That society ought to recognize animal rights

We are all differentMy argument here was that there is no justifiable criteria for distinguishing between animals and humans in ways that are relevant to rights. If we can award rights despite human differences, we can also award rights despite animal differences. My opponent has attempted to argue that the ability to form a contract is a distinguishable criteria. Let me first of all reject the premise that everyone in a given society owes a duty to that society. A newborn infant may not have any understanding of what a "duty" actually is, but they are still considered a part of society in that they still have recognised rights. These same rights are awarded to the intellectually disabled, very elderly and pretty much anything else. Niether does a citizen need to agree with their government for there to be a government, nor a doctor agree with his employer for there to be an employer. It's because I can disagree with somebody in every possible sense of the word and yet feel they are worthy of human rights that human rights cannot be merely contractual. If my opponent wanted a discussion about social contract theory, then I'm afraid this is the wrong debate. The response to this that my opponent used is that they are necessarily contractual because only a contract creates an obligation. While a contract creates a legal obligation, so too do laws, judicial rulings, executive orders and the like. I'm not arguing in this debate that rights derive from any sort of legal obligation, however. I'm arguing that we have a moral obligation to be logically consistant and rational in our awarding of rights. So not only is it not the only source of legal obligation, it's also totally irrelevant to my case. As my opponent agreed in his own definition of obligation, there are other kinds of obligations. I would even go so far as to argue that the concept of a "contract" presupposes the moral obligation to be logically consistant and rational, because without this concept the contract would be meaningless. In addition, on a more moral level, the standard here isn't sufficient for awarding rights. The reason why our society makes these kinds of contracts is to avoid harms, but animals experience these harms too. If there were no harms there would be no contracts, and therefore only an examination of the harms is sufficient (think of the tortured dog I discussed earlier). As it so happens, the harms are the same, and our experience of them is the same. However, let us ignore all that and assume for a moment that I'm wrong about this and that contracts really are the basis for everything in society, including rights. The specifics my opponent has identified for why animals cannot contract is they cannot form one and there is no legal consideration. While inability to form a contract is never a basis for rights (recall my example of torturing a guy after knocking him out), I argue that not all contracts are agreed to explicitly. For instance, by browsing this site you have implicitly agreed to abide by the terms of use. Juggle has not negotiated, in English, an agreement with every user of this site. So speaking English is no requirement for a contract. There is a legal principle in much of the world that both parties need to understand the contract for it to be legal, but animals do understand many obligations. The obligation to not kill each other, for instance, is inherent to all herd or pack based animals. Even if the obligation is only for immediate pleasure, it is still an obligation (although most of the time, animals can actually do things for reasons other than immediate pleasure). Let us come to consideration. First, what is the consideration in human rights? I gain the right not to be killed. The rest of society gains the right to not be killed by me. Now consider animal rights. Animals gain the right not to be killed. I gain the right to not be killed by animals. I know what you're thinking - that's not a benefit because we have that right already, right? I mean, elephants have no right to kill us! But what contract gives us this right (remember I'm making the false assumption here that all rights are based on contractual obligation)? Under the status quo we are assuming a right that according to my opponent's framework does not exist, and therefore gaining this right would be our legal consideration. The net effect of all this is that contractionism as a basis for rights fails, is not sufficient, and even if it were true would still support the animal rights case. Human ResponsibilityHere my opponent argues that responsibility establishes permissability not obligation. In order to show this, my opponent also needs to rebut my material for why we "ought" to be responsible, which happens in the next section. As it so happens, my opponent had absolutely no rebuttal to this. Think about it with some context - if I make you responsible for baking a cake to my birthday party, then I am obliging you to do so. Anybody has the right to bake me a cake (in fact, you have the right to bake a cake for me even if it's not my birthday) but not everyone has the obligation. The reason why is because being responsible is one of the things we generally ought to do. To this my opponent said that superior outcomes aren't obligations either. That's true, but the recognition of them creates obligations. If we judge something superior and we want to create such a world, it only follows that we have to be a part of that change. Just because it is something we will for ourselves (as opposed to having it imposed on us) makes it no less of an obligation. Take, for example, my opponent's example of the old person crossing the street. What my opponent described was a situation in which you might judge not helping the lady to cross to be a better outcome, either for yourself or for the lady. This cannot be taken to be responsibility towards the old lady because you do not consider yourself responsible for her. Let us assume you ARE responsible for the old lady, however. Let us further assume that this isn't a legal responsibility but a moral one - that you believe old ladies should be helped out very strongly, perhaps because you believe in compassion. In that case, there is a generally assumed obligation to do so (because obligation can derive from responsibility). Even on a pure semantic level the words "responsibility" and "obligation" can normally be used interchangably (. http://thesaurus.com...) although of course this doesn't make it true. To win this point my opponent needs to prove WHY we are not obliged to follow our responsibilities, because again there is no criteria for what we should do that responsibility does not meet. I've already admitted that some people do not have the same standard of responsibility or do not follow it, but we already give those people the same rights so that isn't really an argument. Con's CaseHe didn't have one. All his points were rebuttals to my case. I expected to have something to rebut here so I'll just leave it at this. I look forward to reading everything else my opponent has to say.