On 20 Mar, 19:25, Rudy Canoza wrote:
Buxqi wrote:
On 18 Mar, 23:36, Rupert wrote:

When my thesis is finished I
plan to start working on a writing project in animal ethics, exploring
the question of whether speciesism can be justified.

Rudy Canoza recently made the interesting point that AR is
speciesist assuming that you would lock up a human who
harmed other humans but had a brain condition whereby he
was incapable of making moral judgements and therefore should
be considered a moral patient.

If you are willing to lock him up yet unwilling to lock a predator
animal up to prevent him from doing harm to non-human animals
then you are guilty of speciesm. Can you refute that premise?

My specific point that "ar" is speciesist is not really
based on what we require of human moral patients,
although that certainly reinforces my claim.

I think the example of moral patients is actually necessary
for your charge of speciesm to stick. Sure, you can
argue that if it is wrong for humans to do something than
it must also be wrong for any other species but asking a
lion not to hunt or an ant not to farm aphids or a cuckoo
not to steal eggs from other birds is a bit like asking
volcanos not to erupt or hurricanes to not damage anything.

*My point
is that "ar" demands a behavior of moral actors -
humans - based on the fact that humans are uniquely
viewed by most, at least until recently, as moral
actors. *It's sort of like requiring your seven-foot
tall neighbor to assist you in getting things down from
or up onto the top shelves of your kitchen cabinets
merely because he is tall.

The analogy does not convince me. You can only
expect an entity to act based on what it knows.
We have a conception of "right" and "wrong".
The crocodile doesn't know any better.

An interesting development is that some ethnologists or
ethno-biologists now think humans may not be the only
moral actors; there is some scant evidence that
chimpanzees may have some rudimentary moral sense. *If
that is the case, and if it eventually comes to pass
that chimps have a limited but identifiable capacity
for moral agency, then are we required to prevent them
from killing colubus monkeys and other animals?- Hide quoted text -

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