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

On 4/15/2012 6:34 PM, Rupert wrote:
> On Apr 16, 2:13 am, George > wrote:
>> On 4/12/2012 3:08 PM, Rupert wrote:
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>>> 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,

>>
>>>>>>> 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'.

>>
>>>>>> 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.aspMost 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.

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

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

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>>> No, it doesn't.

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>> It does.

>
> When I wrote "That does not follow from the principle of equal
> consideration of interests",


I don't care about that. I reject that principle, and I don't believe
you that "equal consideration" across species is the default position of
ethics. You're bullshitting.