Captivity

08 April 2017

本周,我们的话题是囚禁的伦理。我们的计划是讨论人类和动物的囚禁。现在你可能会问,以这种方式把人和动物放在一起能得到什么?毕竟,这是他们和我们之间的重大差异。但两者也有相似之处。例如,把一个人关进监狱剥夺了他的自由和自主。把动物关在笼子里也会产生同样的效果。这是一个相似。另一方面,我们通常把人关进监狱来惩罚他们。当我们把动物关进动物园或养它们当宠物时,我们并不是在惩罚它们。 That’s a difference -- at least a prima facie difference. Of course, for all I know, a tiger might have a positive desire not to be locked up in a cage and gawked at all day. Probably it would much prefer to be roaming free on the savannah. So for all I know, I tiger just might experience its captivity as a sort of punishment or at least as a curse and a burden.

对老虎来说不幸的是,多亏了我们人类,大草原已经不是以前的样子了。所以你可以举出一个非常有力的例子,许多其他动物在被囚禁的生活中别无选择。有人告诉我,黑猩猩是不可能在野外生存的——因为根本没有野外来限制它们。因此,考虑到这个世界的现状,将某些动物圈养对它们来说可能是最好的事情——尤其是如果我们让它们的圈养条件尽可能温和的话。

这可不是让我开心的想法。首先我们破坏动物的栖息地,然后我们把它们锁起来,扔掉钥匙!然后我们假装这都是为了他们好吗?但不幸的是,我真的没有更好的主意。让所有的动物离开动物园,看看它们能活多久!也许,在舒适的禁闭中生活总比死在消失的荒野中要好。

也许,真的!但如果我们在人类身上尝试类似的推理——“我们要入侵你的土地,俘虏你,让你喜欢上它”——我认为这不会得到很好的反响。

Of course, humans and animals are different. And maybe the differences make a difference to how we should treat them. But you know, if you think of it that way, you can think that animal captivity is, in some instances, at least, morally than human captivity. That’s because you can believe that at least some humans actuallydeserveto be held captive. On the other hand, most, if not all, animal captives are innocent victims of human greed and rapaciousness.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all those young black men rotting in prison for simple drug possession are getting what theydeserveor that minimum mandatory sentences, three strikes and you’re out laws and all the other crap are simple matters of justice. Our prison system is a moral nightmare. But our treatment of animals can seem even worse. We lock them up, not just in zoos, but also in laboratories. We typically don’t do that to humans. We keep them as pets. Something else we don’t do to humans. And, perhaps, worse of all, we herd them for slaughter. And we do all this without a single nod toward justice or fairness -- except those coming from animal activists, who are regarded by many as going way overboard in their love animals.

But perhaps we simply owe different things to animals than we do to humans. Many believe, for example, that humans have a level of dignity, freedom, and autonomy that no animal can match. This isn’t to say that animals are mere things. Clearly animals –at least many of them cause who knows about worms – feel pain. They are capable of a certain level of freedom and autonomy – though nothing like full Kantian self-governance seems possible for them - though lets assume that we humans are capable of such. It seems right that such differences make some differences to the rightness or wrongness of holding humans vs. animals captive. But exactly how much difference is not to clear to me.

Try the following thought experiment to test intuitions. Imagine a really pleasant confinement – with adequate food, shelter and water, and with plentiful opportunities for mental and physical stimulation. That’s about the best our pets can hope for. But keeping a human in that kind of confinement would be a really bad thing. It doesn’t matter how pleasant. But it’s not a bad thing for my dog, Taffy. Perhaps that is what I owe Taffy – not the kind of freedom or autonomy we owe to human beings. Our pets aren’t prepared for that.

当然,这主要也是我们的错。太妃的祖先是骄傲而自由的狼。他们在野外随意游荡。它们是领地里的顶级掠食者。我们对他们做了什么?我们驯化他们!我们减少了他们!让他们只能被囚禁!在我看来,这简直是对自然的公然冒犯!

What does this all add up to except that we've made a pretty good mess of things. I don't really know if animals have rights, if they morally deserve freedom and autonomy, for example. But I do know that way that we have managed this vast and glorious, breathtakingly complex ecosystem has been an utter disaster. Surely we can do better – both for our sake and for the sake of our animal cousins.

Comments(6)


Rob Allen's picture

Rob Allen

Thursday, April 13, 2017 -- 10:07 PM

I am pretty sure that I didn

我很确定我没有听到任何关于囚禁残疾人的事情。许多人被关在康复机构或集体之家,在那里他们被剥夺了性生活的权利。他们可能没有隐私或色情材料。他们甚至可能不被允许与年龄相称的伴侣。这听起来像是囚禁。我遇到过被关在家里的人,他们的私人生活几乎没有自由。

