On Mar 21, 2:35 am, 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?

Okay, here's what I'm going to do, in outline.

We're going to look at two hypothetical cases, involving a scientific
research project which harms individuals in order to attempt to gain
knowledge about Parkinson's disease. This is based on an example which
Peter Singer recently said was an example of "justifiable research".
We'll have two hypothetical cases, one involving doing the research on
cognitively impaired humans, the other on chimpanzees. I'll attempt to
do a survey of everything in the literature which tries to provide
some support for the view that it's morally permissible to do the
project on the chimpanzees but not the humans.

We'll also explore the objection that rejecting speciesism would have
untenable consequences, which has been made by Carl Cohen and is
frequently made on this newsgroup.

This particular point you are talking about at the moment, I'm not
currently convinced that it's worth addressing. We do confine nonhuman
animals to prevent them from doing harm. We do take the view that some
humans do not have legal responsibility for their actions. More needs
to be done before I see an argument here that needs some discussion.

As to Jonathan Ball's points in his more recent post, well, we might
talk about them later. Sometime soon I'll write the first chapter,
giving a more precise version of the two hypothetical cases above and
stating the aims and scope of the project. In particular, I'll specify
which writers and arguments I'm going to examine. Then you can give me
feedback about whether the writers and arguments I've chosen are a
good selection.