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Most
people, even those who to an extent support animal rights and think it wrong to
cause suffering to any creature, still believe that the moral status of all
humans is somehow significantly different from that of all nonhuman animals and
that, consequently, the moral obligations owed to nonhuman animals, while
possibly legitimate, are significantly different (and significantly less vital)
than those owed to humans. I question
this assumption on the grounds that there is no legitimate basis for making
such a distinction.
Anyone who
has studied psychology and neuroscience enough can tell you that the
differences between humans and other animals are differences of degree and not
of kind. I don’t want to argue for this
premise as it is well supported by science and doesn’t need philosophical
justification. If anyone disagrees with
it I challenge them to name the quality that all normally functioning (not
mentally retarded, not senile, etc.), adult humans possess fully and that no
other animal possesses at all.
That said,
it could be argued that humans possess some quality to a degree necessary to
achieve a different moral status, and that no other animals possess the quality
to the same degree. If this is the case,
I again challenge anyone making this claim to name what this quality is, where
the degree is at which that quality justifies a significant change in moral status,
and why this point is the relevant one.
I am willing to bet that this cannot be done and that any quality and
degree of that quality chosen will be arbitrary at best, and that most likely there
will be either humans who wouldn’t meet the given criteria or animals who
would, or both.
Even if
that weren’t the case, however, this type of argument suffers from another
serious problem. If it is degree of
possession of a certain quality which gives humans greater moral worth than
other animals, then the same logic can and should lead us to conclude that some
humans have greater moral worth than other humans. There are two ways in which this is true, the
first of which is recognized much more consistently. The first is the difference between human
children and human adults. Human
toddlers, for example, are approximately the equivalents of chimpanzees in most
ways. Why, then, do human children have
a higher moral status than chimpanzees?
There are two common ways of answering this question and I think both
are bad. The first is to say the
difference is that human children will eventually develop into human adults,
whereas chimpanzees will remain chimpanzees.
I am not at all convinced that the future potential of a given being
should relevantly affect its moral status, but even it does, this potential
does not apply in the case of, say, a human toddler who has a fatal disease and
will certainly not live to be an adult.
Many similar cases can be given, and I think that in all of them we want
to say the child has the same moral status as other children.
The second
way in which the logic of degree should lead us to conclude that some humans
have a higher moral status than others (the one which is more rarely mentioned
and yet, I think, serves as a more telling argument) is that the capacities of
some normally functioning human adults are far greater than the capacities of
others. This is true of any of the
qualities that I can imagine to be morally relevant (ability to reason,
richness of experience, ability to recognize and participate in moral
behavior). I think the difference
between the most intelligent human adults and an average human adult is
probably as great as the difference between an average human adult and a human
child or a chimpanzee. These qualities
do not either exist or not exist, they exist on a scale along which different
humans and different animals fall at different places, with considerable
overlap and many humans being significantly further along the scale. If we are going to make moral distinctions
based on degree then some humans are going to turn out more valuable than
others and some nonhuman animals are going to turn out to be more valuable than
some humans. Unless we want to say that
Stephen Hawking and John Nash have more rights or deserve greater consideration
than most of the rest of us, we should avoid this way of doing ethics. And, quite apart from these dangers, I think
this method is completely misguided.
I think the
above argument covers the types of reasoning that most people use, but there
are two others I want to consider: that
humans have a different moral status because they can participate in a
contractual moral agreement while animals cannot, and that humans have a
different moral status because they have souls or because God has given them
that status.
The second
consideration is by far the easier to answer:
to make such an argument you need to justify belief in a soul (and
furthermore, a soul that all humans have and that animals don’t and, even
beyond that, the idea that this soul makes a relevant moral difference) or
belief in God (and more specifically a God who has given humans a greater moral
status and, perhaps most difficult of all, the idea that the whims of some
arrogant deity are morally relevant). This
has never been done and I doubt if any of you can do it. If your religious beliefs are based in faith
and not reason, then you should be responsible enough to recognize that you
cannot justifiably treat other beings in significantly different ways
(specifically ways harmful and prejudicial to them) simply because of a belief
you cannot prove to be true.
The first
consideration is worth taking more seriously.
The first thing to note is that this argument assumes a contractualist
theory of ethics, which few philosophers would agree with, and so anyone
wanting to make this argument would first need to argue successfully for such a
theory. Even if this were done, however,
I don’t think contract ethics provides a firm basis for making moral
distinctions between humans and other animals.
