Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Animal Rights Discourse Bad – Entrenches Anthropocentrism
Download 1.43 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Animal Rights Discourse Bad – Entrenches Anthropocentrism
Animal Rights Discourse Bad – Entrenches AnthropocentrismRIGHTS VIEW FOCUSES ON “INDIVIDUALS” WHICH REFLECTS ANTHROPOCENTRIC BIAS Tom Regan, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, North Carolina State University, 2003, The Animal Ethics Reader, eds. Armstrong & Botzler, p. 456 Although the rights view and utilitarianism differ in important ways, they are the same in others. Like utilitarian attacks on anthropocentrism, the rights view seeks to make its case by working within the major ethical categories of the anthropocentric tradition. For example, utilitarians do not deny the moral relevance of human pleasure and pain, so important to our humanist forebears; they accept it and seek to extend our moral horizons to include the moral relevance of the pleasures and pains of other animals. For its part, the rights view does not deny the moral importance of the individual, a central article of belief in theistic and humanistic thought; rather, it accepts this moral datum and seeks to widen the class of individuals who are thought of in this way to include nonhuman animals. Because both the positions discussed in the preceding use major ethical categories handed down by our predecessors, some influential thinkers argue that these positions, despite all appearances to the contrary, remain in bondage to anthropocentric prejudices. GIVING “RIGHTS” TO ANIMALS IS BAD – IT REINFORCES ANTHROPOCENTRISM David Orton, Coordinator of the environmental research group the Green Web. “Deep Ecology and Animal Rights”. Green Web. 2000. http://home.ca.inter.net/~greenweb/DE-AR.html Most deep ecology supporters do not approve of the use of the term "rights" as in "animal rights". (For a discussion of this, see John Livingston's book Rogue Primate: An exploration of human domestication, 1994, Key Porter Books.) Rights are seen as a human-centered extension term applied to animals, with roots in power and privilege. The use of this term overlooks the intrinsic values inhering in animals and their uniqueness, and hence the need for a movement conceptualization which expresses this - not rights as an extension of human rights. Animal Rights Discourse Bad – Entrenches AnthropocentrismTHE INCLUSION OF “THE ANIMAL” WITHIN THE REALM OF ETHICS IMPOSES A HOMOGENOUS VIEW OF ANIMALITY THAT MAINTAINS ANTHROPOCENTRIC DUALISMS. MERELY ASSERTING A DEMAND FOR INCLUSION STILL MAINTAINS THE HUMAN AS THE STANDARD FOR ETHICAL CONSIDERATION. Calarco 2004, Matthew, Department of Philosophy @ Sweet Briar College, “Deconstructionism is not Vegetarianism,” Continental Philosophy Review, 32.2, p. 184-5 Here again it is evident that Levinas’s humanism takes Heidegger’s delimitation of metaphysical humanism into account by not equating the essence of the human with the metaphysical determination of man as animal rationale. But Levinas’s displacement of the humanist subject of metaphysics is only partially successful; it still retains and reinforces the anthropocentrism of classical humanism insofar as the question of the animal’s being is never posed but is instead determined homogeneously and in relation to the measure of man (a tendency which is largely true of Heidegger as well). For Levinas, the animal is without human ethics; the ethical relation with the animal is based on the “prototype” of human ethics – the human remains always and everywhere the measure of the animal. Nor does Levinas ever question this category (“the animal”) for its homogenizing tendencies – as if we could trust the notion that “the animal” signifies a homogenous group of beings located on the other side of the human. The thinking of singularity and radical alterity accorded to the other human being by Levinas never seems to extend beyond the human to the other animal, to the animal as other. It is these stubborn and dogmatic remnants of anthropocentrism that ultimately confirm Derrida’s claim that Levinas’s thinking remains a “profound humanism.” Now one could contest Levinas’s anthropocentrism by turning the tables on him, i.e., by reversing this binary opposition and demonstrating that the animal as such calls us to responsibility or that the animal as such is itself capable of responsibility and saintliness. No doubt a good case could be developed along these lines for certain forms of animal life. But this critical response, however necessary and justified it may be, needs to attend to its implicit reliance on a set of metaphysical distinctions (The Human and The Animal) that found and undergird the very anthropocentrism being called into question. For those of us who are concerned about posing the question of animal ethics in the context of contemporary Continental thought and related theories and practices, the issue of how best to delimit and challenge this lingering anthropocentrism without naively reinforcing it is of primary importance. I have insisted on reading Levinas’s remarks on animality at length because his anthropocentrism is representative of the manner in which many of those who work in the post-Heideggerian tradition tend to understand the place of “the animal” with regard to “the ethical,” however this latter term is understood. Most contemporary Continental philosophers are not simply Cartesian or Spinozist, they are not likely to deny that animals have consciousness or to hold that vegetarianism is irrational or womanish. But when it comes to rethinking community, language, finitude, or relation (all of these terms serving as different names for a thought of “the ethical”), there is an implicit tendency to privilege the human and consider the animal as having a secondary or derivative role. Such anthropocentrism is evident not only in Levinas but also, albeit it in differentiated forms, in much of what goes by the name of “poststructuralism.” The critical question that needs to be addressed, then, is not how to challenge a straightforward denial of the possibility of animal ethics, but rather, how best to respond to this more nuanced and surreptitious form of anthropocentrism. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.43 Mb. Share with your friends:
|