Ethics and the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation
Tzachi Zamir
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0691164657
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Many people think that animal liberation would require a fundamental transformation of basic beliefs. We would have to give up "speciesism" and start viewing animals as our equals, with rights and moral status. And we would have to apply these beliefs in an all-or-nothing way. But in Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes the radical argument that animal liberation doesn't require such radical arguments--and that liberation could be accomplished in a flexible and pragmatic way. By making a case for liberation that is based primarily on common moral intuitions and beliefs, and that therefore could attract wide understanding and support, Zamir attempts to change the terms of the liberation debate.
Without defending it, Ethics and the Beast claims that speciesism is fully compatible with liberation. Even if we believe that we should favor humans when there is a pressing human need at stake, Zamir argues, that does not mean that we should allow marginal human interests to trump the life-or-death interests of animals. As minimalist as it sounds, this position generates a robust liberation program, including commitments not to eat animals, subject them to factory farming, or use them in medical research. Zamir also applies his arguments to some questions that tend to be overlooked in the liberation debate, such as whether using animals can be distinguished from exploiting them, whether liberationists should be moral vegetarians or vegans, and whether using animals for therapeutic purposes is morally blameless.
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Moral aliens that would visit Earth (“moral” in the sense that, unlike us humans, these aliens do understand and follow Kantian morality, “follow” in the minimal sense of them endowing value to actions, and realizing that moral prescriptions are universal), there will be no moral objection preventing them from treating us in any way they like. Third, the neo-Kantian’s distinction between being harmed and being wronged is itself misleading. True, examples such as warfare and self-defense show.
Harm, we need to ask what it is that animals lack that legitimates limiting their movement (a “negative argument” according to the typology proposed above). In the case of some companion animals, the justification will appeal to the animal’s own welfare and the quasi-paternalistic framework of pet-owner relations that may support such restriction. Some companion animals would never exist in the wild, and so placing them outside the confines of a human home would be detrimental to them. Caging.
Painlessly when they mature and lose their sexual appeal, justifying the exploitation and killing through the benefits of being born; banning a reform on the pretense that it would prescribe nonexistence to these children. Or consider human cloning for the purpose of creating people who live pleasant and short lives, functioning as organ banks that would not exist without this purpose. If these analogies are valid then EABT is wrong. These practices cannot be vindicated through appealing to the.
Benefit. The same holds for cows and hens, which would still exist in large numbers even if they were not killed for food, as the incentive to raise them for eggs and milk would preserve them in large numbers. And so this objection to vegetarianism actually goes some way in furthering the aims of moral vegetarians. IS COLLECTIVE VEGETARIANISM DESIRABLE FOR ANIMALS? EABT aside, we are still obliged to face the question of the desirability of a vegetarian utopia from the standpoint of animals.
Debates over animals that are under human supervision: (1) animals are never exploited—merely used; (2) animals are never used—always exploited; (3) some animals are used by humans while others are exploited by them. The first position holds that by virtue of what they are, nonhuman animals can never be exploited (or, what boils down to the same: they can be exploited, but such exploitation is not morally problematic). The second group perceives any self-serving relationship with animals as.