjured by an action. If an action inflicted more pain upon a person or a group than it did pleasure, it was wrong; if an action provided more happiness to an individual or a group than it did pain, it was right [3]. Moral rightness then is decided by the Greatest-Happiness Principle, and this is the foundation stone of modern Utilitarianism.Human Rights exist because they provide people interacting within a community with safeguards and legal protections from harmful, unwanted abuse. Public laws exist because they impose a structured order necessary to optimize the quality of life in a community - but also to eliminate or reduce gratuitous pain and harm.John Stuart Mill elucidated that it's our wants, our feelings, our will to optimize the quality of life and increase social happiness that drives us to establish rights and to enact laws. What we want collectively and what we feel with respect to actions determines morality [4]. Using this justification he went on to denounce slavery and endorse complete human rights for the slave and he also championed women's issues and womans rights while he lived, which was rare in his time [5].My opponent will also be shocked to learn, since she cites him, that John Stuart Mill was also a fierce advocate of animal rights! In his article In Defense of Bentham (Jeremy Bentham was a popular philosopher of animal rights), Mill argues that the Greatest-Happiness Principle applies to all interactions involving a human and another living thing, human or non-human [6]. Gratuitous (unnecessary) pain is immoral because it simply isn't necessary and it creates more distress on an animal than the situation calls for, even in the act of killing an animal for human consumption. In other words, pain is real for the animal and because it shows an aversion to pain, the distress should be reduced in it as much as possible, if not totally eliminated. The act of inflicting gratuitous pain on the animal Mill calls "animal cruelty" [6].In ROUND 2 my opponent wrongly insisted that humans can do anything they want to animals. I showed that she was in fact wrong. In all 50 U.S. States it is now a felony to egregiously abuse a non-human animal [7]. There are hundreds of laws that restrict human behavior around animals - inside of research laboratories, on farms and slaughter houses, in the wild and inside the home. Laws protecting animals from gratuitous harm, neglect, poaching carry penalties that range from a fine to incarceration. The work of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Peter Singer and literally thousands of concerned Animal Rights supporters have helped to pass federal and state legislation to protect animals from brutal, unnecessary violence and harm.Bestiality, or "sexual assault" on an animal in the legal sphere, is just another unnecessary abuse animals can go without when they interact with humans. As I explained in ROUND 2, most incidences of bestiality are initiated by the human, for the purpose of human pleasure, without regard for the animal, which can be anything from a small bird to a grazing cow. These relationships are fundamentally unequal, however, because the human always has the advantage, due to his intelligence, his power, and because he speaks the same language of the federal and state courts; the animal does not. There is no confident way to determine that an animal disapproved of being sexually violated once it has happened. For this reason beastiality, which is currently outlawed in 37 states, should be outlawed in all 50 U.S. States!Because an animal cannot of its own freewill file charges against someone who has sexually assaulted it, the country - each state - has a responsibility to protect animals from this degenerate and twisted abuse. No man or woman should have the right to assert him/herself on a less intelligent animal in search of sexual gratification; we do not permit this between adults and children - pedophilia - because we recognize that a child, or a teenager, is less intelligent, less mature, less powerful than a human adult. Even if a child does consent, the human adult will still be prosecuted for taking advantage of the less intelligent, less mature, less cognitively-inclined child. The age of consent in all 50 U.S. States is between 16 and 18 [8] - several years above the age of puberty, when teenagers are already experiencing strong sexual urges. Why is this? Because in the United States consent requires an assumed level of intelligence and the capacity for good judgement; children simply aren't considered smart enough or rational enough to have sex with an adult and it's done to protect them from physical and emotional abuse.Similarly, in the case of beastiality, the animal doesn't have the capacity to say "no" and communicate with certain words that it disaproves of the sex act during or after the fact. Therefore, to protect the animal, 37 U.S. States have passed laws outlawing beastiality completely. It's my contention that all U.S. States should criminalize beastility, to protect animals from sexual opportunists and habitual practitioners of beastility. Animals should not be used as tools to satisfy perverse human fetishes.There are so many other, wonderful, less detrimental ways (to both the animal and the human) for the human to find sexual happiness. And they often involve consensual sex with another human adult.Lastly, no animal on Earth is nearly as intelligent as a human being. For the last 40 years, biologists have been measuring relative animal intelligence using a parameter called the encephalization quotient (or EQ) [9]. The encephalization quotient is used by biologists to estimate the rough intelligence of an animal. Somewhat complicated to obtain, it considers an animal's brain and body mass and allometric effects. The rough intelligence of the animal is computed from the ratio between its actual brain mass and the predicted brain mass it would have if it fit brain-to-body mass trends in nature. The EQ has been found to coincide very well with observed complexity in animal behavior; it is also superior to the simple brain-to-body mass ratio scientists relied on over 50 years ago [9].The chart below shows how humans compare to other species. (Higher values reflect greater intelligence.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org...[2] "Beastility should be illegal in all cases in the United States." Bluesteel, ROUND 3.[3] http://en.wikipedia.org...(book)[4] Heilbroner, Robert L. The Worldly Philosophers. 1966. P. 108.[5] http://en.wikipedia.org...[6] http://www.animal-rights-library.com...[7] http://aldf.org...[8] http://www.ageofconsent.us...[9] http://en.wikipedia.org...