Bestiality should be illegal in all cases in the United States

Remember, Pro has accepted the burden of proof. Last round, Pro completely fails to justify bestiality"s illegality in all cases. Pro does not offer any example of an ethical system that would justify the adoption of anti-bestiality laws. Pro merely engages in logical fallacies (as I will show). No new arguments in the last round since I do not have a chance to respond. == Rebuttal == Pro divides my round into non-consent arguments and then consent arguments: 1) Non-consent Pro further subdivides this into five categories. I don"t agree that these were the only important categories in my argument, but I will address Pro"s points in order and then say what he missed. ---(R1)--- Rationality is a pre-requisite for having moral rights My source from the previous Round argued that to have rights, one must have the rationality to know that one has the right and to assert the right. In addition, to have rights, one must have a recognized freedom to exercise those rights. Animals lack the rationality to know they have rights and lack the freedom to assert a right to life, liberty, or property (the three basic rights enumerated by John Locke). My opponent"s only response is that animals have legal rights currently in the US. He cites a source linking to the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) of 1966. However: (1) A legal right does not entail a moral right. My opponent never disproves that rationality is a pre-requisite to moral rights. In fact, my opponent never explains why adoption of the AWA was morally justified. The AWA is a bad law that impedes medical research. The ridiculously high cost of compliance with the AWA makes it nearly impossible for research laboratories at major universities to use animals in testing because the cost of running the lab is prohibitive. [1] (2) My opponent is merely engaging in a logical fallacy called an "appeal to tradition." [2] He is saying we should protect animal rights in the current context because we have done so in the past. He doesn"t prove that it is immoral to refuse to protect animal rights. If it"s not immoral to do so, there is no logical justification for protecting animal"s legal rights except "we have always done so" (which is a logical fallacy). ---(R2)--- Animals are not moral agents My opponent"s main argument here is that humans are moral agents and we have a moral obligation to treat the Earth and animals humanely. However: (1) My opponent does not explain where this moral obligation comes from. It is too late to do so in the last Round, when I cannot respond. (2) 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. [3] 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. (3) I, however, offered two ethical systems under which animals are not considered morally considerable beings: social contract theory and utilitarianism. (a) Animals are not part of society nor bound by the social contract (since they can rape and murder without consequence), so they cannot be viewed as being worthy of constraining the actions of humans. Social contract theory says that humans only agree to cede their inherent freedom (that they would have in a state of nature) in exchange for the protection afforded by other people signing up for the social contract. If another does not or cannot agree to the contract, there is no legitimate basis for employing state coercion to prohibit a society member"s behavior [John Stuart Mills]. (b) Under utilitarianism, if animals were morally considerable we could not hunt them, breed them, or eat them. We do all these things. Therefore, under moral relativism, we do not accept in our society that animals are morally considerable beings. Any animal welfare laws we pass are just to make ourselves feel better, but are not based on any actual moral justification. The rest of my opponent"s arguments here are just more appeals to tradition. ---(R3)--- Social contract theory My opponent claims that I do not understand social contract theory, but it is he that does not understand it. Social contract theory attempts to explain the reasons that the State can legitimately exercise its power over individuals. We begin by imagining a state of nature that pre-dates society. "According to Locke, the State of Nature, the natural condition of mankind, is a state of perfect and complete liberty to conduct one"s life as one best sees fit, free from the interference of others." [4] People then agree to give up some of their freedom in order to live in a society. [4] John Stuart Mills argued that the only reason that people give up this freedom is to be protected from being harmed by others. Thus, Mills concluded that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Because animals are not part of the social contract, harm to them is not considered. Because my opponent utterly fails to understand or answer this argument, he loses because it proves that harm to animals is not a moral consideration. The state does not ethically have the power - under the social contract - to proscribe harm to animals. ---(R4)--- We can do what we want to animals because they are not morally considerable (1) Here, my opponent just repeats his appeal to tradition and fails to justify why any of the laws he cites are ethical examples of State-imposed restraints on liberty (under social contract theory and the harm principle). (2) In fact, many of these laws were designed to protect people"s property interest in animals. Animal cruelty laws are