“There’s no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights. A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They’re all animals.”— Washingtonian magazine, 8/1/86
The above quote is from Ingrid Newkirk and i use it to introduce the topic of concentration for this entry because it think it summarises essentially the basis of the animal rights fight and justifiably so. No matter what distinction we give ourselves due to our evolution and what not, doesn't take away from the fact that we are all animals and the biologists (myself included) will attest to that; that's why we are in the animal kingdom of classification.
Mattew Silliman may have giving us the qualification of being active moral valuers; we have the ability to value and be valued in return and Tom Regan may have distinguished us with the credentials of being moral agents but when the dust settles, we are all animals and posses inherent values thus shouldn't be treated as some "means to ends"; to borrow Kant's terminology.
Peter Singer in his essay; " Practical Ethics" brings out a very interesting point when he questions why we can't use human beings of the same consciousness level as mice in researches and as food as we do to other animals. This may seem absurd to the average reader but we can nonetheless see the validity in his remarks! Take Regan's moral agency and moral patients principles for example, where he qualifies non-human animals, children and disabled( mental, social, physical) adults as moral patients. We see from these comparisons that children and infants as well as rabbits and mice are all valuable equally so why don't we use children or retarded people as test subjects? Why do we resent stem cell research ( potential humans used for research) and have no qualms with hundreds of mice or guinea pigs subjected to torture daily? Better yet, why do we resent the thought of eating human flesh (cannibalism) but celebrate our achievements with feasting tables filled with meat choices of numerous varieties except human that is ?
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2 comments:
You are absolutely right and I can not fathom how anyone can be content to eat other animals without a second thought. What's more I don't know how those who attack animal rights activists and believe that killing animals is fun can even sleep at night. We should put them in cages, see how they like it, they have no more brains than a donkey so what is the difference.
~Angela
No doubt the many obvious and important similarities between humans and nonhumans ought to lead us to question -- at the very least -- all such practices, even if we suppose that the human suffers a greater variety and number of harms than the nonhuman in any given context. How much less or differently must a cow suffer, for instance, than a human, in order to justify harming the one but not the other?
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