There is little or no evidence to suggest that all normally functioning
adult humans are capable of participating in moral contracts in ways than no
other animals are. The fact is that the ‘moral’
behavior of most humans is just a combination of instinct and conditioning, and
very rarely the product of rational deliberation. Nonhuman animals are capable of acting in these
same ways. Arguably, some nonhuman
animals are also capable of deliberating and making decisions to some extent—the
same as humans are. There are few, if
any, humans who consistently behave in ways dictated by a type of rational
deliberation that other animals are not capable of. Most of these arguments are based in a simple
misunderstanding of the way humans or animals (or both) think and behave. Once these issues are cleared up and a
realistic picture of human and animal psychology is formed, there is little or
no basis for making firm distinctions.
What, then,
is the basis for these distinctions? I
think there is none. I do not deny that
there are differences between humans and animals, even very big ones, but such
differences also exist between humans and I don’t think any of them give some
creatures a significantly different moral status from others. The reason it is wrong to torture, for
example, applies equally to all creatures:
they suffer, and suffering is bad.
NOTE: I am not a utilitarian. I don’t think that every creature must be
given equal weight in every moral decision.
This isn’t the place for a general discussion of ethical theory, but
suffice it to say that what I am arguing here is not that all beings must
always be equally considered, but that the human/nonhuman distinction is not an
adequate basis for giving some beings greater consideration | | |
| 1. To prevent suffering of animals. Ninety-some percent of
the animals farmed for meat/eggs/dairy in the US are raised in misery
in factory farms.
2. To benefit the environment. Animal farming is the number
one cause of deforestation in the world and has always been so.
Deforestation is a problem for a variety of reasons, not the least of
which is that it is the second greatest cause of atmospheric carbon
dioxide, releasing about a quarter of total emissions each year.
Also, amusingly but, unfortunately, truly, methane from the flatulance
of farm animals is one of the leading environmental pollutants, and
methane is more than twenty times as effective as carbon dioxide for
trapping heat in the atmosphere. Yes, seriously--you can do a lot
to fight global warming by going vegetarian. Furthermore, animal
farming results in the deposit of far more excrement than the land can
absord onto farmland, resulting in pollution of lakes and rivers and
destruction of valuable farmland. And the water used for animal
farming (greater quantities than humans consume) is quickly depleting
underground water pools which many dry areas rely on.
3. To save energy/money. Plant farming is vastly cheaper
and more efficent than animal farming. It proteins ten to twenty
times the amount of protein per acre, five to ten times the calories
per acre, and as much as fifty times the proportion of food calorie
output to fossil fuel calorie input. Animals consume many times
the amount of food that they yield. Replacing animal food
production with plant food production in first world countries alone
would yield enough surplus to feed the entire world's population on a
healthy diet with room to spare.
4. To protect the poorest people in the world. Animal food
consumption in western nations harms the world's poor populations in a
variety of ways. Large scale fishing greatly reduces yield of
fishers in areas that rely on fish for survival. Deforestation
for animal farming (which benefits only western nations and the richest
people in third world countries, never the poor population of those
countries) causes soil erosion and consequent flooding which is
catastrophic for poor rural people, reduces rainfall in those areas
which is harmful in a number of ways, makes much needed firewood
scarce, etc.
5. To have a healthier diet. There are no nutrients that
cannot be obtained from a totally vegan diet, and vegetarian vegan
diets are much lower in bad cholesterol and saturated fats.
Vegetable protein is also healthier than animal protein, which
increases the chances of many chronic diseases including diabetes and
several forms of cancer. Studies of longevity and centenarians
consistently show that the oldest people usually eat very little, if
any, meat. I could go on but the arguments for the greater health
of a well managed vegetarian diet are easily found and, I think, the
least of the reasons I've given here for being a vegetarian/vegan.
And the only reason not to do this is a selfish desire for the taste of
meat. Going totally vegan overnight is difficult, sure, but it
isn't all or nothing. It is VERY easy to eat without meat.
It is difficult to find a restaurant that doesn't have at least one
vegetarian option if you look closely, and most have several (in my
experience, there are few if any restaurants which can't serve you
something totally vegan). Make a gradual transition if you have
to--start by limiting your meat intake, then eliminating it
later...start by giving up mammal and bird meats and give up seafood
later...stop eating eggs directly even if you can't avoid them in baked
goods and deserts...etc.
It is beyond my understanding how anyone can not think that the
suffering of any creature is a nonissue, but even if you don't care
about animals, surely reasons 2, 3, and 4 matter to you. You
don't have to be a 'radical' animal rights advocate to care about
global warming, water supplies, and the world's poor.
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| Everyone seems to take for granted that if you were to find out the
world you live in was in fact a virtual reality world generated by a
computer of some sort, you would be better off knowing this is the case
than continuing to be deceived. That, at least, is an assumption made
in films like the Matrix. Neo can take the blue pill and continue
living his comfortable life, or he can take the red pill and learn the
truth about the world: he takes the red pill and we all applaud him and
view him as the film's hero. Except I don't. I think Morpheus was a
jackass who accomplished nothing aside from making a lot of people
miserable and Neo was a victim of bad philosophy. I think he made at
least two major philosophical mistakes.
