Bestiality/Zoophilia should be legal and is not inherently immoral

C1.1 Pro misunderstands my statement so allow me to clarify. All ethical actions are necessarily made in specific real world circumstances. If class of activities has a structure such that it is ethically unstable or can only be practiced ethically under a stringent set of circumstances, then that behavior is not moral. In other words, if bestiality has inherent traits that make it very difficult to perform in a way that is not unethical, then bestiality is unethical. This is the case because any sort of immoral practice can be rendered moral by specifying specific criteria that alter our understanding of the situation. I could argue that random face punching is ethical provided the person being punched happened to be committing a crime or the person punching was motivated by true love. Compared to my opponents interpretation- an action which when performed is immoral 999 times out of 1000 is not immoral. If I do X and traits inherent to X cause that instance of X to be immoral then that trait is immoral. Moreover, when we speak of what should be legal we aren’t arguing over individual actions but practices as a whole. If the overall practice of bestiality is immoral, then it shouldn’t be legal. We don’t legalize specific actions, we legalize a class of actions as they are actually performed. To talk of some hypothetical non-representative cases bear no relevance to how law or morality actually exists. Bestiality is the collection of real world acts of interspecies sex, not some idealized act as performed under hypothetically prescribed circumstances. C1.2 Pro claims that bestiality is moral in a wide range of situations but does not offer any evidence that this is the case. I have provided arguments for why consent is not possible in animals and for why the communication gap between man and animal makes animal rape probable. Again, it very difficult to get accurate statistics on the frequency of human victims of rape; animals have no way to report rape. Allowing a practice for which there is no way to ensure moral accountability is immoral. C2.1 Pro concedes the he has no presented an argument negating H.3. By the structure of Pro’s R1 argument, this is admission is all I need to win the debate. C2.2 Pro is non-responsive to my point that humans are unique in many aspects so it should be no surprise that we are unique in our ability to grant consent. C2.3 Pro argues that if an animal has a preference then it “psychologically grants consent” even if it can’t communicate it: 1) Simply having a preference is not granting consent. I may have prefer to a candy bar but that doesn’t mean I consent to someone feeding me. 2) Consent is NOT consent if it isn’t communicated. If Jack engages in sexual activity with Jill without any indication that Jill agrees to the encounter, this is non-consensual sex regardless of whether Jill preferred sex or not. 3) This argument doesn’t engage my criticism that animals are incapable of consent- it just tries to redefine consent to justify bestiality. Pro seems to be arguing that because animals can be conditioned to perform certain behavior, this entails their ability to engage in moral agreements- a conclusion which does not follow. Pro again reveals his failure to understand what gives consent its moral weight, he claims “agreement is merely a state where two mind’s decisions are consistent with each other.” This definition is clearly false- A car is not “sold” just because a salesman has decided “I want to sell this car” and the customer has decided “I want to buy this car.” A car is only sold once the two decisions have been communicated to each other, once both parties understand the intentions of the other clearly. This also illustrates Pro’s tendency to conflate different understandings of the word “agree.” Pro’s definition is more in line with the phrase “I agree with your opinion” but is irrelevant to the phrase “I agree to have sex with you.” Finally, it is unclear that animals make decisions- Pro has the burden to show this to be true. Pro misunderstands my list of concepts required to grant consent; it is meant to demonstrate the complex moral interaction involved in giving permission. To give permission, I must understand the concept of permission and what it would mean to withhold permission or to have my permission unethically transgressed- all things that animals certainly do not understand. Pro responds to this with the odd claim that I wouldn’t feel violated if my girlfriend borrowed my car without permission. First, I might feel violated- I might feel that even if I would have said yes it was wrong to presume my agreement (this is the subject of more than a few TV episodes). Second, this illustrates the complex moral landscape required to navigate issues of consent and permission that animals are totally oblivious to- how would you explain to a dog that even though you would have said yes to sex, you hadn’t actually consented and so