Bestiality should be illegal

Firstly, please stop taking my words out of context. Often, when you read the whole paragraph you find I was referring to something else, or quickly followed up with an explanation that made my claim more reasonable or identified exceptions. Much of your Round 4 argument rests on the incorrect assumption that I called my standards for positing that rape should be illegal subjective. This is patently inaccurate. Reading the quote in full context reveals that "these standards" I was referring to were legal standards; I was describing a legal perception of magnitude. Since the parameters of the debate involved no pre-existing legal standards, I assumed it should be obvious to everyone that in the context of this debate, all legal standards are subjective. What I did not expect was that you expected me to make objective arguments to support subjective legal standards.Additionally, you ended on another mistaken note by saying, "You have equally established that they are incapable of consenting in law to sex with other animals", then proceeded to make ridiculous statements based on that foolish premise. I said exactly the opposite. I said: "Surely animals can consent to sex within their own species. Whether or not they can consent to sex outside of their species is irrelevant to the debate, with the exception of the human species." I really have no idea how this can be interpreted to mean that I think breeding programs are organized rape. It may surprise you to learn that a "species" is biologically defined by its inability to produce fertile offspring with partners not in its species.I am not interested in what the voters think, or whatever emotionally driven judgment you accuse them of. I'm not asking for their sympathy for my plight at your "unfair" demands, I'm interested in losing this debate to a lesser extent than you did – or winning to a greater extent than you did – based on the power of logical reasoning alone. I was perfectly aware of the parameters of the debate when I entered into it, although I was perhaps surprised by how literally you planned to pursue certain aspects. I have always respected the preconditions you set for this debate, even when I disagreed with some extensions of those preconditions.Perhaps you're right in assuming that it is impossible for me to uphold my BoP – but at least I tried bringing reasonable and insightful arguments to the table to support my views, instead of pecking at feeble strawmen. Thus, I shall devote my remaining characters to attempting to objectively, by the parameters of this debate, defend the premise that rape should be illegal. We shall see whether I am able to make a strong case for my perspective. Again, my position remains that animals are incapable of consenting to sex with humans, and thus bestiality is rape, and should be illegal. Thank you for an interesting debate :) May the best arguments win.I will place my objective argument on a neurological basis, though I will oversimplify for clarity. Animal brains are equipped with pain receptors. Injury – for instance, a cut or burn wound – results in suffering in order to discourage the animal from repeating behavior which resulted in the injury, such as stepping on glass or touching fire. While unpleasant, the biological purpose of suffering is self-preservation, giving the organism a better chance at survival, and survival is the ultimate biological aspiration of all life. Activities that benefit survival or perpetuation of genes, among them intraspecific sex and eating, are "rewarded" with pleasant sensations to encourage such behavior. The natural "goal" of life is the perpetuation of life, through both the survival and reproduction of the individual. All actions and experiences either improve the chances of survival and/or reproduction – in essence, work constructively towards life – and are biologically pleasurable, or reduce the chances of survival and/or reproduction – in essence, work destructively against life – and are biologically painful. When deciding what we humans in a society should and should not do, for the purpose of furthering not only the survival of our own species, but all life, surely this objective principle of construction vs. destruction could be a reliable consideration when law and ethics fail us. As members of living things on the planet, rationally speaking we should minimize unnecessary destruction against all living things to ensure maximum survival and minimum suffering, for the best interest of our own survival.Why needlessly induce suffering in an animal that cannot defend itself against the harm? This is not a constructive action. Trauma, both physical and emotional, is suffering, and thus biological destruction. There is no objective net biological benefit which arises from rape [1], only biological trauma, i.e. destruction. When the tiger mauls the antelope, the victim is also subject to great pain, but as it is necessary for the tiger's survival and thus the survival of the tiger's offspring, it is both a destructive and constructive act. Rape is not necessary for the rapist's survival, nor is it biologically constructive: social psychologists share a consensus that human rape is about (a) anger or (b) power, not pleasure or procreation [2], and interspecific rape is certainly not about reproduction. The destruction of inflicting harm on a living thing for no constructive purpose hurts the chances of survival of all living things, and as such should be avoided on the grounds that we humans, as living things, should act in favor of our own survival.This is not to say that evolutionary or natural selection principles should be applied to human society; that is social Darwinism and it is deeply flawed because it assumes that our culture's goal is survival of the most powerful individuals, when really a humanist philosophy which embraces the rights and freedoms of all humans works in tandem with the objective argument that, as a society, we should maximize life and minimize suffering, which would certainly discourage slavery and genocide, among other grievous human rights abuses. There is a sound biological basis for objecting to rape and other destructive violence, namely the insistence that life forms (such as humans) exhibiting purely destructive behavior against other life forms is destructive to life as a whole, and thus self-destructive and counter-productive to our collective survival. [1] http://www.academia.edu...[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...Since I still have some characters left I might as well delve more into the question of whether animals are capable of consenting to sex with humans, since you continue to express skepticism about this rather well-supported premise. I have already mentioned two central aspects of the mental flexibility which makes humans a unique animal species, namely recursive recall: the ability to string thoughts together into a stream of potentially abstract or imaginative thought, and contextual focus: the capacity to shift between a minimally contextual analytic mode of thought, and a highly contextual associative mode of thought, conducive to combining concepts in new ways. http://users.on.net.... I consider both highly relevant to my argument that humans are capable of far more sophisticated levels of cognitive thinking and decision-making, which animals cannot mentally match.Furthermore, Marc Hauser, director of the cognitive evolution lab at Harvard University, published that "mounting evidence indicates that, in contrast to Darwin's theory of a continuity of mind between humans and other species, a profound gap separates our intellect from the animal kind." "Hauser and his colleagues have identified four abilities of the human mind that they believe to be the essence of our [unique] mental traits and abilities that distinguish us from [other animals]." http://www.livescience.com...These are (1) generative computation, (2) promiscuous combination of ideas, (3) mental symbols, and (4) abstract thought, all of which are exclusively human mental faculties. "This is not to say that our mental faculties sprang fully formed out of nowhere," Hauser wrote. "Researchers have found some of the building blocks of human cognition in other species. But these building blocks make up only the cement foot print of the skyscraper that is the human mind." We cannot equate the decisions made by a human mind with the decisions made by a non-human animal mind. This is not to say that animals are inferior in all forms of thinking or perception, it is to say that the cognitive abilities essential for consent – abilities undeveloped or impaired in children and drunk adults – require certain mental functions that animals factually, biologically, objectively, do not possess.Animals do not have the mental faculties necessary to consent to the extent that a human can. Again, if you wish to make bestiality illegal, whether or not you agree with the law, you must argue that bestiality meets the law's non-rape standards, and this includes the animal's capacity to consent in law. This capacity is nonexistent. Therefore, bestiality is, legally speaking, rape, and rape should be illegal. Thank you :)