His first mistake (and
in a sense this is the less contentious of my two claims) is thinking
that knowing the truth is more important than being happy. In other
words Neo, like most people (or at least most thinking people),
believes that truth has intrinsic value--it is worth knowing for its
own sake. I disagree. I completely reject the idea value exists in this
way independently of the sentient creatures who are capable of valuing
things. Value comes entirely from people, and it is senseless of us to
value things for no reason. If we value truth (and I think we should)
we do it for a reason--namely, that truth is extremely useful.
Knowledge is, in fact, power, and the more we know about the world the
more we can do to increase the wellbeing of sentient creatures. This is
why we are right to value truth even if sometimes certain truths make
people uncomfortable. But in a Matrix scenario where it is not a matter
of getting used to certain features of the world we didn't previously
know about, but of jumping into a whole new world that it is not
necessary for anyone to live in and which it is far more difficult to
live in, there is no value in knowing the truth. There are no negative
consequences to not knowing the truth, and no positive consequences to
knowing it. In certain virtual reality scenarios, the problem arises of
other minds: it's possible that you would choose the real world of a
virtual world on the basis that, regardless of whether the world itself
is real, it matters whether the people you interact with are in fact
people. I'm not sure what I think about this problem, but fortunately
it does not arise for Neo: everyone else is in the Matrix too and the
people he perceives are quite real in that they perceive him and their
surroundings in the same way.
Neo's second mistake is taking for
granted that the Matrix world is somehow false and the other word
genuine. It is far from clear to me that this is a good distinction to
make, and in fact I don't think there is any basis for making it. There
is nothing qualitatively different about the two worlds Neo has to
choose from except that one is broken down and miserable and the other
is modern and comfortable. In one world, it appears as though there is
a huge AI system that keeps most of the human race enslaved in a
dreamlike state; in the other world there is no such AI system and
everyone seems to be relatively autonomous. I see no grounds on which
Neo or anyone else can say that one of these worlds is real and the
other fake. Not only that, I don't even know what it would mean to say
something like that: I don't know what property one world could have
that the other doesn't which would make it real while the other is
fake. So there are really two separate claims here: first, that there
are not and never could be grounds on which a person could determine
which world is the real one, and second, that there is in fact no
distinction to be made between a real and a fake world. The first of
these claims is obviously less controversial, and suffices for purposes
of my argument just as well as the second. But I think the second claim
must be taken seriously as well. I'm not fully convinced that there is
no distinction to be made between a real world and a fake one, but
neither I am I convinced that there is such a distinction. (Don't get
me wrong: I believe that, within the context of a single 'world',
distinctions can be made between reality and illusion, but purely on
pragmatic grounds--grounds which don't work for the Matrix scenario.) I
think that everything must be explained in terms of experience, and
that to the extent that we can talk about illusions or dreams or
whatever, we can do so because there is a genuine distinction to be
made between these mental states and normal experience. So if someone
created a virtual reality machine that created a complete world that
seemed real, we could perhaps still speak of it as not being real,
because within the context of experience we understand it as being an
induced mental state and not normal experience. The Matrix may seem
analagous to such a machine, but I don't know if it is: the problem is
that some people have had the experience of living all their lives in
one world (the Matrix), and other people have had the experience of
living all their lives in another (the nonMatrix world), and some
people have lived in both. So in this case it seems odd to talk about
putting it in the context of experience because there is no collective
experience within which to contextualize. Whose experience do we use
and on what grounds? I think it is wrong to choose one person's (or
group of people's) experience as primary on the basis of a truth
distinction, because I consider truth itself as only a meaningful
concept within the context of experience. Perhaps it would be possible
to make sense of the situation if there existed people who had existed
in one world for such a length of time that the witnessed the beginning
of another world (as in the virtual reality game example) and thus
could construe one of the worlds as having come into being in the other
world and therefore as being the 'fake' world in some sense (though
perhaps not in an important sense). Whether or not this could be done
is irrelevant because there are no such people, nor even a reliable
pedigree of people dating back to such a person, in the Matrix example.
Would you take the red pill or the blue pill? If you want the red pill, please tell me what is wrong with my objections.
P. S. You can possibly object to the first problem on the grounds
that the machine might decide to kill us all at some point so it is in
our best interests to get out of it. That doesn't answer my
second argument, of course, but more importantly, I can just alter the
film's example slightly to say that the machine is not sentient and
does not change over time, so there is no chance of it deciding to
destroy us at some point. That leaves the interesting
philosophical problems (namely, those about the value and nature of
truth) raised by this scenario intact.
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