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George Plimpton George Plimpton is offline
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Default "Speciesism" - nothing wrong with it

On 4/12/2012 9:00 AM, Rupert wrote:
> On Apr 12, 5:41 pm, George > wrote:
>> On 4/12/2012 7:27 AM, George Plimpton wrote:
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>>> On 4/11/2012 11:29 PM, Dutch wrote:
>>>> > wrote in message
>>>> ...
>>>>> On Apr 12, 12:23 am, > wrote:
>>>>>> > wrote

>>
>>>>>>> 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...

>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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'.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.


It follows from the fact that your position is distinctly a minority
position that has been implicitly reject by the vast majority of humanity.