Chickens are thinking feeling creatures who have preferences fears wants memories, they play games and have friends, they want to live in comfort and peace and avoid pain and death.
Just because they can't verbalise an explicit contract with you doesn't mean that they don't value their own life and find enjoyment in it.
You would take everything from them why because they can't speak your language?
@ambiguous_yelp Your argument does not address my moral premises. You have no argument that can, until you produce a chicken that can adopt a moral code.
Whether they enjoy life or not is entirely irrelevant. If you wish to protect one, use your capacity as a moral entity to become the guardian of a chicken. We have a ready-to-use system in place for this--property. Buy a chicken, make it your property, defend it against all comers, and it is safe from me killing it, forever.
Buying property implies a previous property owner, who was the first property owner of a chicken? Where did their property rights come from?
Treating someone as something is how you end up doing horrible things
And no I'm not trying to produce a chicken that will fulfill your moral code, I'm asking you to consider that creatures that can't speak to you have an internal life, and that they have feelings, the same feelings that you and I have, the same feelings that make life worth living for anyone
@ambiguous_yelp I can consider that separately. With respect to whether those animals have rights, it is a nullity.
"Feelings" is not the source of rights. The moral contract is the source. Creatures incompetent to enter that mutual exchange between equals do not benefit, ever, unless a creature that *can* join is willing to extend the aegis of *their* rights over it. Which usually has a price. And limitations.
You can protect as many chickens as you can afford to keep. No more.
@ambiguous_yelp I am not your professor. Educate yourself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
Yes, the non-aggression principle is a form of social contract. It is not the only one.
I know what the social contract is in relation to political philosophy, I'm familiar with Hobbes, what I'm curious about is how it relates to your personal understanding of why you get to hurt innocent chickens
What precisely about the specific social contract you are invoking means that you should be allowed to hurt chickens who have done nothing to hurt you
#Ethics #ThomasHobbes #SocialContract #PoliticalPhilosophy #Chickens #Speciesism #HumanSupremacy
@ambiguous_yelp Chickens are neither innocent nor guilty. They lack the moral capacity for it. Their defense against being eaten by human or cryptid is the same as their defense against being eaten by a fox--roost somewhere safe.
They have zero access to the social contract. They are not moral actors. If a person kills a chicken, it is not murder; it is predation.
I could hurt chickens, if I wanted. I don't. As you say, they have neat little personalities. But they are not *people*.
Why can't a chicken decide to act morally?
Here are some clips of non-human animals acting altruistically plus the attached video
Dog saves stranded bird by carrying them outside
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vCm-ZOWVrc
Hippo saves baby impala from dogs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OI6qGPW1Nw
Pig brings food to sick brother
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R8fbIlWiDj0
Its called a counter example. You said they can't make moral decisions, I gave many counter examples of them making moral decisions therefore your premise was false
So chickens deserve to die because you can't read their minds? What reasoning from a chicken would convince you they deserve a right to life?
"
Rats free trapped companions, even when given choice of chocolate instead
"[1]
[1]
https://news.uchicago.edu/taxonomy/term/49941
2011.12.08 XX:XX:XX
Helping your fellow rat: Rodents show empathy-driven behavior
UChicago News
<https://news.uchicago.edu/story/helping-your-fellow-rat-rodents-show-empathy-driven-behavior>
> @ambiguous_yelp:ahimsa.chat
2026.02.06 17:XX:XX XXX
@ambiguous_yelp Deserving death and having the right to not be killed while participating in civilization are two *completely* different standards. I am utterly indifferent as to whether any individual chicken lives or dies. They're on their own against any threat to their continued existence. Chickens, in short, are not my problem. Nor can they meaningfully assist with any of the very real and non-frivolous problems I do have--such as American fascism.
Are you done yet?
"The fastest way to lose your rights is to only care about your own"
And you obviously are not indifferent because you eat other animals so you have a motivated reasoning to maintain your privilege of eating your preferred sandwich filling.
This "not my problem" thinking is exactly how privileged people let fascism slide because they are either unaffected or benefited by fascism.
The way of looking at the world you have detailed over this thread is one where no one but you really matters, and if someone can't profit you then they might as well be dead to you, and in fact you will pay for someone to murder them.
And if you want to say that affairs that ultimately benefit or harm you are the only ones worth moral consideration well then why can't the chicken say the same thing, you can't both be right. You are not the center of the universe. Others have feelings and preferences outside of your perspective that are just as valid as yours.
@ambiguous_yelp To reach that conclusion, you must equate food animals with people, which I have repeatedly stated is not the case. So, again, I must ask whether you made that invalid leap of logic maliciously, or accidentally.
Animals that cannot uphold the social contract do not benefit from any rights included in it. That is the principle. You have not yet restated it back to me in your own words, such that it indicates to me you understand what that means.
And that social contract you are talking about is the ability to benefit you personally. I have to assume that because you wont tell me what contract you want someone to join to gain rights.
So I'll ask again: What social contract are chickens not upholding?
