Hirsute

\HUR-soot; HIR-soot; hur-SOOT; hir-SOOT\, adjective:

Covered with hair; set with bristles; shaggy; hairy.

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The concept of “souls” is one that I think could be left out of the moral rights debate concerning animals.

In the video today, one woman mentioned that she thought all animals not only deserved rights but possessed valuable (implicitly equally valuable) souls. I found myself wondering why the moderator did not ask her to expatiate nor bring up any contention to this point, and realized immediately that had he done so, the argument would have folded into another one completely—into a realm of somewhat arbitrary debate.

Plenty of times in the history of our country has the concept of having a soul tried to infiltrate legislation and moral philosophy to cull worth from things, and time and time again the argument has been proved inadequate. As much as people would like to call themselves faith-based beings, we are all very aware that souls don’t hold up in moral debate. They simply carry no punch, they get proven flimsy and fold under pressure—even by those who believe in them. Especially concerning the moral debate about animals, where arbitrary reasons for their separation from humans abound, the concept of soul flourishes a similarly arbitrary agenda for the other side (sometimes, as in the video).

It is best to argue about things we know, and match it with our intuitions, moral or otherwise. All moral debates will eventually scroll themselves back to macrocosms of personal ethics and moral considerations—even to the point of questioning what morals are all about. We’re all humans, and we often have diverse ideas about things, extending backwards to the cores of our belief systems. But upon engaging in moral debate, we often rely on reason, not because it’s necessarily more correct than faith/spirituality, but because all of us have faculties of reason that are inherently accessible, and that through reasoned information, we can communicate in debates.

This might sound rather harsh in opposition to souls or faith-based reasoning, but I don’t mean it to be. There is certainly a time and place for discussion of the soul, and it does indeed deserve moral attention in any debate after having its tenets laid down. But I do not claim that souls should be for the most part exempt from rights debates for atheist or secular reasons, or that I think reason only flourishes in a lieu of spirituality, but rather that any well-reasoned argument will not rely on faith-based evidence to prove its positions. It’s simple not a good way to argue.

(Also, I don’t mean this to be an attack on that woman or her points. She simply got me thinking. I do, however, disagree that all things have rights, as she did not specify distinctions between living things and lifeless (as far as we know) matter, but I’m not quite prepared to give a few paragraphs on that yet.)