A Delict Worth Defending?
I suppose it was inevitable that we would see things like this statement by Stephon Marbury defending Michael Vick. You'll recall that Vick has agreed to plead guilty to charges involving dogfighting. Marbury's point is that dogfighting is not that different from the routine killing of animals for other reasons. He even calls it a "sport," which I suppose is defensible but maybe overstates his case.
Anyway the obvious distinction is that hunting (within the regulations) is legal. Slaughtering livestock, within the regulations, is legal. Dogfighting is not. You can quibble about the reasons for these laws - maybe the dogfighting lobby just isn't powerful enough - but those are the statutes that have been enacted by a duly elected legislature. We can't go around doing amateur moral philosophy and then letting people break the law if we can't find a distinction other than legality.
Of course, you could also think of the Marbury line of reasoning as an argument for changing the law, and I suppose I'd be all right with that. I'd change it in the other direction, though, making slaughterhouses and hunting more humane. My very limited understanding of dogfighting leads me to believe that it's horribly cruel. To the extent that we care about animal welfare at all, it seems like a reasonable ban to me.
Anyway the obvious distinction is that hunting (within the regulations) is legal. Slaughtering livestock, within the regulations, is legal. Dogfighting is not. You can quibble about the reasons for these laws - maybe the dogfighting lobby just isn't powerful enough - but those are the statutes that have been enacted by a duly elected legislature. We can't go around doing amateur moral philosophy and then letting people break the law if we can't find a distinction other than legality.
Of course, you could also think of the Marbury line of reasoning as an argument for changing the law, and I suppose I'd be all right with that. I'd change it in the other direction, though, making slaughterhouses and hunting more humane. My very limited understanding of dogfighting leads me to believe that it's horribly cruel. To the extent that we care about animal welfare at all, it seems like a reasonable ban to me.
posted by James | 3:12 PM
1 Comments:
I think you're absolutely right. Contrasting dogfighting with hunting, Marbury says, "...dogfighting is a sport. It's just behind closed doors" and of course the reason it's behind closed doors is because it's illegal. I think Marbury's main complaint, though, is the outrage with which people have reacted to this compared to other crimes.
I do agree with him, in part, about the similarities with hunting. Both involve the killing of animals for recreation and I'd consider them both blood sports. But one can evaluate the morality of acts along a (multi-dimensional) continuum, taking into account the benefit to humans, the harms to the animals, and so on.
It's hard for me to classify dogfighting as a sport. As opposed to hunting, in dogfighting, both participants are animals, both unwilling (as opposed to hunting, in which the human does participate). In addition, from what I've read of dogfighting, and particularly what Michael Vick is accused of, it is particularly vicious, cruel, and abusive--far beyond the harms hunting typically inflicts on animals.
That being said, I don't think hunting is particularly noble, and it would be difficult for me to be friends with someone who killed animals for pleasure. I don't propose that all animals merit the same rights as humans, but killing animals purely for sport seems unjustifiable to me.
And then there are other reasons that we deliberately kill animals, such as food and medical research--both of which have at least defensible reasons why animals' lives must be used. We'll need to use animals for research for quite a while, still, though I have no doubt we will one day have the technology to research without causing harm. We've already reached that stage, though, for food, and it is partly for animal welfare (and partly for environmentalism/global warming--see my blog post) that I have stopped eating mammals and birds.
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