Bestiality should be illegal

‘Your rights are only limited in that you should not violate the rights of others. These rights include life, health, happiness, safety and freedom. My argument states that bestiality is comparable to rape, and as such an abuse of such magnitude that it should be illegal.’Are you saying the law should ignore these rights in other cases?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. 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. In the case of one slap, the severity is so negligible that the slapper's right to be free to slap someone once overrules the severity of the violation. It is true that these are subjective standards, but when they are on the extremes of a spectrum – as rape is – it shouldn't be too difficult to say that nobody is "free" to legally rape others. As my argument compares bestiality to rape, i.e. sex without consent from at least one party, and rape is an abuse of such magnitude that it should be illegal, so should bestiality. Anyone on this site is welcome to argue with me over whether rape should be illegal, and I hope very dearly that they lose miserably.You said all animals had those rights, I am challenging that premiseWhat are your reasons? Since we are speaking about the legalization of an interaction with animals, I find the question whether animals have those rights very relevant. Here is an example excerpted from Virginia law: VA. CODE ANN. § 3.2-6570 (2013). Cruelty to animals. A. Any person who: (i) tortures, ill-treats, abandons, willfully inflicts inhumane injury or pain not connected with bona fide scientific or medical experimentation, or cruelly or unnecessarily beats, maims, mutilates, or kills any animal; (ii) deprives any animal of necessary food, drink, shelter or emergency veterinary treatment; (iv) willfully sets on foot, instigates, engages in, or in any way furthers any act of cruelty to any animal; (v) carries or causes to be carried by any vehicle, vessel or otherwise any animal in a cruel, brutal, or inhumane manner, so as to produce torture or unnecessary suffering is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.I stand by my beliefs, but for the purpose of this debate, I will narrow it down to one point: animals have the right not to be abused by humans, particularly not for a purpose as selfish and destructive as rape. Why just human?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. What does animation have to do with it?Um, everything? You can't rape a non-living thing. However, animals are alive.So it’s not rape unless there is a possibility for mental trauma and distress? Wha? When did I say that? I was pointing out that rape is not only a physical, but also an emotional crime, and that the emotional aspect is applicable only to living things that can feel. Incorrect, this debate is about whether bestiality should be illegal. A law is a universal. Banning bestiality bans all bestiality.That's literally what I said in the next 2 sentences :) As we know, human-human sex can sometimes be nonconsensual, but it should only be made totally illegal if there is no way for one or more parties to (a) communicate and (b) understand consent. This is the debate I was referring to. We could come to the conclusion that only some bestiality is in fact rape, but if animals are incapable of communicating consent to humans, and/or if humans are incapable of understanding consent from an animal, both in all cases, bestiality should be illegal because there is no way to legally discriminate (through "consent in law") between sex and rape.If the possibility for misunderstanding rendered the practice unacceptable then human on human sex would be unacceptable.Not what I said. 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 because there is no legal way to distinguish abuse from non-abuse.The law cannot control everything its purpose is to define what actions warrant punishment Among other purposes, two other relevant purposes of law are (a) preventing crime and (b) protecting those under the jurisdiction of the law from damage/harm/abuse. As you said, law is universal.Appealing to other subjective standards won’t make yours objective.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. However, I consider modern law a pretty reasonable standard. After all, the standards of legitimacy of the law are what you wish to extend to bestiality. You have yet to provide objective arguments for that yourself. That is circular logic. ‘Consent in the law should be what consent in the law is.’Please explain what about "legal recognition of [an action]" is synonymous with an action which applies to legal standards. I said, "Only 'consent in law' should be legally recognized." If I had said, "Only a will signed in the presence of two witnesses should be legally recognized" would that be circular logic too? I'm referring to the fact that "consent in law" has certain standards; consent which meets those standards should be legally recognized. These standards do not include legal recognition, they are a prerequisite to legal recognition.Consent is the opposite of coercionNow that's subjective! The dictionary begs to differ. Consent: permission for something to happen or agreement to do something. Coercion: the practice of persuading someone to do something by using force or threats. Persuade: (1) cause (someone) to do something through reasoning or argument; (2) cause (someone) to believe something, esp. after a sustained effort; convince; (3) provide a sound reason for (someone) to do something. Something … such as consent? Nothing about the definition of consent you provided demands that the permission/agreement be given freely. The opposite of consent is dissent, which, by defintion, excludes coercion.People have the right to make irrational decisions based on ignorance.The argument is not that they do not have that right, the argument is that these decisions are not necessarily legally valid due to the condition of the decision-maker. And we aren't even talking about "people", we are talking about non-human animals. Do non-human animals have the right to make irrational decisions based on ignorance? A seven-year-old child may have the "right" to make the irrational decision based on ignorance to "consent" to sex with a thirty-year-old, but this act is not recognized as "consent in law", nor should it be, because we understand that this condition renders the decision invalid. It is your job to prove to us that bestiality is any different.you must prove that it should be illegal; not that it is illegal or that based on other legal traditions it would be illegalStrangely, I find whether bestiality is illegal or whether based on other legal traditions it would be illegal very relevant to the question of whether it should be illegal. Please explain to me why this is an illogical or inappropriate position. The law does not evaluate the legitimacy of an agreement unless it must enforce that agreementIncorrect. 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. For instance, before the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, a contract where a master had legal ownership over his slave in certain states was valid. After, it was rendered invalid, not because it hadn't been enforced yet, but because slavery was deemed abusive, a violation of basic rights, and as such unconstitutional. In other words, the contract may have been enforced and executed already, but the defendant suffers from its consequences.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). However, a contract is any formal and legally binding agreement. Because we are discussing whether bestiality should be illegal, we should examine whether the agreement reached by both parties to participate in the act is at all legally valid – and if not, it should be illegal. One definition of agreement is "a negotiated and typically legally binding arrangement between parties as to a course of action". Because we are debating this agreement's validity in a legal context, I took the liberty of using the term "contract" to refer to it, in the sense of "a formal and legally binding agreement".The word exploiting is ambiguous.I provided a clear definition of the relevant meaning I was using: "the use of a living thing in an unfair way".you have not established that animals must consent before the law or at all yetBut 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.