Henry Sturman wrote:

1. Granted animals are not the same as humans. But to suggest that animals have no rights whatsoever seems a bit extreme, since this suggests there is no limit at all to what people should be able to do to animals. Should people be able to torture dogs just for fun, for example? I would think the answer to such questions, as some have suggested above, depends on whether animals are capable of real suffering and on whether this suffering is comparable to how a human suffers. This is an important philosophical question which is often ignored, both by animal rights activists (they simply take it for granted animals feel pain just as humans do) and by animal rights cynics (such as the post above which is only interested in animals' ideas and not in the question of whether animals can suffer).

Let's take it as given that we don't know whether animals suffer or not and are unlikely to learn at any point in the near future. Let's also take for granted the idea that animals can suffer in the service of making you criticism of the post as strong as possible. So we have to take actions that we think are likely to reduce suffering, such as only killing dogs for fur under general anesthetic or something like that. We would also presumably prevent people from torturing animals. But by the same token we might consider it right to do things that we know will make animals suffer in the interests of preventing avoidable human suffering, e.g. - testing medicine on animals. And human suffering would still rank above animal suffering since it would also inhibit the growth of knowledge.

2.To claim that laws against murder exist to protect the free development of ideas is not only very rare, but also, it seems to me, very odd. Surely, humans have some kind of intrinsic value and right to life (or at least so we assume) apart from the use of humans as a means to something else (i.e. the creation of ideas useful for other people). So, even if it can be proven that some person can never have any useful ideas, surely that in no way diminishes his right not to be killed.

The first point that you think there is some transcendent value in a human being above and beyond ideas is unanswerable as it stands as you have not explained what you think that value consists of. When you come up with a theory we can discuss it until then I have no reason to change my position. As for the second point: how can we be sure that a person can never have any useful ideas unless he is completely brain dead? Nobody is psychic and so nobody has access to another person's ideas. Consider a homeless drug addict who roots through bins for food. Perhaps he will learn that what is doing is not a very good idea and will become a better person and devlop new knowledge about how and why people end up in such distressing circumstances.

3.What in fact is the argument for the assumption that ideas and knowledge play such a prime role in morality and existence? What about other factors, such as hapiness? For example, is not a culture with decent happy people who do not make any advancement for hundreds of years better off than a culture with unhappy people who create a lot of technological inventions? Is creation really the only or main object of human life? Why?

Let's suppose that totally uncreative people can be happy. I think this is a dubious proposition, but let's grant it anyway. Well, their happiness can only consist of psychological feelings generated according to a fixed set of ideas, dispositions, feelings and so on. Because they generate no new knowledge their influence on the rest of the world will be finite and indeed sooner or later their civilisation will be totally destroyed by something that catches them by surprise, e.g. - the Sun will undergo enormous changes in a few billion years that will make Earth uninhabitable for human life. so their lives will consist of pushing a finite set of buttons for pleasure for a finite time, after which they will all die and no new people of that type will ever exist again. They will also be stuck with a finite set of buttons to push to get themselves out of unhappy states and it is a lot easier to get things wrong and be unhappy than to get them right and be happy. So if a person gets in an unhappy state and pushes all the buttons and stays unhappy then he is stuck in a polluted waterway without any means of propulsion.

Now consider a culture that grows new knowledge. First, each time they invent a new idea or technowhatsit they have to consider their new situation to be better than the old one or they would scrap the new idea or technowhatsit. The growth of knowledge is potentially open-ended so they could have an infinite number of such improvements. Furthermore they will become happy in new ways that don't involve pushing the finite buttons on the pleasure machine in their genes and their current ideas. For example, quantum theory is a lot cooler than classical physics and makes people who understand it happy in a way that somebody who doesn't understand quantum physics won't understand. So I don't think it can be true that everyone in a culture that is growing knowledge is unhappy. And the unhappy people will have more chances to make themselves happy than they can possibly explore.

Now let's return to the culture that doesn't grow knowledge. Knowledge can grow by accident: a person can make a mistake and then decide it is an improvement. For example, a person can mispronounce some word and find the result funny or illuminating. Perhaps this is how Freud came up with his psychological theories and I have little doubt that lots of jokes come from this process. And then of course there is the famous story of how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, how Roentgen discovered X-rays and so on. With finite knowledge mistakes are bound to be made and some will be regarded as improvements by those who make them? So where does this new knowledge go? The only answer can be somebody has to deliberately squash it, which will make its originator unhappy. So I don't think a culture that fails to generate knowledge can be a happy place.