Posted by alexandra_k on February 21, 2005, at 19:56:04
I encountered this maybe 5 years ago.
Have been thinking about it ever since...The racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Similarly the speciest allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is the same in each case. Most human beings are speciesists. I shall now very briefly describe some of the practices that show this.
For the great majority of human beings, especially in urban, industrialised societies, the most direct form of contact with members of other species is at meal-times: we eat them. In doing so we treat them purely as means to our ends. We regard their life and well-being as subordinate to our taste for a particular kind of dish. I say "taste" deliberately - this is purely a matter of pleasing our palate. There can be no defence of eating flesh in terms of satisfying nutritional needs, since it has been established beyond doubt that we could satisfy our need for protein and other essential nutrients far more efficiently with a diet that replaced animal flesh by soy beans, or products derived from soy beans, and other high-protein vegetable products.
It is not merely the act of killing that indicates what we are ready to do to other species in order to gratify our tastes. The suffering we inflict on the animals while they are alive is perhaps an even clearer indication of our specieism than the fact that we are prepared to kill them. In order to have meat on the table at a price that people can afford, our society tolerates methods of meat production that confine sentient animals in cramped, unsuitable conditions for the entire durations of their lives. Animals are treated like machines that convert fodder into flesh, and any innovation that results in a higher "conversion ratio" is liable to be adopted. As one authority on the subject has said, "cruelty is ackowledged only when profitablility ceases."
Since, as I have said, none of these practices cater for anything more than our pleasures of taste, our practice of rearing and killing other animals in order to eat them is a clear instance of the sacrifice of the most important interests of other beings in order to satisfy trivial interests of our own. To avoid specieism we must stop this practice, and each of us has a moral obligation to cease supporting the practice. Our custom is all the support that the meat-industry needs. The decision to cease giving it may be difficult, but it is no more difficult than it would have been for a white Southerner to go against the traditions of his society and free his slaves: if we do not change our dietary habits, how can we censure those slaveholders who would not change their own way of living?
The same form of discrimination may be observed in the widespread practice of experimenting on other species in order to see if certain substances are safe for hman beings, or to test some psychological theory about the effect of severe punishment on learning, or to try out various new compounds just in case something turns up...
In the past, argument about vivisection has often missed the point, because it has been put in absolutist terms: Would the abolitionist be prepared to let thousands die if they could be saved by experimenting on a single animal? The way to reply to this purely hypothetical question is to pose another: WOULD THE EXPERIMENTOR BE PREPARED TO PERFORM HIS EXPERIMENT ON AN ORPHANED HUMAN INFANT, IF THAT WERE THE ONLY WAY TO SAVE MANY LIVES? (I say "orphan" to avoid the complication of parental feelings, although in doing so I am being overfair to the experimenter, since the nonhuman subjects of experiments are not orphans.) If the experimenter is not prepared to use an orphaned human infant, then his readiness to use nonhumans is simple discrimination, since adult apes, cats, mice and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing, and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant...
The experimenter, then, shows a bias in favor of his own species whenever he carries out an eperiment on a nonhuman for a purpose that he would not think justified him in using a human being at an equal or lower level of sentience, awareness, ability to be self-directing etc. No one familiar with the kind of results yielded by most experiments on animals can have the slightest doubt that if this bias were eliminated the number of experiments performed would be a minute fraction of the number performed today.
Singer, Peter 'A Utilitarian Defence of Animal Liberation' in "Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application" pp. 39-45
This one is a good example:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhharl.html
or
http://users.rcn.com/napier.interport/cwm/experim.html
Or, for a slightly different perspective:
http://www.uwkillsanimals.com/maternaldep.htm
poster:alexandra_k
thread:461535
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050215/msgs/461535.html