As my previous blog about the referendum on whether there should be state lawyers for animals in Switzerland, the article "Swiss vote to reject animal lawyers " in New Scientist tells us the result of that referendum.
The article reports that 70.5 percent of voters rejects the referendum. According to the opposition, Swiss has strict enough regulations that can guarantee the welfare of animals. As in such economic downturn, people might not want to let this regualtion load thier tax, despite the estimation that a lawyer for animals would cost less than 1 dollar per year. The article also states that there are such other effort to expanding animal welfare for example Spain's Balearic islands issues a law to grant some primates the status of children or dependent adults. However, some scientists proposes the solution to the cruel treatment of animals by engineering them to lose the sense of pain.
I think that even if this referendum are accepted, the status of animals would not change much in Switzerland. I agree with the opposition group that Switzerland has laws that are very concerned about animals welfare. On the other hand, if they want to make some change on the status of animals, I prefer the way that Spain's Balearic islands granting some primates human status. This could make some significant change in their living more than this referendum. And I also completely disagree with the propose of scientist on engineering animals so that they would not feel pain anymore. I think this is a terrible idea. It is immoral for me to treat animals like material. Moreover, we don't know what effect it would occur next to such a practice. Instead of doing so, they should invent or improve the way of raising animals so that they would live a happier live and not suffer much.
The article reports that 70.5 percent of voters rejects the referendum. According to the opposition, Swiss has strict enough regulations that can guarantee the welfare of animals. As in such economic downturn, people might not want to let this regualtion load thier tax, despite the estimation that a lawyer for animals would cost less than 1 dollar per year. The article also states that there are such other effort to expanding animal welfare for example Spain's Balearic islands issues a law to grant some primates the status of children or dependent adults. However, some scientists proposes the solution to the cruel treatment of animals by engineering them to lose the sense of pain.
I think that even if this referendum are accepted, the status of animals would not change much in Switzerland. I agree with the opposition group that Switzerland has laws that are very concerned about animals welfare. On the other hand, if they want to make some change on the status of animals, I prefer the way that Spain's Balearic islands granting some primates human status. This could make some significant change in their living more than this referendum. And I also completely disagree with the propose of scientist on engineering animals so that they would not feel pain anymore. I think this is a terrible idea. It is immoral for me to treat animals like material. Moreover, we don't know what effect it would occur next to such a practice. Instead of doing so, they should invent or improve the way of raising animals so that they would live a happier live and not suffer much.
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References
Barley, S. (2010, March 8). Swiss vote to reject animal lawyers. NewScientist. Retrieved March 8, 2010 from http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/03/swiss-voters-have-rejected-a.html
Like Liu, I was also glad that the Swiss defeated teh proposition to appoint lawyers for animals.
ReplyDeleteLiu sounds very Kantian (as in Immanuel, the famous 18th century German philosopher, whose very difficult work we will not study in class) in his reasons for objecting to the engineering of animals that do not feel pain. But that suggests a counter-argument to my defence of the acceptability of eating meat; the argument can probably be answered, but that we may not simply treat animals as a means to our ends, such as a tastier meal than beans and vegetables, does need to be addressed.
As Liu also notes, there are moves under way in some countries, such as Spain, but also New Zealand, to grant some sort of personhood rights to some animals. I'm not sure that I agree with this either - I would favour a more general approach that clarifies first what it is to be a person, and what sort of rights might properly belong to persons. Then we can allow the relevant facts to determine whether or not any animals other than humans do in fact qualify. Of course, the danger is that some humans will not in fact qualify as persons - this is the point that Gemma makes in Stephen Law's essay "Carving the Roast Beast", which some people have previously read in level 4. This approach would recognise that in principle our machines could oneday, perhaps very soon, become persons with the attendant rights and obligations: if a computer worked in a way that was relevantly exactly the same as a human brain and had the same sort of feelings, thoughts and awarenesses, would it be a person? (Something like this is on track to happen within our life times, possibly the next 10 - 15 years. See "The Blue Brain Project" at Wikipedia for a quick introduction, and TED video "Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer" by Henry Markram, the leader of this project. The varied comments on the TED video are also worth a look.