On Apr 12, 5:41*pm, George Plimpton > wrote:
> On 4/12/2012 7:27 AM, George Plimpton wrote:
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> > On 4/11/2012 11:29 PM, Dutch wrote:
> >> "Rupert" > wrote in message
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> >>> On Apr 12, 12:23 am, "Dutch" > wrote:
> >>>> "Rupert" > wrote
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> >>>> > Most ethicists would agree that equal consideration of interests is
> >>>> > the default starting position.
>
> >>>> For whom? My default starting position for consideration is my own
> >>>> interests, followed by my immediate family including my pets, my
> >>>> community,
> >>>> my country, mankind, higher level animals, rare plant species, lower
> >>>> level
> >>>> animals, the planet, and the economy is implied in there somewhere.
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> >>>> The default starting position for every organism in existence is its
> >>>> owninterests, that is the way the world works.
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> >>> That is something that requires defence from the moral point of view.
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> >> You mean like you defended your assertion, by claiming that most
> >> ethicists agree with you? Well I can't honestly say I've ever met an
> >> ethicist,
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> > nor has Woopert...
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> I should have elaborated in my original reply that it's a sick joke for
> Woopert to be saying that the "default position" in ethics is to give
> equal consideration to the interests of any suffering-capable entity.
> First of all, I don't believe Woopert has studied ethics rigorously at
> all, let alone to a degree that would permit him to say with such
> comical "authority" what the consensus position among ethicists is.
> Second, it is completely obvious, due to the amount of controversy
> surrounding it, that Singer's position is distinctly a minority view.
> With as much controversy over it as there clearly is, I find it very
> hard to believe it's the "default" or consensus view of ethics. *Rather,
> it's what Singer - and Woopert - would *want* to be the default view.
> That's why I maintain they are the ones with the burden of proof: *given
> that most ethicists (or so I intuitively believe) and the overwhelming
> majority of humans do *not* accept it as the default, the burden clearly
> is on them.
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> Carl Cohen said something in "The Animal Rights Debate" that has stuck
> with me. *He wrote that when there is a huge majority holding a
> particular moral intuition, the overwhelming size of that majority gives
> it a particular weight that cannot simply be casually brushed away. *It
> doesn't mean it's necessarily a correct intuition, but there's a
> presumption. *Now, both the human concept of ethics, and ethics as a
> distinct branch of philosophy, have been around literally for millennia.
> * With all that, the overwhelming majority of humans still consider it
> morally acceptable to give less weight to the interests of animals than
> to human interests, while at the same time most humans feel that *some*
> weight should be given to animals' interests, so it's not as if their
> moral intuition simply treats animals as holding no morally considerable
> interests at all. *However imperfectly people may have thought this
> through, they have given thought to it, and concluded that animals'
> interests deserve less moral consideration than humans'.
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> The Humane Society of the US (HSUS) says that 39% of US households own
> at least one dog, and 33% of households own at least one cat
> (interestingly, there are about 8 million more owned cats in the US than
> owned dogs, so many more households have multiple cats than multiple
> dogs.)http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/...facts/pet_owne...
> * A pet products professional association gives about the same number of
> owned cats and dogs, but says the percentage of households owning one or
> the other is higherhttp://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp* Most US
> households are comprised of more than one person, so it's very likely
> that more than 50% of Americans have a dog or a cat or both. *I think
> most people give a fair amount of consideration to the interests of
> their animals. *They spend over $50 billion a year on them, including
> almost $13.5 billion on medical care. *If people didn't give
> considerable weight to the interests of these animals, they wouldn't
> spend nearly as much.
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> Woopert and his corrupt pal Singer are going to have to do a lot of work
> to convince people they ought to be providing the same amount of medical
> care and same quality of food to their animals as they provide for
> themselves.

That does not follow from the principle of equal consideration of
interests.