Planet Debate 2011 September/October l-d release Animal Rights
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- AT: “If You Don’t Solve All Animal Exploitation There’s No Advantage”
Representations KeyREPRESENTATIONS SHAPE REALITY – THE VIEW THAT ‘MAN’ IS OUTSIDE AND SEPARATE FROM NATURE CREATES ACTION TO SUPPORT IT Fouts, President of non-profit organization, Friends of Washoe; Co-Director of Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute; Professor of Psychology and Research at Central Washington University. 2004 “APES, DARWINIAN CONTINUITY, AND THE LAW”. Animal Law. 10 Animal L. 99 , p. 102-3 Our perspective of the world determines how we behave in it. If we thought Earth was flat, we would avoid trying to sail around it. If we thought Earth was the center of the universe, we might try to explore other planets, but without much success. While geocentric models are now regarded as an erroneous part of our scientific history, we are currently experiencing a major change in perspective with regard to our species' place in nature and our relationships with other organic beings. Since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species almost 150 years ago, a great deal of evidence has been discovered stimulating change from the erroneous view that "man" is superior to and different in kind from our fellow beings, to a view emphasizing evolutionary continuity for both the mind and body. For an example of how our worldview affects our behavior, consider the following questions: How would witch hunts be viewed today? Would our legislatures consider laws that would allow the punishment of people who practice witchcraft? Could one seek damages from a person they accused of putting a curse on them? Such charges and claims would be laughed at today, yet it is estimated that they resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths in our past through the offices of church and state. These wrongs were visited mainly on women and were the result of a misled worldview. The judges, prosecutors, and people of that time believed in this false worldview, though it was inconsistent with the empirical realities of life. The Platonic-Aristotelian and Cartesian worldviews, which see "man" as superior to all other beings, including women, are also unrealistic. They remain popular even though they starkly contrast the empirical reality of Darwinian continuity, which states that evolution must be gradual, with no major breaks or discontinuities. In the ancient Greek worldview - the more traditional and ladder-like "chain of being" model - inferior creatures were placed in descending order below the superior Greek male human. Descartes' worldview was slightly different, maintaining that a definite gap, or difference in kind, existed between man and the defective automata below him. But his view still maintained a hierarchy with "man" above and outside of nature, and lumped all the other beings below "man" in one great unthinking, unfeeling, imperfect mass of automata. These imperfect automata were considered quite distinct and different in kind from "man" because they lacked reason and, being machinelike, were incapable of thought and feeling. EVEN IF WE CANNOT EVER TRULY BECOME ONE WITH “THE OTHER” A PRINCIPLE OF RESPECT HELPS BUILD UNDERSTANDING Barbara Noske, Researcher, Department of Social Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, 1994, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity, eds. Cavalieri & Singer, p. 265 Admittedly there is a sense in which we can never be at one with the other. We will never succeed in leaping over our own socialization and our Western history. Thus Western anthropologists cannot ever totally know or understand the people they study. Anthropologists necessarily remain prisoners of their own background. In this fundamental sense ethnocentrism can never be totally overcome. But at least as far as human subjects are concerned, the anthropologist is supposed to tread upon this unknowable ground with respect rather than with disdain.
Gary L. Francione, Professor of Law, Rutgers University, 1996, Rain Without Thunder, p. 213-4 What this demonstrates, however, is not that the incremental approach cannot work but rather that it is essential to understand, in analyzing a proposed prohibition on particular animal use, that the rights advocate cannot fairly be made to account for what others do to effect other types of exploitation. For example, if I abolish the forced labor of children who work sixteen hours a day in Indian carpet mills, I have prohibited a particular activity that is constitutive of child slavery. If someone comes along and forces these children into an alternative form of servitude, such as child prostitution, that does not mean that my efforts have not resulted in an increment in the total eradication of the status of children as the property of their parents. I may know with some certainty that, people being who and what they are, the exploitation of children will continue in various forms. That recognition, it seems, does not relieve me of the obligation to seek the eradication of those forms of exploitation that I can eliminate. And to the extent that consequences are important, this whole matter is far more vexing for Singer and the animal welfarists than it is for Regan or rights advocates. After all, the utilitarian needs a fairly detailed theory that serves to distinguish her acts from the consequences of her acts. The reason for this is that utilitarian theory require that we judge acts in light of consequences. But this is a theoretical and not an empirical matter. As philosopher Jonathan Bennett argues, a description of what someone did will include certain upshots of certain bodily movements, but certain upshots will not be included in a description of what the person did, but rather, as the consequences of what the person has done. “There are various criteria for drawing the line between what someone did and the consequences of what he did; and there can be several proper ways of drawing it in a given case,” and “there are wrong ways of dividing a set of happenings into action and consequences.” We can be grateful that we not need to develop a theory to distinguish actions from consequences in the sense that is required by the new welfarist or the utilitarian, who need a fully developed theory of consequences in order to evaluate the morality of actions. The rights theorist, who lacks the crystal ball that would be required in such a case, can rely on the principle of moral agency.
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