I'm going to assume a meaning, and go on. Having rights means someone else legislated, or approved, or allowed, the behavior that you have the right to perform.  A person has the right to be cruel to another in innumerable ways, each legal.  Some ways, however, ARE illegal for the person to perform, so the person "has no legal right". Values make a hell of a difference wrt appreciating another person's experience, whether or not the person is human.  You can even value the appreciation, in terms of its worth to you. For example: If I stop eating meat, because I appreciate the suffering that animals go through in captivity and during slaughter, then will I help those animals?  No.  They'll all be raised and killed anyway, because lots of other people will still eat meat, so I don't value my appreciation of the suffering of those animals: the appreciation will make no difference, and meanwhile, it gets me down.  I don't value the appreciation: if it's possible for me not to have it, or to have it less, I probably will, at that point. I've just committed a logical fallacy, the fallacy of slippery assimilation.  The way out of the fallacy is to appreciate that at least ONE person(non-human) might not suffer that way AT ALL, because of my not eating meat.  I will save one animal from suffering factory-raising and slaughter. A common, and false, argument against ethics, is that values MUST be relative, since it's impossible to associate indexes with another's ontologically subjective experience.  Here's an example, of me thinking about a bull tortured by ring-clamp circumcision.  The argument goes: "I can't find accurate mappings of signs of internal experience in another to his internal experience.  Mappings that correspond to the ones I demonstrate (like screaming when I feel pain), might be different for him.  Just because he's screaming with that agonized sound, is rolling on the floor, his eyes bulging, and his legs kicking, doesn't mean he necessarily feels agony." That is NOT an argument I use to persuade me to eat meat.  But that kind of argument is, I think, a common conscious response people make when the politics of the rest of their arguments are satisfied, politics that depended only on knowledge of the situation.  Knowledge contrasts with association, in the case of a decision.  Associating into the position of another is very different than knowing how that person feels, felt, or will feel. But here are my pro-meat-eating arguments: - Just because you eat the meat, you are not factoryfarm employee; you aren't responsible for the animal's torture.  - the meat in the cooler is just meat, the animal is long dead.  - what can one person who doesn't eat meat do? (see argument above) - meat adds variety and flavor to my meals My argument is conductive, each premise separately lending support to the conclusion.  The most important thing to do with a conductive argument is counter each premise separately, while building another argument toward an opposing conclusion. In fact, I do eat meat, and I don't need to eat meat, and I'm searching for alternatives to add variety and flavor to my meals, and I'm afraid, not ethical. -nj