Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species Barrier
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Respecting Liberty Rights of Great Apes Key to Breaking the Species BarrierEXTENSION OF EQUALITY WILL REDUCE PERCEIVED DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUMANS AND OTHER APES Dale Jamieson, Professor of philosophy, University of Colorado @ Boulder, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 225 However, it is interesting to note that perception of difference often shifts once moral equality is recognized. Before emancipation (and still among some confirmed racists) American blacks were often perceived as more like apes or monkeys than like Caucasian humans. Once moral equality was admitted, perceptions of identity and difference began to change. Increasingly, blacks came to be viewed as part of the “human family,” all of whose members are regarded qualitatively different from “mere animals.” Perhaps some day we will reach a stage in which the similarities among the great apes will be salient for us, and the differences among them will be dismissed as trivial and unimportant, or perhaps even enriching.
Bernard E. Rollin, professor of philosophy, Colorado State University, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 211-2 For whatever reason, then, society has begun to ‘remember’ the extension of our consensus ethic for humans to animals. Like virtually all social revolutions in stable democracies, this has occurred by articulating the implicit, in an incremental fashion, rather than by the imposition of radically new ideas totally discontinuous with our social-ethical assumptions. The next key question is this: “How can one ensure that this revolution continues to unfold, rather than becoming stagnant or aborted at its current stage?” We have already learned from Socrates something significant about ethical change. Let us now develop a number of insights from Hume. Hume pointed out that morality involves a collaborative effort of reason and passion, i.e. emotion. Reason may allow us to deduce logical consequences from our moral ideas, but reason does not motivate us to act. We are motivated by emotional predilections and disinclinations, by things that make us happy, or indignant, or excite in us pity, and so on. Second, Hume pointed out that what fuels moral life is sympathy, i.e. the fellow feeling with other beings, which allows us to respond to positive and negative feelings in them as motivations for our actions. These insights of Hume seem to be borne out well with regard to our emerging ethic on animals. Obviously, the first stirrings of concern for animals were for those animals with whom we enjoy a relationship of sympathy or fellow feeling—companion animals. They respond to our moods and feelings, we respond to theirs. This, of course, helps explain the overwhelming primacy of concern of the traditional humane movement for pets, especially dogs. The further removed from us an animal is, the les likely we are to share sympathy with it. Thus many leaders of the traditional humane movement were unabashed anglers, and otherwise sensitive people feel no compunctions about dispatching snakes in any number of ways. Furthermore, our emotions with respect to an animal, or to its treatment, will inexorably shape our tendency to apply the emerging ethic to that animal. Few of us will readily and naturally extend our ethic to sharks or rats, though patently both of these animal meet the criteria for moral concern: they are conscious and have natures. But we are acculturated to see these animals as noxious, as threats, as vermin, and thus we are not exercised about their wanton destruction, even when it is done simply for fun, as in the case of sharks, or in painful ways, as in the case of rodents. It is extremely significant that the general public in California opposed the hunting of mountain lions until a film of lions taking prey was disseminated, at which point concern for the lions dropped dramatically. SERIOUS OBSTACLES TO EXTENDING RIGHTS TO ANIMALS DEMAND AN INCREMENTAL APPROACH TO SUCCEED Steven M. Wise, Animal rights attorney and professor Vermont Law School, 2002, Drawing the Line: science and the case for animal rights, p. 9 An advocate for the legal rights for nonhuman animals must proceed one step at a time, for progress is impeded by physical, economic, political, religious, historical, legal and psychological obstacles. Although the historical and legal obstacles remain about the same for every nonhuman of every species, we’ll see that the physical, economic, political, religious, historical, legal and psychological obstacles can loom higher for some nonhumans than for others. AT: “Great Ape Project is Speciest”FAILURE TO MAKE COMPROMISES RESULTS IN LESS PROTECTION OF ANIMAL INTERESTS Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Rain Without Thunder, p. 164 Garner assumes that “insider” status is desirable, although he does acknowledge that “there is a danger here of giving the impression that all forms of insider dealing with the government are valuable.” And though he does recognize that groups may be seriously compromised by efforts to achieve such status, he assumes that “there are advantages in the compromise approach.” Garner argues that in the absence of such compromise there might be “fewer and weaker animal protection measures” and that compromise may claim responsibility for “improvement in the way animals are treated…in the short term.” Indeed, Garner dismisses the notion that anyone would not want “insider” status: he claims that “most groups…want to achieve access to government even if they will not admit as much.” He remarks that “some groups might want to be outsiders, as no doubt some motorists might want to drive a ten-year-old-car.”
Paola Cavalieri & Peter Singer, Editor Edica & Animali and Professor of Bioethics @ Princeton, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 309-10 How can we advocate inclusion or exclusion for whole species, when the whole approach of animal liberationist ethics has been to deny the validity of species boundaries, and to emphasize the overlap in characteristics between members of our own species and members of other species? Have we not always said that the boundary of species is a morally relevant distinction, based on mere biological data? Are we not in danger of reverting to a new form of speciesism? This is a problem that has to do with boundaries, and boundaries are here tied up with the collective feature of the proposed manumission. What, then, can be said in favor of such a collective manumission, apart from recognition of its obvious symbolic value? We think that a direction can be found, once more, in history. It is already clear that in classical antiquity, while the collective emancipation of Messenian helots led to some dramatic social changes, the random manumission of individual human slaves never led to any noteworthy social progress. Even in more recent times, when a conscious political design was not only feasible, but also actually pursued – namely, during the first stages of the anti-slavery struggle in the nineteenth-century United States –the freeing of individual slaves, or even the setting free by an enlightened plantation owner of all the slaves on his plantation, did little good for the anti-slavery side as a whole. Given that the global admission of nonhuman animals to the community of equals seems out of the question for the moment, one way to avoid a parallel failure is to focus on the species as a collectivity, and to opt for (otherwise questionable) rigid boundaries. 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:
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