PHIL 211 South University Speciesism, Sexism & Racism Research Paper McGinn argues strongly that speciesism is analogous to racism and sexism. Why is he so

PHIL 211 South University Speciesism, Sexism & Racism Research Paper McGinn argues strongly that speciesism is analogous to racism and sexism. Why is he so interested in making those analogies stick? To what extent is he successful in that?Summarize in 3-5 paragraphs. Animals
Let us start with animals — other animals. This is a good place to
start because the moral issues raised by animals are a powerful
illustration of what a rational morality can lead to. Just by thinking
about the issue in a critical and impartial spirit you can, I believe,
arrive at a radical revision in the way other species are normally
regarded. You can cut through a good deal of confused nonsense
and harmful prejudice. In addition, animals raise in a sharp way
many of the basic issues that arise in the other areas we shall be
discussing: issues of harm, freedom, impartiality, unreasonable
discrimination, the balancing of interests. We shall see that there is
actually a lot wrong with what we do to animals without reflecting
on it, and in the way we habitually conceive our moral relation to
them.
On the one hand, then, we have the human species — those
featherless bipeds with the big brains. On the other hand, in the
blue corner, there is the rest of nature — the minerals, the plants,
the beasts. We humans need the rest of nature in order to live and
thrive. We need to eat some of it, breathe some of it, wear some of
it, burn some of it, live in some of it, and so forth. (We are also
curious about it and can sometimes appreciate its beauty.) In order
to meet our needs, we put nature to our use — we ‘exploit’ nature.
There is no way round this, and there is nothing bad about the
exploitation of nature in itself — all animals must do it, as must
plants. We hew rock to make houses, cut down trees to make
furniture, kill animals for food and clothes. We take from nature
what we want — a piece of slate, a branch, a skin. We tend to
assume that this is all much the same kind of thing; we are just
using what comes to hand for our own benefit, be it mineral,
vegetable or animal. We use the not-us for the good of us. Now,
the queston is: is there anything wrong with any of this? Are
some kinds of exploitation of nature immoral? Do we in fact
make the kinds of moral distinctions in nature that it objectively
requires us to make?
If you want to know whether some kind of action is right or
wrong, then you have to ask how it is for the thing on the
receiving end of the action. You can’t just look at how you feel,
what you get out of it; you have to consider how it feels, the
consequences of your action for it. You must examine the
impact of your action on the things it affects. Now, in the case
of rock-quarrying and house-building, there doesn’t seem to be
any moral issue here: the rock doesn’t care what you do to it,
because it doesn’t have any cares at all — it is just a rock.
Technically speaking, it is not ‘sentient’ — it doesn’t feel
anything, see anything, know anything. It is not even dead,
since it was never alive. In the case of a tree, we are at least
dealing with something living — something that grows,
reproduces, dies, sickens, flourishes, ingests. But we are still
not dealing with anything sentient, any more than seaweed is
sentient or the mould that grows on rotting food. There is no
conscious awareness in the tree. (Yes, I know that some
eccentrics have claimed to find evidence of sentience in plants;
no doubt there are other eccentrics who are convinced that
rocks entertain profound thoughts — let us forget them and
stick to common sense.) So we need not worry that the
lumberjack’s saw operates as an instrument of torture for the
felled tree.
Colin McGinn: Moral Literacy “Animals” page1 of 8
But, of course, in the case of animals like cows and dogs and
monkeys the same actions would produce immense pain. I leave
you to imagine the pain that would be caused to a cow if you took
a chainsaw to it — if you treated its neck and legs like the trunk
and branches of a tree. Stepping on a tree’s root is thus not like
stepping on a cow’s foot. How does this difference of potential
effect bear on the morality of felling or pruning a cow? Is there a
moral distinction that goes with the difference in sentience?
