Week Overview

We are now beginning the last portion in the course where we will focus on issues in applied ethics. We will start with animal rights. It is not obviously the most pressing in applied ethics but it is a good issue to hone our philosophical skills on because it allows us to think about a wide range of moral issues. It is particularly  interesting issues it forces us to think about one of the most basic question of moral and political philosophy: who gets what moral consideration and why? In some ways, it takes us back to many of the same questions that have come up when we’ve talked about the cases of Theresa, Jodie, and Mary,

Readings

• Peter Singer- Unsanctifying Human Life
• Alastair Norcross- puppies, pigs, and people
• Tom Regan – The Case for Animal Rights
• Ethical Arguments for Eating Animals
• The Climate Change Argument for going vegan
• Earthlings Documentary (optional but highly recommended if you are willing to take the red pill on this issue)

Peter Singer’s “Unsanctifying Human Life”

Thesis: The life of a human being is not sacred i.e. does not possess some very special value.

Specieism: Discrimination on the basis of species

Example 1: The strange value people place on a human life:

Baby born with severe down’s syndrome, intestinal obstruction, and congenital heart condition. Mother didn’t want an operation to save the child’s life, but a local child welfare agency got the state involved and forced her to.

“This case, then, shows how much some people are prepared to do in order to ensure that a human infant lives, irrespective of the actual potential mental capacities of the infant, its physical condition, or the wishes of the mother.”

 Example 2: The strange lack of value people place on non-human life

 “The researchers confined sixty-four monkeys in small cubicles. These monkeys were then given unlimited access to a variety of drugs, through tubes implanted in their arms. They could control the intake by pressing a lever. In some cases, after the monkeys had become addicted, supplies were abruptly cut off. Of the monkeys that had become addicted to morphine three were “observed to die in convulsions” while other found dead in the morning were “presumed to have died in convolsions.” Monkeys that had taken large amounts of cocaine inflicted severe wounds upon themselves, including biting off their fingers and toes, before dying convulsive deaths. Amphetamines caused one monkey to “pluck all of the hair off his arms and abdomen.” In general, the experimenters found that “The manifestations of toxicity . . . were similar to the well-known toxicities of these drugs in man.” They noted that experiments on animals with addictive drugs had been going on in their laboratory for “the last 20 years.”

According to Singer both examples are unexceptional

“Can it be right to make great efforts to save the life of a mongoloid human infant when the mother does not want the infant to live, and at the same time not be wrong to kill, slowly and painfully, a number of monkeys?”

We can treat species differently based on their different relevant respects i.e. We do try to teach humans to read but not dogs.

But to suggest that certain races should not be taught to read would be racism. “Race has nothing to do with the extent which a person can benefit from being able to read.”

How do severely retarded humans compare with dogs, pigs, monkeys, and apes? It seems that these animals possess greater mental and emotional capacities than some severely retarded human beings.

“If we are prepared to discriminate against a being simply because it is not a member of our own species, although it has capacities equal or superior to those of a member of our own species, how can we object to the racist discriminating against those who are not his own race?”

Three solutions

• Hold constant our attitudes to members of other species, and change our attitude toward members of our own species so that we consider it legitimate to kill retarded human infants in painful ways for experimental purposes even when no immeadiately useful knowledge is likely to be derived from these experiments; and in addition we give up any moral objections we may have to rearing and killing these infants for food.
• While holding constant our attitudes to members of our own species, we change our attitude toward members of other species, so that we consider it wrong to kill them because we like the taste of their flesh, or for experimental purposes even when the experiment would result in immediately useful knowledge; and moreover we refuse to kill them even when they are suffering severe pain from some incurable disease, and are a burden to those who must look after them.
• We change our attitudes to both humans an non-humans, so that they come together at some point in between the present extremes.

 

“We have to change our attitudes in both directions. We have to bring non-humans within the sphere of our moral concern, and cease to treat them purely as a means to our ends. At the same timem ice we realize that the fact that severely and irreparably retarded infants are members of the species homo sapiens is not in itself relevant to how we should treat them, we should be ready to reconsider current practices which cause suffering to all concerned and benefit nobody.”

Within current medical practice doctors often withhold treatment to infants because it would prolong their life and cause them more suffering. This is okay given the current laws but it would be better to change the laws. The current practice of letting die could be made more humane by allowing the child to die painlessly. This is what we do for animals, so why not for humans.

 

Why not euthanize babies born with spina bifida?

“Virtually all will be paralyzed from the waist down, and incontinent because of damage to their exposed nerves. Four out of five of these survivors will get hydrocephalus; their heads will swell out, some until they are too heavy to hold up. Severely retarded, often spastic and blind, they will spend their childhood in institutions that most of us do not care to think about, let alone visit. By adolescence virtually all will be dead.”

“What exactly is it that the medical profession stands for that allows it to kill millions of sentient non-human beings, while prohibiting it from releasing fro suffering an infant homo sapiens with a lower potential for a meaningful life?”

Conclusion

“I have suggested some ways in which once we eliminate speciest bias from our moral views, we might bring our attitudes to human and non-human animals closer together. I am well aware that I have not given any precise suggestions about when it is justifiable to kill either a retarded infant, or a non-human animal. I really have not made up my mind on this problem, so I leave it open, in the hope that others will offer suggestions.”

