Jean asked:

After Andy Lambert's answer to Jenny's question about fox hunting, I would like to ask the following:

Do human beings have the moral right to kill other living "non-human" beings only and merely for their
pleasure and amusement?

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Your question presupposes that there are "moral rights", you may want to think about that. Think
about answering the questions: What is a "moral right"? What makes it so? Who decides what it is?
Where would the authority come from? Who is bound by it? Why should people respect such rights?
Only then you'd have a chance to tackle your question...

Helene Dumitriu

Firstly, you might want to think about a basis for any discrimination between human and non human
life. You might think about the expanding moral circle, which once encompassed only educated white
males but — if you're into deep ecology, for example — might now have a place for the entire
ecosystem. Much contemporary debate has focused on the application of utilitarian and contractualist
theory to this issue — see Peter Singer's writings on utilitarianism or Peter Carruthers The Animals
Issue— but this depends on accepting the premisses of those theories. Contractualists would say
that only rational humans could make a moral contract. For more on this, you could read the article on
the Philosophos.com webpage, describing some of the features and consequences of rationality,
called Dehumanisation of Humanity: Zero Ground, by Munayem Mayenin. Utilitarians, however,
would suggest that there isn't much intrinsic difference between humans and animals — only the
quantity of suffering, perhaps.

I'd say there's something unconvincing about the utilitarian position: how it relates pain with
unhappiness (or lower utility) and, subsequently, the connection to a world that could scientifically
figure all such things out. I think questions of the worthwhileness of suffering and pain need thoughtful
interpretation! Especially concerning the possible difference in 'interpretation' of pain by animals and
humans. Also, the idea of the 'blanket' avoiding of discomfort seems sometimes linked to a separate
agenda of conflict-free consumer life.

To come back to your question about killing for amusement, I'd say look beyond one particular
culture's positing of rights for animals and at a wider picture which presents many groups that hold
respect for nature as paramount, while killing animals for food and daily life. I'd imagine they get some
pleasure when killing, but don't kill for pleasure. You might want to think about the character of the
one doing the killing. Even if the animals themselves don't have moral significance, our treatment of
them does. Alternatively, teacher of mine once said, 'Never eat anything that knew its mother'.

Andy Lambert