This question is not hard to answer. Suppose a man first fells a tree
to make a chair and then fells a cow to make a coat: he applies his
saw in the same way on one living thing and then on the other,
whistling as he works. The tree is killed but suffers no pain, the
cow is killed and suffers great agony. The first act was not wrong,
the second is a paradigm of cruelty — the man shouldn’t have done
it. If he needed to kill the cow for a coat, he should at least have
done it painlessly — he shouldn’t simply have ignored the cow’s
pain. In short, he shouldn’t have treated the sentient thing in the
same way he treated the insentient one. What he did was morally
wrong. And suppose we learn that he already had a coat or that he
could have made an equally good one from cotton: then we think
his painful killing of the cow was doubly wrong, was really quite
inexcusable. We think this because we make a basic distinction
within the class of natural things that we exploit: we distinguish
between the things that have no interests and feelings of their own,
and the things that do have interests and feelings. We thus think it
matters morally to what you do to an object that it feels pain as a
result of your action. So we condemn cruelty to animals, and
rightly so. An animal isn’t a mere thing. You can’t do just anything
to an animal and expect to be regarded as a moral person. Animals
restrict your freedom, in that you are not morally free to treat them
in any way you feel like treating them. People shouldn’t be free
to torture animals because they are in a bad mood. Animals
constitute a moral limit on human action; they have moral
worth or weight.
I assume that what I have just said will strike you as obvious
and banal. Whoever thought the opposite? Don’t civilised
societies have laws protecting animals from wanton cruelty?
Yes, it is totally obvious and not in itself a revolutionary point
of view. But it raises the big question of how far the underlying
principles should be taken. How much of human freedom
should be sacrificed for the sake of the interests and well-being
of animals? What is to count as ‘wanton cruelty’? How
consistent are we in taking to its logical conclusion the moral
standpoint we take as obvious when spelled out as above? Is
there, in particular, any conflict between what we thus take as
obvious and what we routinely do to animals when we eat
them, experiment on them, use them in sport, put them in zoos
and circuses, use them as transportation devices, and so on? Are
we really balancing their interests against our own in a just and
decent way? We can all agree that you shouldn’t chainsaw the
conscious living cow for the fun of it; but should you put a bolt
through its head so that you can cut it up and eat cooked bits of
its dead body? Why is the first act generally thought very
wrong and the second not? That is where the issue becomes a
little more disturbing.
To gain some perspective on the question, let us make use of a
couple of imaginary examples of the kind I mentioned in the
previous chapter. We will first see what we think about them
Colin McGinn: Moral Literacy “Animals” page2 of 8
and then ask whether this is consistent with the orthodox way of
thinking about humans and other species.
So: we have all seen those vampire films, creepy tales of powerful
pale predators who live on human blood. Well, let me tell you a
story about a particularly successful vampire species. This species
is unusual among the run of vampires in that it can live equally
well off human blood or orange juice. It is also more in control of
its food supply than your average vampire. In addition to
producing ample supplies of orange juice, it keeps throngs of
humans locked up in huge prisons so that it can get to their necks
with minimum effort. The vampires raise human infants in these
prisons for the sole purpose of drinking their blood at maturity
(and they have been known to do it at tenderer ages too). There is a
bit of a snag, though, from the vampires’ point of view, namely that
you can’t drink blood from the same human more than three times
without that human’s dying, so they are continually needing to
replenish their stocks as thrice-bitten humans die off. The humans
are powerless to resist because of the superhuman capacities of the
vampires. When the vampires aren’t dining on human blood (and
the occasional glass of orange juice) they do the usual civilised
things: go to the movies and the opera, make love, get married,
play tennis, whatever.
They also have strict laws governing conduct within their species
and are generally law-abiding and polite. They are actually not
such a bad lot, generally considered, apart from this human blood
business. But they don’t see much a problem about that because,
after all, we humans belong to a different species from them and
look and act differently; anyway they have been doing it for
millennia. They sometimes think it is a pity about the pain and fear
the humans feel while their necks are being punctured and
drained, not to mention all the death that results, but there is no
point in being squeamish and sentimental about your farm
animals, is there? And yes, they could live just as well on
orange juice – which they actually rather enjoy at breakfast time
– but it would be a little monotonous to have only that to drink:
they like some variety in their diet. True, also, it would be
healthier to give up human blood, as some of them are always
tediously insisting, but they relish their pint of blood at dinner
time and feel that life would be poorer without it. So they don’t
take much notice of the ‘juicetarians’ among them, a small
minority anyhow, who fitfully campaign for humane treatment
for humans – and even go so far as to call for complete human
liberation! Why, what would become of all the humans if they
were set free to roam the land? No, it is inconceivable.
