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George Plimpton George Plimpton is offline
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Default Why (partially) the argument from marginal cases fails

Humans, except for marginal cases themselves, feel sorrow when
contemplating a marginal case. If a friend or family member experiences
a trauma or illness that puts him permanently into a vegetative state or
another severely diminished capacity, humans feel terrible about it, and
the feeling doesn't go away.

No one looks at or in any way contemplates pigs and feels bad that they
can't read or do arithmetic, can't appreciate classical music, can't
tell or understand jokes. It doesn't mean anything - no moral or
philosophical or emotional dimension to it at all. There *is* a moral
and philosophical and especially an emotional dimension to our awareness
that marginal humans cannot fully participate in human society and
culture. We feel there is something *wrong*, something *bad*, if humans
suffer from a diminished capacity that prevents them from participating
fully in the human community, but we don't feel anything at all like
that about *all* non-human animals lacking that capacity; nor *should*
we feel the same way about animals lacking that capacity. Their
diminished capacity, relative to ours, has no meaning for any of them,
and there is no reason for it to have any meaning for us, so it has no
meaning.

The contrast between our innate sense of compassion for marginal or
diminished-capacity humans, and our utter lack of compassion or sorrow
over animals' similar lack of capacity, illustrates why the AMC fails.
A normal pig's lack of normal human mental, emotional and moral capacity
elicits no feelings in us at all, nor should it; a human who permanently
lacks normal human mental, emotional and moral capacity is seen as a
tragedy, and it is *right* that he is seen as such.