From: Greg Jordan (jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 08:03:47 MDT
On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Keith Elis wrote:
> > I do not believe in morality, but I have an aesthetic
> > appreciation for animals, not just as a class, but as
> > individuals. It's a definite lift for me to know animals are
> > getting along well, and it's a tragedy when one is lost
> > unnecessarily, by something I did and could easily have
> > avoided. It's not so much about minimizing suffering as
> > maximizing happiness. Nature already kills and tortures
> > animals every day - including humans - but humans have the
> > capacity, rarely used, to empathize with others, including
> > animals. This empathy is a plus, an expansion of potential happiness.
>
> I think you would probably fare better if you stuck to the aesthetic
> argument. At least that can be reduced to personal preference, which
> cannot be disputed. Here, you're making an odd argument which
> anthropomorphizes animals, exacerbated by the equally odd implicit claim
> that you know what makes animals happy. This argument would apply
> equally well down the food-chain until, at some arbitrary point in the
> taxonomy -- say, just below the nematode and just above blue-green algae
> -- it becomes absurd.
My argument is pretty much entirely aesthetic. But that doesn't
necessarily make it "personal preference", either. I have a feeling that
aesthetic principles tend to be quite similar across large numbers of
human beings. Lots of people obviously have the ability to appreciate
animals - one look at our culture tells us that. Many people just
arbitrarily stop caring about animals when it interferes with an activity
(eating meat) that is a nearly universal meme in the society and
considered impossible to break (and the connection between
store-packaged meats and real-live animals is heavily suppressed in the
minds of many people).
The "anthropomorphizing" critique is flawed because nonhuman animals *do*
have many characteristics in common with humans, not surprising given our
common evolutionary history. But again, many people deny evolution, and
many people also deny that humans are a type of animal.
It's not *too* mysterious to guess that getting shot or throat-slit is not
in the top 10 of a deer or cow's daily activities, it seems to me the
burden of proof is on those who argue that animals are just robots that
don't feel pain or care about what happens to themselves.
The food chain, the chain of living things, is a continuous spectrum of
sentience and intelligence, from humans fading down into things like
nematodes and algae, which are so little sentient or intelligent that most
people do not use those terms to describe them. It's a judgment call where
you stop eating - whether you eat humans and everything else, or whether
you eat only nonhuman animals, or just chicken not beef, or fish and not
chicken, or insects but not fish. It ought to be a judgment at least
partially based on what you know, or can reasonably infer, about the food
source's value to you and the aesthetic consequences of eating it. Is one
grasshopper different enough from another that eating it removes a unique
and precious source of value in the world? Does it feel enough that
killing it and eating it would bring enough trauma into the world to
disturb your sense of your own self-efficacy? I tend to think the more
value we can keep in the world, the better, and the less
suffering and destruction we can cause, the better. But there are often
other considerations...
gej
resourcesoftheworld.org
jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu
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