I don’t know about you but I find this vampire species a pretty
selfish, blinkered and cruel bunch. They have got their values
all wrong. If I were a powerful Martian visiting earth and found
it dominated by these bloodsuckers, with the human species
reduced to the status of mere blood vats, I would insist that they
damn well stick to orange juice. Variety, freedom, tradition don’t give me that! Just look what you are doing to these poor
humans, the pain and misery and confinement you cause them and all because you don’t fancy orange juice all the time. I
mean, honestly, are you really telling me that it is morally
acceptable to put that child to a slow and painful death rather
than squeeze a couple of oranges? Can the difference of taste be
that important to you? Human liberation! That is what I would
say; and if I were one of the unlucky human victims I would
plead the same case, hoping to appeal to the vampires’ moral
Colin McGinn: Moral Literacy “Animals” page3 of 8
sense – of which they seem to have plenty when it comes to the
welfare of their own species.
Here is another example, in which the human role is reversed.
Imagine that there are two humanlike species not one, either
naturally evolved or created by God, rather as there are a number
of monkey species. We are in the dominant position relative to the
other humanlike species – call it the `shuman’ species. Shuman,
like humans, are intelligent, sensitive, social, civilised – in fact very
much on a par with humans in their level of development.
However, their warlike prowess is much inferior to ours, and as a
result they have been conquered and tyrannised by the ‘superior’
species. Not content merely with enslaving them to do our dirty
work, we also use them for food, as subjects of vivisection
experiments and in bloodsports. Our exploitation of them gives us
a higher standard of living than we would have otherwise. Their
flesh is excellent when barbecued; medical science has progressed
rapidly by using them instead of lower species which are
biologically less like us; and it is jolly amusing to watch them
running away from, and being caught by, the starved dogs we let
loose on them on Saturday afternoons. Of course, the shumans
complain all the time about what we humans do to them, always
petitioning the government from their special reservations, trying
to work up some emotional sympathy, causing trouble in the
streets. We are not impressed, though, because they belong to
another species from ours: we can’t interbreed with them, they are
completely hairless with pointy ears, and the mothers carry the
babies for twelve months not nine. Admittedly we don’t need to use
them in this way -we already have plenty of other species to
depend on, as well as the vegetable kingdom – but it can’t be
denied that we derive pleasure from them that we wouldn’t enjoy
without exploiting them as we do. So you see it is all right to
ignore their interests in order to cater to ours. We don’t need to
balance their interests with ours, treating similar interests
equally, since the shumans belong to a different biological
group from us. The biological distinction cancels the moral
commitments we would have with respect to the interests of
members of our own species.
Again, I maintain that this isn’t right. We are doing to them
what the vampires were doing to us – trampling over the
legitimate interests of another group. In essence, we are
refusing to take their welfare seriously simply because they
belong to a different biological species from us —and this
difference does not warrant that refusal. There is a word for this
attitude, coined about twenty years ago, namely `speciesism’. It
was coined on analogy with the concepts of racism and sexism,
and is intended to suggest that what is morally irrelevant or
insignificant —species or race or sex — is being treated as if it
carried decisive moral weight. The point of my two imaginary
examples is to demonstrate that speciesism as such is a form of
unacceptable discrimination. There is no good moral defence of
what the vampires do to us or what we do to the shumans, and
to try to base one on a mere difference of species is transparent
special pleading. It is simply quite unconvincing as a
justification for what looks on the surface like a naked exercise
of power designed to benefit one group at the ruthless expense
of another. Cruelty is cruelty is cruelty — and a mere difference
of species doesn’t make it right. Ditto for murder,
imprisonment, and so on.
The question we must then ask, returning now to the real world,
is whether our actual treatment of animals is founded on a tacit
Colin McGinn: Moral Literacy “Animals” page4 of 8
speciesism — that is, whether we could rationally condone it if it
weren’t for mere species differences. Do we, in other words, accord
mere zoological distinctions too much weight in deciding what to
do and not do to animals? Is the speciesist attitude the only thing
that sustains our exploitative treatment of other species? Could we
defend this treatment without reliance upon naked species bias?
