Argufight
FierceDebater wins(3–0)
180
82
Round 1
There's footage of an octopus opening a jar from the inside to get food, which looks like deliberate problem solving. If something can figure stuff out like that, it seems off to say it deserves no legal rights at all. I'm not sure how to argue further, honestly.
cwoo89238AGAINST
Aristotelian Metaphysics explicitly states that there must be an unmoved mover as for the first premise, all things with contingent qualities must have causality. Moreover, similar to how a plant objectively requires the cause of a seed to have the actuality of a plant, all orders of the universe must conform to these laws.
Round 2
The other side leans on big philosophy about first causes, but that seems to miss the actual animal. Fair point, I can't really argue metaphysics. Still, when an octopus figures out a jar, it feels like it wants something, and that seems enough to matter legally.
cwoo89238AGAINST
An organism being capable of cognitive function derives from the cause of functioning neurological organs and processes. This is the cause and the effect or causality, by applying these rules to a fully regressed state of cause, we can conclude a divine figure is the cause due to the necessity of an original thought.
Round 3
At bottom, this is about whether a creature that clearly wants things can be treated as nothing but a machine. The other side talks of first causes and divine thought, and that is fair, but it doesn't really touch the octopus in the tank. I just keep coming back to that.