BigBallinStalin wrote:I understand that's the basis of utilitarianism, but for other ethical systems, it simply isn't. So pick and choose whichever makes you feel best about this issue, and go from there. To me, that's acting arbitrarily because your choice is based on your preference. One can use such great arguments for a particular ethical system, but for this situation there is no ONE and ONLY ethical system which can be demonstrated as the best one. After all the arguments on either side, one simply has to rely on their preference, thus arbitrarily selects the system which they prefer.
I do not speak for every person in this thread, but I follow a utilitarian system of ethics in general. In particular, I subscribe to
preference utilitarianism. Thus I did not select a system of ethics to apply to this situation arbitrarily. Preference utilitarianism is not so different from other forms of utilitarianism when it comes to the question of animal rights, however. Any rational utilitarian system that defends the rights of humans to be unharmed or protected against killing has to base it on some reason why humans deserve not to be harmed. The core reason, as you admit, is that humans do not like feeling pain. Since this is also true of non-human animals (this must be conceded for the reason I mentioned above -- we must assume this to be true, just as we assume that other humans can and do feel pain despite their ability to lie; and also, this is not voodoo, since modern biology confirms that the nervous systems of these animals are really not so different from that of humans), any system that extends the right to be free from harm to humans is arbitrarily speciesist if it does not also extend that to species that have capacities that are of a morally relevant nature.
The key thing you ignore is my challenge -- it is the crux to this issue. You may not agree with my particular system of ethics. That is not the point. The point is, I challenge you to come up with
any self-consistent system of ethics that extends protections to humans but not to non-human animals. The reason I argue that this cannot be done is that the differences between humans and non-human animals are differences of degree and not of kind. As a result of continuous evolutionary progress, humans are not separated from other species by some special kind of line. Chimpanzees share many of the same reasoning characteristics as humans, even if the latter have developed them to a far greater extent than the former.
The only defense left is to suggest that because we're
much more intelligent than the chimpanzees, we deserve protections that they do not. But intelligence has never been a rationally defensible way for classifying who deserves rights and who does not. It is quite possible that there are chimpanzees that are more intelligent than the profoundly mentally disabled. But also, the logic that some other group, by virtue of its stupidity or "dumbness," as you put it, does not deserve the same rights we do, has been the core of the worst atrocities in our history. What is so different in the argument that because animals are not as smart as humans, we can enslave or torture them, from the argument that because blacks or Jews are not as smart as whites or Aryans, we can enslave or torture them too?
It is not enough to assert that you can discard my argument because it's just one of many defensible systems, because I argue that any of the defensible systems, when carried through to its logical conclusion and not just arbitrarily stopped at the line of our species, leads to a revolution in our way of thinking about animal rights. If you wish to discard my thinking, you must advance your own self-consistent system of ethics that is in line with what you have argued, and then live by it.
