From Whence 'Harm'?

Response to Avery's "What is Harm?"

It's very interesting to investigate what is harm, and some of our semantic confusion over what constitutes harm may come from the epistemological difficulties relating to differentiating between objects and subjects. There is certainly direct harm, something negative happening to a subject, such as a punch in the face of a human. Also we can agree there is indirect harm caused by decreasing the instrumental value of an object, such as when damage is cause to a Monet or a child's teddy bear is trampled. With these definitions of harm it doesn't seem we can really 'harm' a non-subject. 

There do seem to be some interesting hold outs. First, it seems reasonable to take Kant to heart; while we now avoid kicking dogs as we are aware of their intelligence, we might want to avoid getting in the habit of kicking computers so we don't get into the habit of kicking humans (or dogs) as well. Second, unlike computers, which exist because we bade them into existence for our service, plants have an existence separate from humans. Though I firmly believe that moral rights arise from the capacity to value, I intuitively feel that if one cuts down a tree not valued by sentient life there is still harm done to that tree and the other non-sentient organisms dependent on it. This may be a baseless intuition, perhaps a bootless inquisition.

Q&A Four Question One

Q: Is a human more relevant in a lifeboat scenario with Coco the gorilla? Are we so close we are equal even in this situation?

I'm honestly unsure about this one. A gorilla certainly has the right to life and to be left alone. A higher valuation could be based on the animal's higher cognitive capacities. If these capacities are equivalent to mentally stunted humans, then is their moral value equal to that of a human? And further, is a mentally stunted human less morally valuable than a fully developed adult human?

Exploring the Semantics of a 'Person'

The term 'person' is used to denote an entity with the power to engage in contracts with other persons as well as possessing rights and being subject to law. We have discovered already in this course that the conflation of having rights and having the capacity to enter into a contract are not incompatible. All this talk of persons, which brings these two separate things together, seems to me to confuse the discussion. Person is often used synonymously with 'people,' and that term has the same issues. 

If I were the divine lexographer, that demigod who defines words, I would stipulate 'person' as meaning those two things (rights and contracts) and 'people' to mean those who have rights and less than human faculties. In any case, as the term stands now (before reading the chapter) I would say that even the highest functioning primates and whales are not strictly speaking 'persons.'

Maybe there capacity to form contracts with other members of their own species would change my opinion. In that case it would be our fault we couldn't communicate with them.

The Moral Efficacy of Lies

The video above has personally helped motivate me to adopt vegetarianism, my brother veganism  and several of his friends vegetarianism and veganism. My problem is that it does not approach the issue philosophically  and I counted many an outright lie. Is this moral to do whatever it takes to stop people from harming animals? Where is the line?

[One scenario I think of, which is used to justify some amount of lying  supposes you're house is invaded by several gun men. They're there to kill everyone in the house and they ask you 'Is there anyone else here?' Usually this scenario supposes your family is there, but suppose it was a herd of cattle in the basement they would not find otherwise, would you say there where? No you'd be justified in lying to them to preserve the lives of the cattle in the basement. (If they offered to spare your life in exchange it might be a different story, but supposing that's not the case)]

More Thoughts on Vegetarianism

I do understand that this Animals and Ethics class is not 'Vegetarian Boosterism Class' but that's where most of my ideas are springing from. That being said the forefront of the animal and environmental rights movement is precisely the place where we interact with animals the most often; our diets.

I've been thinking a lot on the motivations for vegetarianism and I'm trying to discover what the basis might be for making that basic dietary switch. First, it aligns closely, but not precisely, with the great civil rights movements of the last century that have changed European/American cultures over the last half century or so. All these movements where not radical movements for the overthrow of bourgeois society  but rather movements to expand the civil protections granted to the liberal middle class to excluded segments of society. In this case it is not productive members of societal being officially oppressed into social stagnation, but rather a group fundamentally in equal by almost anyone's standards. We still want to extend rights because we argue the basis of rights is the capacity to suffer and cognise in itself, not the capacity to be a productive member of society, which is assigned arbitrarily by circumstances of birth and social condition.

The animal rights movement has the capability to produce the next great breakthrough for the fundamental human capacity for sympathy and justness. Despite deeply held doubts I can only hope that our age of reason will produce an end to arbitrary suffering caused by a lack of human empathy. If it succeeds, the animal rights movement is fundamentally a triumph for what is the greatest good possible for all humans.

Implicit Content of the Vegetarian Action

Vegetarianism is a moral choice fundamentally based on the decision not to eat the meat so an animal so it does not suffer. But why then does a vegetarian refuse to eat meat even when they played no direct part in the chain leading to the death of the animal for consumption? If a vegetarian was invited to a party and there was meat around why would they let it go to waste?

The first answer may be that that veggie is still participating in the chain that led to the death of an animal only in a slightly more distant way. Another possible reason that eliminates issue with this tenuous connection is that the act of refusing meat is a social signal the content of which makes it clear that eating meat is not pure.

In a world that meat eaters out number vegetarians maybe thirty to one (Wikipedia says so anyway) the vegetarian convinced of the moral efficacy of not eating meat is likely also convinced that others should follow suit. If there really was no possibility of significantly disrupting the meat industry vegetarians would not become so for moral reasons. The ideological content of not eating meat in these marginal cases where no direct material aid was lended to slaughter is emotive rather than moral, the slaughter of nonhuman animals for consumption is so dire that the veggie will refuse even in this case.

Response to 'Initial Thoughts'

(original post here)

I also think that the criteria for being subject of a life need to be considered further  If the reason that animals have rights is because they are able to value themselves to some degree or another, then the capacities that give them the ability to value themselves must be given precedence over the ability to value in a more general way.

Thus the ability to remember one's life is important because it contributes to one being able to value one's self. If you where a sort of fish without the ability for memory but still experienced pleasure and pain, it would still be wrong to arbitrarily harm you, but it would be less wrong than harming a fish that was able to remember it's life and experience pleasure and pain.

Pethood in Light of SOALhood

Slavery is traditionally defined as the ownership of one human by another. If we accept that animals are the Subject of a Life (SOAL) then this throws new light on our concept of ownership over nonhuman animals. While there are provisions for animal welfare attached to ownership laws, the fundamental relationship between a human and an nonhuman pet is owner and owned.

Owning a human is clearly different from owning an animal because any human slave's innate capacity to be a rational agent in society is being suppressed when in reality she is completely able to take care of herself given the resources to do so. An animal such as a dog kept as a pet is unlike an enslaved human because that dog is incapable of supporting itself in a nonhuman environment due to it's genetic domesticated genetic heritage and being raised in a domestic setting. However, the SOAL criteria clearly demarcate those animals that are enSOALed as valuing entities that, to some degree, value themselves, unlike ordinary nonhuman objects. 

How does being a valuer make animals different? The most basic difference for SOALs is that since they value their lives and have interests they have the right not to have their interests arbitrarily ignored. This right makes those animals situation different because it refutes the model of animal welfare, where animals are still owned but because we value them they are given protections, instead animals value themselves and thus we are obliged to treat them morally. 

However, does SOALhood obviate the end of human ownership of animals? Can animals be properly considered their own owners because of their ability to value themselves? Certainly human ownership of animals is clearly demarcated from the ownership of SOALless objects, and maybe a more viable way to view our relationship with pets is guardianship rather than ownership.