Animal rights Flashcards
importance of sentience
It may be bad to destroy the rock (Stonehenge) as it’s historically important, but it’s not bad in the same way that destroying the Rock (person) is - destroying a rock is not harmful to the rock, but destroying The Rock would be harmful to him
Sentience - the capacity to feel pleasure and pain and have conscious experience - that’s enough to not only have some moral status, but equal moral status to human beings
Singer’s egalitarianism
Against “speciesism” - egalitarian spirit behind civil rights movements should go against speciesism - the idea that membership within our species gives us some kind of moral superiority to members of other species - discrimination of other species
Singer believes every sentient being has equal moral status - not just endorsing the view that unlike a rock, a non-human animal, has some moral claim on us, he’s saying that non-human animals have equal moral claim to human beings
Equal consideration does not equal treatment
They don’t have the right to vote - because animals can’t vote or understand an election
Their interest in not suffering is just as important as a human being’s interest in not suffering
Animals have an equal right to life
Michael Tooley and the desire account - according to the desire account what is wrong with killing is that you are violating someone’s fundamental desire to continue to live
One difference between singer and marquis - singer thinks it’s actual psychological traits, rather than potential psychological traits, that matter morally
Singer does not care at all about common sense morality
There’s nothing about being in or outside a uterus that makes you morally important
Eg. people with severe dementia or other handicaps, they have the same right to equal consideration, but possibly not equal treatment
What confers moral status
Biological traits
- Being homo sapien
- Warren does not say this but denies this
Psychological traits
- Warren: sophisticated capacities (reasoning, self-consciousness) - according to Warren the psychological category we belong to is quite sophisticated - ones we don’t have in common with a fetus and a lot of non-human animals
- Singer: simple capacities - capacity for consciousness, pleasure or pain - Singer states that moral status is exactly equal for every conscious being
Potential traits?
- Marquis: Potential for FLO - merely having the potential for developing psychological characteristics is more than enough to have moral status
Singer: Current farming, research is immoral]
Eg. chickens, live in extremely confined conditions - for non free range chickens, the conditions are designed to be as inexpensive as possible, which produce a great deal of chicken suffering
- Singer says that the trade off here that chicken suffering leads to pretty trivial taste preferenes, just because we like the way it tastes, is trivial, over much more compelling interests that chicken have in not living in such terrible conditions
Singer: Psychological inegalitarianism leads to discrimination
There’s a fairly trivial preference on our part that is given more priority over the chickens right to life
- Singer states that if they are conscious, they get equal consideration
- Singer relies on the assumption that plants are not conscious, they don’t have brains
- The basic assumption that having a brain is necessary for consciousness, and having a brain is sufficient in consideration in having a right to life
Psychological inegalitarianism - we can still say that the degree of moral consideration you deserve depends on your level of psychological ability
- Singer is against this inegalitarianism amongst species, because it would cause inegalitarianism amongst humans - because there are differences in humans in psychological ability
Common sense argument for animals
- Animals display coordinated movements - if a dog sustains injury it will whine and wimp, similar to when a human experiences pain.
- Coordinated movement requires consciousness - they respond to their environment in ways that are suggestive of consciousness
- Therefore, animals are conscious
If descartes wants to reject the conclusion, he has to reject one of the premises
- Descartes would not agree that the argument is sound - a sound argument is one with true premises
- Descartes rejects the second premise - it’s obvious that animals respond to their environment, however he thinks that this kind of coordinated movement, even in human beings, does not even require consciousness in human beings
Descartes dualism and animals consciousness
Dualsim - there are two things - the mind and the body - maybe have some relationship to one another
- Descartes argues that the mind had a special relationship to our brain, but our brain and the mind were separate things.
- He thinks we have an immaterial part that could potentially survive after death. mind and body interact with each other.
- Brain communicates to your mind external feedback (such as pain, and other senses experienced in the outside world).
- The brain causes things to happen in the mind, and the brain causes our body to do things in the external world - experiences are caused by the body, and they are produced in the mind through the external world effects of your body, specifically, your brain
- Nonhuman animals have bodies and brains, but may not necessarily have minds
There are no minds in animals, all automated actions - descartes
There are no minds in animals, all automated actions
- Don’t have any mental phenomena
Because mental phenomena are part of the non physical substance that is merely attached to a brain - Animals don’t feel pain, they are like robots. Like a self-driving car, does not have visual experiences like we do, does not see red and green the ways we do.
- Animals are complicated machines, they are all mechanically induced
Spinal injury - argument by Huxley
Even though people think animals are conscious the reason why we think animals are conscious are not a good reason
- If spinal cord severed
Reflexes intact in humans
your nervous system connects through your spinal cord, if you have an injury there, it can mean that parts of your body can get cut off from your brain - Parts of your body below the spinal cord, can get cut off from your brain so that you won’t be able to perceive tactile stimulus from below that part of the spinal cord bc messages can’t get to the brain. can’t exercise motor control because messages from the brain can’t get to muscles.
- Some kinds of simple reflexes can remain intact (when you hit your knee and it pops up.) if this remains intact even with spinal injury, tells us the reflex is built in locally to the leg and not controlled by the brain.
Anytime there is an experience of pain, Huxley is happy to admit that there is a corresponding event that is happening in the nervous system - this shows that the activity in the nervous system that is happening in the brain is not happening in the periphery
- Descartes mentions the case of pain in phantom limbs - undergo an amputation, but still have feelings within the limb that has been amputated, like an illusion - that may be another bit of evidence that the bit of nervous system activity that corresponds with pain, is in the brain, rather than the peripheral nervous system
- Motor control necessary for sophisticated movements can take place without any conscious experience of it
Lobotomised frog - Huxley
Lobotomized frog - swims, balances, swallows and navigates
The little bit of brain left intact probably there aren’t any conscious experiences intact. Yet the frog is still able to swim, balance, swallow, and navigate.
Sophisticated movements are still possible without consciousness
Evolutionary argument for animal consciousness
- Complex natural phenomena are always preceded by simpler modifications (eg. complex organs, people didn’t know about the mechanism within individual cells in the past) every single step has to be individually advantageous, you will never get a complex organ that is never preceded by some simpler version of the same thing.
- Human consciousness is a complex natural phenomenon
- If human consciousness was preceded by simpler modifications, then some animals are conscious
- Therefore some animals are conscious
Huxley
- But though we may see reason to disagree with Descartes hypothesis that animals are unconscious machines, it doesn’t follow that he was wrong in regarding them as automata
- Animal behavior does not have to be caused by animal consciousness.
Just because they are conscious doesn’t mean they aren’t automatic still
Maybe animals are not unconscious machines, but they are conscious machines - Consciousness itself is not mechanical, Instead, Huxley thinks that the behaviour of animals sis fully caused by the mechanical (in the sense of physical processes) consciousness is just a byproduct of the mechanical processes
- He gives the example of a locomotive - the steam engine has a whistle, why does it whistle - because the exhaust from the fires
Whistle is coordinated with the train moving but does not cause it. It is the turbine. - You have a case where two events are correlated, but the whistle does not cause the train to move, and the train actually moving forward does not cause the whistle.
- There is a common cause, what causes the train to move and the whistle are the same
- Coordinated movement can take place in just the nervous system. And the nervous system activity is associated with consciousness, but the consciousness doesn’t necessarily control the nervous system activity.
epiphenomenalism: mental states have physical causes but no physical effects epi )=above/in addition to) + phenomenon + ism - Consciousness is just a byproduct that doesn’t actually control our behaviour