@ambiguous_yelp I will incorporate by reference the specific social contract that enumerates several specific rights.
The UN Declaration of Human Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/eng.pdf
Obviously, as a nonhuman myself, I prefer to disregard species-specific language found therein.
So when did a chicken ever deprive you of any of these rights? Why can't you extend the same to them out of fairness.
I call out injustice where I see it I don't need a license to stand up for victims of oppression. If you don't like that you can do what you like about it or try to convince me I'm wrong
Then why is my moral reasoning relevant? Chickens aren't fascist nor do they threaten your rights AND you consider us both useless to you. So what is it specifically about moral reasoning that means I deserve the live and the chicken doesnt? The potential to be useful to you? Because that is still selfish reasoning
Also I maintain that chickens do moral reasoning and that you have highly motivated reasoning not to recognise it
@ambiguous_yelp You seem to think that I care whether you think me selfish or not. You also seem to think that someone less than useless to me, as one spewing constant fallacy and distraction, has the right for me to take them seriously. You are not of value to me. Your constant argument has not once laid a single mark upon my repeatedly restated premise. We cannot be allies.
I'm going to tell my human porter to eat chicken for lunch. They'll do it, too.
You must find some value in trying to convince me or you would never have spoke to me.
Both I and the Chicken are considered useless to you, so what trait do i possess that the chicken does not that makes it wrong to torture and kill one but not the other?
@ambiguous_yelp I'm not entirely convinced you're not an LLM-powered bot. I don't particularly care, either.
To answer your question directly, it is the capacity for moral reasoning and principled action--which an LLM would not have, being a glorified probability matrix. Maybe you don't actually deserve rights. You're awfully hashtaggy there. Not something I usually see in human punching bags. I akso notice you didn't say whether you vote in US elections when I asked. Do you?
Why does the capacity for moral reasoning and principled action confer rights for you? Because then they might be able to defend your rights? If so then once again everything comes back to other people only mattering because they can profit you.
As a technical point I can actually prove I am human I keep up to date with state of the art image generators and I happen to know that an image drawing of an analogue clock displaying a time of your choosing, plus some text of your choosing I can draw with a mouse would be too much for an AI to generate. Individually these are difficult for AI to do together its virtually impossible
I use hashtags for discoverability
I'm not answering the question because its a setup to either a non-sequitur or a genetic fallacy. The veracity of my argument has no bearing on anything I do or don't personally do.
Wasn't a non-sequitur, there was a larger point arguing about leftist unity in general which OP was arguing for. I laid that full argument in this comment thread
You are responsible for your own actions here I'm trying to defend them its not my fault if youre so evil that you see others suffering as a joke. And your pathetic attempt to shut me up out of some utilitarian calculus isn't going to work, nor does your photo offend me Ive been desensitized to it by the violent society we live in
@[email protected] This is the larger point I was trying to make and why I don't consider what I did as hijacking You start off by saying the left must be united against the right, but then you carve out a specific exception for when we should shun those on the "left". When people "divide the left" they do it for principled reasons not because theyre opposed to any sort of collaboration. In fact it is the whole idea of "leftist unity" that is idealist, the idea that eveyrone on the left shares fundamental values is just naive and kind of patronising. Really the labels left and right aren't very useful at all they are broad tendancies and don't point to any particular ideology or set of foundational beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-jwkMEGHG8
@ambiguous_yelp Ok cool, glad you think you weren't derailing OP's discussion, but I strongly disagree.
I'll answer for you that you do not vote in US elections, and hazard a guess that if you vote, it's for Green Party. If so, good for you. UK is getting bullshit political spillover from the US.
There is no chicken army, if you want animals to have even a semblance of rights, that's in your hands (if you have hands). You follow your dream.
The rest of us have real work to do.
Begging the question that chickens rights are not important to them.
This idea that they don't deserve rights that they themselves can't fight for is just might makes right thinking and is a cornerstone of fascist thinking.
If chickens ever have rights, you argue, its because someone uses force to stop you from killing chickens. Otherwise, you have a natural right to dominate the chickens because they are powerless to defend themselves, and that powerlessness is the same reason they can't fight for your rights either
So you are just doing fascist might makes right ethics
@ambiguous_yelp That's a fun little diagram there. Let's bring it back to reality here. Chickens, as a species, in a negotiation with humans, as a species, have no leverage. Their sole bargaining chip is, in fact, people who really like them as living creatures. Gallophiles.
What can the chicken do to convince the human to, on a purely moral basis, refrain from domesticating chickendom as a livestock animal? What do they bring without the gallophile?
@log @ambiguous_yelp this is a reductio ad absurdum of your position. You literally just admitted that you believe toddlers have no inherent moral value. What if the moral agents whose guardianship they’re under are abusive? How does your faux-morality handle that?
Chickens have memories emotions preferences and make decisions, they are people.
Why should the world be human centric? Because we control everything? That is just might-makes right thinking again
🌱🏴🅰️🏳️⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp
Log 🪵
J Lou