Once this question is clearly raised, it is very hard to avoid the
answer that we do rely, unacceptably, on speciesist assumptions.
What tends to obscure this fact is that animals differ from us not
only in point of what species they belong to; they differ, also,
mentally, in terms of their cognitive abilities. They don’t have our
intellects, our brain power, our moral sense. Their minds are just
not as rich and complicated as ours.
But it is easy to see that this difference cannot make the moral
difference we tend to take for granted — unless, that is, we are
prepared to set up a new and pernicious form of social
discrimination: intelligenceism.’ Surely we don’t think that mere
inferiority of intelligence (by some possibly arbitrary standard) is
enough to justify, say, slaughtering the intellectually inferior for
food or electrically shocking them for scientific purposes. If we did
believe that, we would have the freedom to do these things to
human children, mentally backward adults, and senile old people.
Indeed, there would be no moral objection to intentionally raising
genetically engineered ‘simple’ humans for such purposes. But
being intelligent is not what gives you the right not to be abused.
The reason it is wrong to cause pain to people is not that they are
intelligent or members of the human species. It is that pain hurts, it
is bad to suffer it, people don’t like to be in pain. If you want to
know whether an action is wrong, you have to look at its actual
effects and ask if they are bad for the thing being acted on —
not ask what else happens to be true of the thing. If forced
confinement, say, is bad for an animal, then it is bad to do this
to an animal, unless you can think of a reason why this badness
is justifiable in the light of a greater good. It isn’t a question of
the animal’s ability to do mathematics or appreciate chamber
music — still less of its species per se. It is a matter of
sentience, the ability to suffer.
And here we reach the nub of the issue about our moral
treatment of animals. Is there a greater good that justifies what,
considered in itself, appears to be bad? Can we argue that what
is bad for the animal is overridden by what is good for us? Is it
possible to defend something bad in itself by claiming that the
ends justify the means? Note, now, that we are assuming that
our treatment of animals would be morally wrong if it were not
for some supposed greater good.
A clear-eyed look at the facts quickly reveals that there is no
such means-end justification, at least in the vast majority of
cases. The test to use here is whether you would condone a
given form of treatment if it were practised on humans, thus
eliminating the speciesist bias from your deliberations. You
may also consider ‘simple’ humans in order to eliminate
intelligenceist bias. That is, you have to ask whether you would
do to intellectually comparable humans what we regularly do to
animals. I won’t bother to run through the whole gamut of
things we do to animals, leaving this as an exercise for the
reader; once the principle has been grasped this is fairly
mechanical work. But it must be clear enough already that you
would not condone killing humans for food in the way we now
Colin McGinn: Moral Literacy “Animals” page5 of 8
do animals, or experimenting on humans as we now do on animals,
or using them in sports as we do now, or using their skins for
clothes as we do now, and so on. You wouldn’t even do these
things to humans who were mentally inferior to the animals in
question. The pain, the fear, the frustration, the loss of life — these
would be quite enough to deter you. And the reason for these
sound moral judgements is simply that the ends do not justify the
means. A life lost for a pleasant taste gained? Mutilation for some
possibly trivial increase in knowledge? Dismemberment in the
jaws of dogs for the ‘thrill of the chase’? Trapped and skinned for
an expensive fur coat? We would never accept these calculations if
humans constituted the means, so why should we suddenly change
our standards when we move outside the human species? Only, it
seems, because of the prejudice that declares our species sacred
and other species just so much exploitable stuff. Unfair
discrimination, in other words.
not in good conscience do to humans. We must make our
morality consistent.
So what should be done, now that we have seen our treatment of
other species for what it is — immorally benefiting ourselves at the
expense of other animals? (Actually, it is more that we think we
are benefiting ourselves, since a lot of what we get from them is
bad for us.) We should, at the very least, do everything we can to
minimise our dependence on animals, treating their interests as
comparable to the interests of fellow humans in the respects
relevant to the case at hand. This will mean, just for starters,
stopping eating meat if you live in one of …
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