usually only enforced when someone unjustifiably harms someone else"s pet or livestock. This means that these laws merely support the view that animals are property, not morally considerable beings. ---(R5)--- Animals rape each other so who cares if a human rapes an animal ==>(A) My opponent claims that animal sex organs don"t match those of humans, so they are harmed physically However, as philosopher Peter Singer explains, the vaginas of most mammals are very similar in structure to those of a human female. [5] There is no evidence that bestiality causes any permanent physical harm to animals. In addition, it seems silly to object to minor vaginal abrasions when we can kill animals for pleasure [hunting]. Raping an animal for pleasure seems much less harmful than death. Somewhere later in the Round, my opponent cites two sources (#9 and #10) that purport to show that animals were physically harmed by bestiality. However, both sources merely provide statistics for how often bestiality has occurred. They say nothing about physical harm. Dock my opponent "sources" for trying to pull a fast one. ==>(B) My opponent claims that animals are harmed psychologically by rape (1) However, his source #5 doesn"t say this. In fact, the study did not even look at animals. It"s just a study of juvenile offenders who had sex with animals. It talks about how some of these juveniles were emotionally abused as children. But it never talks about whether the animals had psychological problems. Dock my opponent "sources" for trying to pull a fast one. (2) There is reason to believe that animals are not psychologically harmed by sex with humans. Many animals (such as ducks) are raped all the time by others of their species. This is a normal form of reproduction in the wild. Animals do not have the same complex psychologies as humans, and often do not attach the same emotional significance to sex. Our emotional attachments from sex stem from our pair bonding instincts, but most animals do not form long term pair bonds in the wild. For this reason, their bodies do not secrete the pair bonding hormones during sex that create long-term emotional attachments. So even if harm to animals were considered under utilitarianism, the balance would still come out in favor of allowing bestiality because there is little to no lasting psychological or physical harm from the sex. ---(*)--- Things my opponent missed under non-consent My opponent completely drops the utilitarianism argument. This argument proved that harm to animals cannot be considered in the utilitarian calculation or else we would not be able to hunt, breed, or eat animals. My opponent has no response. Until we also ban those practices, we cannot adopt an ethical system that considers harm to animals as morally considerable. Therefore, harm to animals is morally irrelevant in our society. My opponent also drops that in the utilitarian calculation, the detriments of banning bestiality outweigh the benefits. 8% of American men admit to having had sex with animals at least once in their lives. [5] The cost of incarcerating everyone who has engaged in bestiality would cost $5.4 trillion. My opponent drops this argument; don"t let him respond in the last Round, when I can"t respond to his response. In addition, my opponent drops the argument that if someone is desperate enough to rape a sheep, the same person may be desperate enough to rape a human if both acts carried the same penalty. At least if people take out their sexual frustrations on animals, humans aren"t harmed. Due to both the cost and the potential for increased rapes on humans, the utilitarian calculation proves that bestiality should not be banned. In sum, the only possible justification for an anti-bestiality law is morality. Yet my opponent fails to provide any ethical system that would mandate a bestiality law, and he fails to even refute the ethical systems that I offer - which show that animals cannot possibly be morally considerable beings in our society. Therefore, the morality argument alone is enough for you to Vote Con. 2) Consent My opponent"s only real argument is that "animals don"t know what they are getting themselves into" when they consent. However, see my argument above that animals do not attach the same emotional significance to sex that humans do (because many of them do not have pair bonding). Therefore, my consent argument still stands. My opponent also drops my arguments that very intelligent species, like chimps and possibly aliens, are smart enough to verbally consent and to understand exactly what they are consenting to. My opponent thus fails to prove bestiality should be illegal in all cases. Even if you don"t like this argument, my opponent dropped it so you have to vote on it. 3) Impossible to enforce It is impossible to enforce a bestiality law without violating the Constitution. People have a right to privacy, and the Supreme Court said in Griswold v. Connecticut and reaffirmed in Lawrence v. Texas that the bedroom is a private place that the State should not be barging into. The Constitution does not allow the law enforcement tactics that would be necessary to enforce bestiality laws because such methods violate the Constitutional right to privacy inherent in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. Therefore, because bestiality laws are unconstitutional, vote Con. [1] http://speakingofresearch.com... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org... [4] http://www.iep.utm.edu... [5] http://web.archive.org...