Bestiality should be illegal

In response to the list of rights violations: I will happily debate you at a later date on whether these violations ought to be illegal. We are, however, not discussing slaughter for food or animal testing for scientific progress, but bestiality. Oh no, afraid it doesn’t work like that. Otherwise I could just go “we are not discussing pedophilia” every time someone brings that up (you did remember). Nothing moral or legal should ever be considered in isolation, it is all from general principle to more specific rule all the way down to applying it to a specific situation. If you want to use a principle you are going to admit the other consequences of that principle. If the only way you can make bestiality immoral is to make all human-animal interaction immoral I will see you cede that long before I agree to that principle. I stand by my position. I also don't think the law should "ignore" rights; however, recall that "your rights are only limited in that you should not violate the rights of others". The law should only limit people's power if that power is used to violate the rights of others. However, not every minor instance of violation can or should be illegal – it's a question of how severe the violation is, this is what I mean by "magnitude". I roughly contrasted raping vs. slapping someone. Rape is a violation of extreme severity; one slap is a violation of negligible severity. If you slap an animal who you have not hit before, and sex(which you are claiming is always rape) is a more severe violation then can we expect the animal to react worse to the first time sex then to the first time slap no? Why or why not? It is true that these are subjective standards Why do people get into arguments only to destroy any hope of supporting their position by admitting it’s subjective? You know what that means right? It means it’s in your head and possibly some other people’s heads. By definition you cannot support it with reason or evidence. I will thus ignore any further appeal to the magnitude of a violation vs rights since you have admitted to being unable to establish the magnitude of this proposed animal rape. Anyone on this site is welcome to argue with me over whether rape should be illegal You’re relying on that premise here in this debate. Support it here or lose this debate. What are your reasons? Causing you to be unable to meet your BoP before we run out of rounds to be perfectly honest. I stand by my beliefs, but for the purpose of this debate...icularly not for a purpose as selfish and destructive as rape. Nice but you didn’t support those beliefs. The Virginia law does not prove a right to non-abuse, no law can. Because we know for a fact that humans are far more capable of faster, more complex and more sophisticated decision-making. 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. It has every relevance. Here you put the contradiction you have implied before on clear display. Humans are capable of better decision making, totally irrelevant to what an animal is capable of. You are treating consent like a function of two minds but it isn’t, it’s just a function of one. One mind is capable of consent or one mind is not. A human is not rendered incapable of consent because a smarter human or a smart alien walks into the room. There is no definitive evidence of telepathy in the real world, there is no supportable mechanism by which human intelligence could interfere with an animal’s mental capacities. I will illustrate the contradiction with a hypothetical scenario, and no it doesn’t matter that this can’t be done currently. I go through some kind of machine that allows my brain to control an animal (seen avatar?). I go out finds some animals of the same species as my host body. I act just like they do. I have sex with some of them. You said ‘Surely animals can consent to sex within their own species’, Does the other animal consent to sex in that case or do they not? If you say they do, then you admit my intelligence does not matter to whether they consent. If you say they do not, then you admit that your idea of consent is independent of their perception or mental processes (since to them I am just another animal their process is identical). The latter case is in contradiction with the definition of consent which is a communicated mental decision, it can never be independent of the deciding party’s mind. Um, everything? You can't rape a non-living thing. Why? you can have sex with a nonliving thing and they can’t consent. there is no way to legally discriminate (through "consent in law") between sex and rape. If a private citizen can discriminate so can the law. If neither can discriminate then assuming it’s all rape is just as fallacious as assuming it’s all consensual. If the law cannot discriminate between a case where both parties reached an understanding and a case where there was a misunderstanding, the practice should be illegal The same is true of petting under your premises. Remember you can’t invoke differing magnitudes you admitted they were subjective. (b) protecting those under the jurisdiction of the law from damage/harm/abuse. Including abuses and harm from the law which includes being punished despite doing nothing wrong. I thought we agreed that this was going to be a "from scratch" debate. You can't possibly expect a random debater to come up with an objective standard for defining rights and abuses, thousands of years of human history were unable to accomplish it and I personally don't think it's possible. I expected the exact opposite: that no one would ever be able to do that in the space given; I knew from the moment I created the debate that you could not win since you would never be able to meet the BoP. I must confess I was trying to prove a point to those who claimed my earlier challenges made debating impossible. The truth is this, from scratch; nothing is given is what is really impossible (for the positive position). Unfortunately you accepted the debate. From round one: “No moral or legal standard is given, pro will have to present their own and support it.” “giving the general reasons anything should be illegal, and supporting that rule/principle against all challenges I make” It’s not fair, and voters are probably going to vote for you despite failing to meet your BoP, but that is not my concern. “If I had said, ‘Only a will signed in the presence of two witnesses should be legally recognized’ would that be circular logic too?” If your supporting argument was that only a will signed in the presence of two witnesses is legally recognized. I'm referring to the fact that "consent in law" has certain standards; consent which meets those standards should be legally recognized. Support those standards. The opposite of consent is dissent, which, by defintion, excludes coercion. I hate it when this happens… the dictionary appears to be in contradiction with itself. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com...+ It does use the word persuade in the definition of coerce but in the definition of persuade it says “induce (someone) to do something through reasoning or argument” and an appeal to force is a fallacy. The dictionary should not have used the word persuade in the definition of coerce. because we understand that this condition renders the decision invalid. I do not understand it. A decision is a decision, unless it is induced by force, fraud, or threat of force it is not essentially any different from any other decision. It is your job to prove to us that bestiality is any different. Then it is your job to prove that violating consent of animals in order to eat them is any different from violating their consent to have sex with them. Please explain to me why this is an illogical or inappropriate position. What the law is, does not tell you what it should be, regardless of which part of the law is the subject at hand. For example if we were debating whether blacks should be slaves, and you relied on another legal tradition whereby kidnapping someone from Africa gives you the right to enslave them. That is no less begging the question than just appealing directly to a law that says blacks are slaves. The law may evaluate the legitimacy of an agreement if there is reason to believe a party that entered in the agreement was illegally victimized by it. Circular logic again, you can’t use terms like illegally when the question at hand is proper legality. For instance, before the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, a contract where a master had legal ownership over his slave in certain states was valid. There was not contract, the consent of the slave was not required. It was a deed or bill of ownership that was considered valid. Again, we aren't talking about a contract that you sign with witnesses present – you don't do that in human-human sex either (unless you're just weird). Human-human sex is not a contract either. There are no binding agreements. Consent is given in real time and can be retracted at any time. There is no need to establish the terms and verify that both parties understand them since neither party is bound to honor any terms (except maybe the implicit term that you don’t lie about what happened or break any other laws). "the use of a living thing in an unfair way". Well in that case bestiality is not inherently exploitive. In theory pleasure, consent, and benefit are all equal in the long run. But I have established that sex without consent is rape, and my argument remains that animals are incapable of consenting in law to sex with humans. You have equally established that they are incapable of consenting in law to sex with other animals. Thus you have established that every breeding program is organized rape. I hope you’re not advocating that?