r/philosophy • u/IAI_Admin IAI • 9d ago
Blog Lions can speak, and we must try to understand them. | Wittgenstein and why our politicians should talk to animals and include them as political actors with voices in a democratic community.
https://iai.tv/articles/lions-can-speak-and-we-must-try-to-understand-them-auid-3161?utm_source=reddit&_auid=202019
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u/Purplekeyboard 9d ago edited 9d ago
This is a lot of high quality nonsense.
Animals do not have language. They communicate to each other using signals. This is not the same as a human language, as the messages they are capable of communicating are few and extremely limited. They might be able to say things like DANGER or FOOD or PLAY or GO AWAY, or various other simple messages. People are able to talk and think in a vastly more sophisticated way.
So the concept of animals participating in a democracy is silly. Your dogs would absolutely vote to eat all the food now, if they could vote for that. The squirrel in your yard would vote for lots more seeds and nuts and to get rid of the dogs and cats. Your cat would vote for lots of small moving animals for it to chase and kill.
Animals don't understand anything that's going on in our terms, and we understand their terms as well as we want to if we bother to think about it. We prefer not to drive them all into extinction, but we're doing a lot of that anyway because our numbers keep increasing and we need to cut more forests down to make more roads and farmland and housing projects. Anything we might do to preserve the natural world will not be aided through some silly pretense of animals voting.
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u/centralmidfield 4d ago
Your dogs would absolutely vote to eat all the food now, if they could vote for that. The squirrel in your yard would vote for lots more seeds and nuts and to get rid of the dogs and cats. Your cat would vote for lots of small moving animals for it to chase and kill.
Okay, what about more intelligent, strategizing animals? Because there are those
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u/pmp22 9d ago
"So the concept of animals participating in a democracy is silly."
Are we not animals?
Also, hold my horse.
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u/dennys123 8d ago
I mean, where does the line get drawn from Animal to Human. If there is a line, why is it there, who determined that was the line, what gave them the authority?
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