feel violated? Third, this has nothing to do animal's understanding of permission. Pro concedes that the communication he advocates is “guess work for specific details” but maintains that this doesn’t entail guesswork for the overall interaction. The overall interaction is just the aggregate of the specific details, so if one is guesswork the other is as well. Pro claims animals can withdraw consent- but my point is that they have no understanding of how to communicate this. Humans exist in a moral framework where it is well understood how to withdraw consent, animals do not. Behavior such as biting and pulling away are frequently a natural part of animal sex, so behavior is not a reliable indicator of withdrawn consent. The ability of some animals to associate a behavior with a sound does not prove they make decisions or have abstract concepts. This only proves one thing – that they can associate a behavior with a sound! We can see conditioned behavior in humans that does not correspond to making decisions or dealing with abstract concepts. For example, consider how often people automatically respond to greetings. It is a common experience for a cashier says something like “thanks for shopping at Kmart” and an instinctual but nonsensical response of “you too” pops out. This behavior is not associated with the high level mental functioning required to engage in moral consent. Even if there is some sense in which animals make “decisions,” they are decisions in a totally different sense than what is conventionally meant in the case of humans. When an animal “decides” to have sex it does not consider the risk of pregnancy, of disease, of the impact it will have on social relations, etc. Animal “decisions” bear none of the ethically relevant characteristics of human decisions. Pro claims humans are programmed to hump- but we can use this example to tease out exactly how animal sexual behavior is disanalogous to humans. Dogs will impulsively hump the leg of a visitor without regard to the social setting, desires of the visitor, and without any sense of shame or pride after the encounter. Humans do not respond to sexual stimuli in this way. Pro claims that when I chew food I do so by first giving myself permission. No one experiences the phenomena of chewing in this way. Judges, this is the psychology Pro relies on- Pro claims that when you put a piece of food in your mouth you are mentally going through the process of asking and giving yourself permission for every step of that process. I don’t know about Pro, but I chew in a fairly automatic fashion- I never give myself permission to chew, I just do it because that’s the behavior that is associated with eating. C3.1 Pro describes aspects of why power relationships entail an obligation of care, but he does not refute my premise that such an obligation exists. This obligation is in line with our moral intuition that it would be wrong for a jailor to pursue sexual relations with an inmate, it would be wrong for a guardian to mismanaged a ward’s inheritance fund, etc. Pro concedes it is wrong to have sex if it would bias you towards an individual- this is precisely what makes it wrong to pursue a sexual relationship with someone you have complete power over. You are always at risk of putting your own sexual interests in front of the welfare of your ward. C3.3 Separating coercive elements is hard even between humans- that’s why workplace sexual harassment cases exist, why there is discussion about what counts as date rape, etc. If we have to explicitly explain that “no means no” in human relations, consider how much harder the issue becomes in relationship between an animal and the human that literally owns it. Pro also doesn’t address my point that sex with animals is inherently a conflict of interest due to the power imbalance or the fact that animals have no means of seeking justice in the case of rape. C4 Pro doesn’t refute my argument that informed consent is the only morally relevant form of consent. For consent to be morally relevant, it must be made with an understanding of the agreement being made. An agreement with an agent incapable of understanding the terms of the agreement bears no moral weight. Pro doesn’t address my refutations of his original comments on informed consent. Pro only misses the point by repeating his nonsensical reductio. Non consensual sex isn’t a crime for animals because animals can’t commit crimes. It isn’t murder when a bear mauls a camper because bears aren’t ethical agents- its still murder when a camper mauls a camper. C5 Pro simply asserts that a moral practice is equivalent to a not immoral practice, stating A is ~A. But A is only ~A in a dichotomous situation. If the options are A, B, ~A, then either A or B is ~A. In my R1 argument I explained how actions can be amoral- neither immoral nor moral. To win this debate Pro must prove that bestiality has moral content and is not simply amoral. He must do this to satisfy his original premise “bestiality is a moral practice.”