Guest's picture

Guest

Sunday, August 10, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

Confinement, at least to

Confinement, at least to humans, does vary per perspective. Prison is eventually a social and natural habitat after a while, and that's based on the fact that people return deliberately. I'd like to say that because drug charges are so common, we can pretty much agree beyond a doubt that we value and wish to have drug use and trade in our society, which pretty much makes drugs laws obsolete. However, that idea makes me wonder: Who might the captor be? Who is so confined to ignore an unwritten peoples vote of the value to ourselves and each other of a demand for drugs, and it's use by persons who are considered competent? "420" because Hitler was that bad.
So the ethics are mind/body/spirit; reasons for captivating; intended outcomes and unintended outcomes, possibly ignored aspects, or aspects seen as worth the disregard; types of captivity and how the morals (imposing in it's degrees and varieties) do affect by each detail every identifiable detail. If you take any captive, this will be pretty solid. So, we take the most lovely; the romantic captive. For simplicity, we might say passive and dominant. The passive person does not take the specific courses of action to impede the restrictions of their captivity; the eyes don't look away, and the memory of moments following will encourage further attention. The interaction will very likely include both persons to be dominant or passive according to moments. This is likely in the interest of both parties. Therefore, based on that alone, we can say that the specifics would have to be pairs of instances of dominance and passivity. However, to shoot a tiger with a tranq gun, the motivations to shoot are completely separate from the tigers agreement or disagreement, and it's the fact of the tiger's ability to fall from the chemical that makes this possible. The tiger will have some ability to consider it's environment upon waking, and that will have been a consideration of the shooter; it can be said to be mostly immoral for imposing upon the tigers ability to freely live as it would, while the entire future is determined beforehand, if only in the few options for what to do with it (as long as it remains with the shooter).
We may be unique as a species to systematically impose our beliefs on each other. The systems are already identified; social, per group think, constitution, emotional beliefs, ideas of importance by wealth or achievement or reputation, with the use of language... These overlap. Some collections of beliefs are volatile, and I've seen a woman jailed for stealing food, so there may be excessive neglect in these areas (because an alternative to sentencing with jail time to stop the same crime in her future would have been mandatory food stamps or a requirement to show proof of adequate food donations which should have been discussed under oath to tell the whole truth of the crime). It's possible our beliefs that overlap are like many interacting species "in nature", someone could describe the sameness of interactions.
你所描述的真正令人愉快的限制很可能是我们的社会,有机会忽略那些需要解决问题的领域,因为也有方法批判性地探索问题就在那里,然后是我们因兴趣或好奇心而产生的数学问题,更不用说我们作为人类所享受的所有事情,我们也有方法来判断它,并掌握了许多个人可能喜欢的事情;我们甚至有空间不去融入社会,而是和我们自己在一起。那么,自杀或抑郁呢?那俘虏呢?这是信仰系统的问题还是过度的强迫,还是生物学和化学的问题?这是语言领域的一个问题,因为两组中的四个选项都有负载意义和相对意义;这是一个问题,一般来说,那些有自杀倾向或抑郁的人被限制在没有答案的范围内,等等。如果有一个限制,就像它可以看到的,它是什么,它从哪里来……这个问题可能是一个被圈养的动物的一种困惑的体验,就像它是对基于“智力能力”的编程或可能的“结果”的细节的关注。
Lab rats (some) glow in the dark, get cancer, live well and are fed to glowing cats... Does the human involvement of those who can manipulate rats affect any other areas of ethical ownership of a living thing (or it's future at all). Would they not be the authority on a matter of empathy, or objective course of action of our most simple concerns? What implying factors to ownership or course are there to a thing? Mushrooms were the size of trees, gas byproducts gave us soil, and could we say anything about their captivity to (what, even) for they're clearly smaller than trees, no longer a dominant influence over the outcome of the Earth... And, our human lives and our species future is determined by *identifiable things* like diet and genetics, which is based on the past, and could very well be determined as failed for a lack of attention. Say we have no bees for cell phones, the popular example; to talk about it says nothing about having no bees and no food... So can we actually infer, with the pretended scenario, that our immediate quality of life is pretty much paramount as a motivator, and for it's quality obscures......? But... No, of course not. The dinosaurs had the most random end; but we know that we say "dinosaurs are extinct", and that we never say "but so was everything, and we have spines also." Dinosaurs being large is possibly the motivation for us to attend to the variable attentions separately. They are big; what of deadly gases, what of eradication of life on Earth, what of another meteor hitting some other 1 in a million red button of destruction. Use them, manipulate by their existance, movies... And I should've stopped at mushrooms.

mwsimon's picture

mwsimon

Saturday, October 18, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

I think there are some more

I think there are some more parallels to be drawn between how we put animals in captivity and how we put people there. We enslave animals because its profitable. There are huge industries around meat and animal products, with tons of market demand, that want animals to be bred in captivity and killed. It is known that animals feel pain, but the lure of profit outweighs this.
为什么我们要把非暴力罪犯关进监狱。好吧,各种各样的原因——种族主义的社会结构,“保护”人们不受自身伤害的错误想法。但也是为了利润。私人监狱产业是巨大的。当然,它知道它会给人带来痛苦。然而,它仍然游说让持有毒品等行为成为非法行为。如果这种情况发生改变,他们会损失很多钱。他们为了赚钱而忽视了自己造成的危害,就像肉类行业一样。

Oliver's picture

Oliver

Tuesday, October 27, 2015 -- 5:00 PM

Information serves to make

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Guest's picture

Guest

Tuesday, June 21, 2016 -- 5:00 PM

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