@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?
You think human children are property, why do you care about guardianship being beneficial to human children but not that owning other creatures should be beneficial to those other creatures.
What is the trait difference between a human child and a chicken legally owned by a human that makes it ok to kill and eat one but not the other, neither human children nor chickens can defend your rights in a war
#Ethics #Speciesism #HumanSupremacy #Chickens #YouthLiberation
@ambiguous_yelp @jlou You are free to create a convention on the rights of livestock animals, if you are so inclined. Such could certainly create protections that would invalidate one person's ownership of an animal and transfer it to another. I do not think it will achieve widespread voluntary adoption, if it does not allow for a noted omnivorous species to eat animals under any circumstances.
The main difference, I think, is that most adult humans seek vengeance if you eat their babies.
We should interfere in nature to reduce wild animal suffering, but that is more complicated than the straw man you’ve constructed of banning predation. Moral agents shouldn’t intentionally cause increases in total suffering for personal pleasure.
Also, pro-animal people don’t think that eating animals, under absolutely any circumstances is wrong, anymore than eating people is wrong in cases where there is extreme starvation and deprivation. You’re engaged in a straw man
@jlou @ambiguous_yelp "Moral agents shouldn't intentionally cause increases in total suffering for personal pleasure."
I do not accept this as axiomatic. It is not one of my premises, and my principles do not support it as a derivation. Pleasure and suffering are subjective, and unsuited for use as a moral metric, even ignoring that morality is not well suited for metrics.
@jlou @ambiguous_yelp The trolley problem is a useless hypothetical. You constructed this one to force me into a false binary. I am not obligated to respond to your questions, just as you are not obligated to answer mine.
In any case where the well being of a toddler is pitted against the well being of an adult, the first question that must be asked is why the choice is necessary. It is only after that is answered satisfactorily that I pick the adult, barring any other relevant information.
@jlou @ambiguous_yelp Illustrating an important difference between us, but doing nothing to suggest either is a morally superior choice.
You would prefer to defend the defenseless. I would prefer to protect the one that could pull or not pull the lever if we were transposed.
Its not a preference I don't prioritize non-human rights over human rights: its about equality and justice, I don't confine exploit kill and eat humans either..
You're seriously asking me to defend the position that a moral framework that disallows eating dumpster babies is better than one that allows it?
@ambiguous_yelp @jlou If you can show me any evidence that anyone has ever eaten a trash baby (outside of dark humor jokes) I will entertain your ridiculous edge case. If that is all you have left, I think we're agreed that neither of us will be adopting the moral philosophy of the other.
So, that settled, I hope you are doing something active to keep the US ruling party from shitting on your corner of the planet. And presumably all the animals on it.
Epsteins circle killed babies, probably from their rape victims. And where there's smoke theres fire, there are other sex trafficking rings.
Your framework would have nothing to say about this and your defense is that its a niche moral issue?
@ambiguous_yelp @jlou My position is that the actions of that circle have placed them well outside the social contract enjoyed by cooperative civilization, and they therefore do not enjoy the benefit of rights. The abhorrence of it all suggests that they should all be killed. It would be no more immoral than killing a chicken.
But we probably shouldn't *literally* eat the rich. Humans get squicky about that sort of thing.
Log 🪵
🌱🏴🅰️🏳️⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp
J Lou