FoodBanter.com - View Single Post - "Speciesism"

George Plimpton

On 4/12/2012 3:08 PM, Rupert wrote:
> On Apr 12, 6:50 pm, George > wrote:
>> On 4/12/2012 9:00 AM, Rupert wrote:
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>>> 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
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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...
>>
>>>> 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'.
>>
>>>> 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.
>
> No, it doesn't.

It does.