. . . I put it to you that the Caledonian Crow has advanced cognition as any human and its rights should outstrip those of humans.
@hedonic I just noted this disturbing remark you made in reply to David. I don’t mean distinctively disturbing to folks abiding in the Objectivist framework; I mean disturbing for its being so contrary contemporary research on animal intelligence.
I do not get your immediate inference from cognitive levels to bearing rights. Rights are sensible lines by which violence between humans can be made small and their prosperity can be made large. Rights are a human-to-human thing. We have crows at my house. We leave them alone since they are not damaging anything and any ugliness in their calls is compensated by the entertainment value they bring to the scene. We don’t need to be making contracts with them, or charging rent, and truth be told, they do not have the cognitive powers for such things.
Notice all of this drops the context of humans possessing volitional conceptual rational consciousness that is emergent and separates Man from animals that possess consciousness where that hasn’t emerged. This dropping of context is what leads to all of these false ideas, premises, and assertions including those of rights.
The following quotation is pertinent to the OP of this thread, but I am showing it mainly because I want to alert participants here of the book from which this excerpt is taken. This marvelous book is The First Principles of Knowledge by John Rickaby, S.J. He assimilates all pertinent philosophy up to the time of this book (1888). This book is available online in the link I have provided. I learned of it through the Ph.D. dissertation of Leonard Peikoff (1964). He would have gotten the book from a library.
Quote
St. Thomas further supports his view by a contrast between intellectual judgment and mere sensitive, animal perception. “Though the sense can take cognizance of its sensation, it knows not its own nature, and, consequently, is ignorant also of the nature of its act and of its proportion to the object affecting it.” The lower animal can never take account of its own perceptions, whereas man recognizes himself as intelligent ; the lower animal never recognizes truth as such, man does. Here again is a point which has so forced itself on rational observation, that representatives of the most widely divergent schools have a unanimity which, from their professed principles, might hardly be expected. In proof of the fact the only available method is quotation, but quotation shall be short, leaving each reader to make fuller verification for himself. After his own way of using words Lewes says, " To perceive a difference is one thing, to know a difference is another. The dog distinguishes meat from bread without knowing that one is not the other." Less explicitly Mr. Sully remarks, “An intelligent dog can distinguish and recognise, but he cannot mentally juxtapose objects, or compare them, except perhaps in a very imperfect and rudimentary way.” It was from a like persuasion that a German philosopher declared his readiness to give a pig the honour due to a rational creature as soon as it intelligently affirmed, " I am a pig," and another philosopher, of the same country, promised to dismount from his horse as soon as it said, " I am a horse." The bacon for breakfast and the morning ride to digest it, are not much endangered by promises of this kind : for only a truly intelligent being, like man, can judge with full consciousness of the truth.
Another fine book I learned of through Dr. Peikoff’s dissertation is The Theory of Universals by R.I. Aaron (1901).
@Boydstun It’s worth pointing out that OP’s avatar is of Peter Singer. I don’t mean to imply that OP is pretending to be him, but it stands to reasons he takes inspiration.