Alastair Norcross’ “Puppies, Pigs, and People”

The case of Fred:

Fred is involved in a car accident that damages his godiva gland which can no longer produce the hormone cocoamone. Fred discovers that puppies produce cocoamone when tortured Fred tortures puppies to obtain cocoamone, a substance that Fred needs to consume in order to enjoy the taste of chocolate. Fred does not enjoy the puppies’ suffering, but it is necessary for him to obtain the cocoamone

Fred is discovered by the police and is charged with animal cruelty. At his trial Fred uses the defense that he is innocent because he is doing exactly the same thing we do in society all the time and that if factory farming is acceptable then so must his behavior be

Norcross’s thesis:

There is no morally relevant difference between Fred’s behavior and the behavior of the millions of people who purchase and consume factory-farmed meat.

Tom Regan’s “The Case for Animal Rights”

Moral Agents vs. Moral Patients

Moral Agents:

“Moral agents are individuals who have a variety of sophisticated abilities, including in particular the ability to bring impartial moral principles to bear on the determination of what, all considered, morally ought to be done and, having made this determination, to freely choose or fail to choose to act as morality, as they conceive it, requires. Because moral agents have these abilities, it is fair to hold them morally accountable for what they do, assuming that the circumstances of their acting as they do in a particular case do not dictate otherwise.”

Moral Patients:

“In contrast to moral agents, moral patients lack the prerequisites that would enable them to control their own behavior in ways that would make them morally accountable for what they do. A moral patient lacks the ability to formulate, let alone bring to bear, moral principles in deliberating about which one among a number of possible acts it would be right or proper to perform. Moral patients, in a word, cannot do what is right, nor can they do what is wrong. Granted what they do may be detrimental to the welfare of others – they may, for example, bring about acute suffering or even death; and granted, it may be necessary, in any given case, for moral agents to use force or violence to preven such harm being done, either in self-defense or in defense of others. But even when a moral patient causes significant harm to another, the moral patient has not done what is wrong. Only moral agents can do what is wrong. Human infants, young children, and the mentally deranged or enfeebled of all ages are paradigm cases of human moral patients. More controversial is whether human fetuses and future generations of human beings qualify as moral patients. It is enough for our purposes, however, that some humans are reasonably viewed in this way.”

Two types of moral patients:

(a): “those individuals who are conscious and sentient (i.e., can experience pleasure and pain) but who lack other mental abilities

(b): “those individuals who are conscious, sentient, and posses other cognitive and volitional abilities discussed in previous chapters (e.g., belief and memory). Some animals, for reasons already advance, belong in category (b); other animals quite probably belong in category (a).

When Reagan uses ‘moral patient’ he is referring to type b moral patient

Inherent value

Inherent value of individuals vs intrinsic value of the experiences they have

inherent value is not reducible to intrinsic value (pleasure)

“To say that inherent value is not reducible to the intrinsic values of an individual’s experiences means that we cannot determine the inherent value of individual moral agents by totaling the intrinsic values of the their experiences. Those who have a more pleasant or happier life do not therefore have greater inherent value than those whose lives are less pleasant or happy. Nor do those who have more “cultivated” preferences (say, for arts and letters) therefore have greater inherent value. To say that the inherent value of individual moral agents is incommensurate with the intrinsic value of their (or anyone else’s) experiences means tha the two kinds of value are not comparable and cannot be exchanged one for the other. Like proverbial apples and oranges, the two kinds of value do not fall within the same scale of comparison. One cannot ask, How much intrinsic value is the inherent value of this individual worth – how much is it equal to? The inherent value of any given moral agent isn’t equal to any sum of intrinsic value of the experiences of all other moral agents. To view moral agents as having inherent value is thus to view them as something different from, and something more than, mere receptacles of what has intrinsic value. They have value in their own right, a value that is distinct from, not reducible to, and incommensurate with the values of those experiences which, as receptacles, they have or undergo”

Receptacle view: what is in the cup (pleasure, desire satisfaction) has value

My view: the cup itself has value

“Given the postulate of inherent value, no harm done to any moral agent can possibly be justified merely on the grounds of its producing the best consequences for all affected by the outcome. Thus are we able to avoid the counterintuitive implications of act utilitarianism if we deny the receptacle view of moral agents and postulate their inherent equal value.”

What beings have inherent value? Those that meet the subject-of-a-life criterion.

“To be the subject-of-a-life, in the sense in which this expression will be used, involves more than merely being alive and more than merely being conscious. To be the subject-of-a-life is to be an individual whose life is characterized by those features explored in the opening chapters of the present work: that is, individual are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future, an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare-interests; the ability to intitiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their utility for others and logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. Those who satisfy the subject-of-a-life criterion themselves have a distinctive kind of value – inherent value – and are not to be viewed or treated as mere receptacles.”

Does SOAL criterion meet the following demands:

1)   shared by all moral agents and patients who are deemed to have inherent value

2)   It is a categorical value that does not admit of degrees

3)   Separates those that have inherent value from those that are merely alive

The Respect Principle – We are to treat those individuals who have inherent value in ways that respect their inherent value. . . .It enjoins us to treat all those individuals having inherent value in ways that respect their value, and thus it requires respectful treatment of all who satisfy the subject of a life criterion. Whether they are moral agents or patients, we must treat them in ways that respect their equal inherent value.”

“It is not an act of kindness to treat animals respectfully. It is an act of justice. It is not “the sentimental interests” of moral agents that grounds our duties to justice to children, the retarded, the senile, or other moral patients, including animals. It is respect for their inherent value. The myth of the privileged moral status of moral agents has no clothes.”