Part #3: Animal Rights--The Case Against A. R. Activist Peter Singer by Stella Young

The case against Peter Singer
The Drum By Stella Young

"Australian bioethicist and philosopher Peter Singer has argued the case for selective infanticide.

"Singer, who is arguably better known for his views on animal rights, has views about disability that have been discussed far less here in Australia than they have in the US where he lives and works. I am open about not being a fan of Singer's work, a statement that's often met with confusion among friends and colleagues. "But he does such great things for animal liberation!" they exclaim.

While that may be true, animal liberation is not the only subject of Singer's work. He also believes that parents should be given the choice to have their disabled babies killed after they are born.

His argument is not about the right to terminate pregnancy based on the presence of a disabled foetus, although he does believe this as well, but the active killing of babies born with particular disabilities.

I was once one of these babies.
[emphasis added]

Let me be clear: Singer does not object to my life as it exists now. I am now what he considers to be a person with a right to life. But I, along with all other babies, was not born this way. All babies are born without the capacity to make conscious choices about their preference for life, and so Singer does not consider that they have a right to life in the same way as humans who are capable of this choice. This is especially true, he says, where the infant has a disability.

In his book Practical Ethics, Singer argues the case for selective infanticide. He deems it unfair that "At present parents can choose to keep or destroy their disabled offspring only if the disability happens to be detected during pregnancy. There is no logical basis for restricting parents' choice to these particular disabilities.

If disabled newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth it would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to choose on the basis of far greater knowledge of the infant's condition than is possible before birth."

FROM Stella Young is a comedian, television presenter, disability advocate and was formerly editor of ABC's Ramp Up website. She is an ambassador for Our Watch.

READ THE REST OF THIS POWERFUL ARTICLE AT:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-08-15/young-case-against-peter-singer/4199120

IMPORTANT NOTE FROM PREVIOUS SECTIONS OF THIS SERIES:
I didn't post this "case against Peter Singer" because I am opposed to animal rights. On the contrary, Singer makes some good points. Furthermore, I think all humans ought to NOT eat or enslave sentient animals!

Furthermore, I think that animals, besides the human primates, homo sapiens, do have inherent worth.

Furthermore, no animals ought to be caused to suffer as an 'end justifies the means' by humans.

HOWEVER, what is problematic is that some animal rights activists including Peter Singer demean humans--such as his claim that infants AREN'T "PERSONS"!--and claim that all animals are equal to the human species.


Related Questions



In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox

Do Animals have Rights? Inherent Value?

Introduction: (Skip this if you want to get, quickly, to the article: To the QUESTION)

The whole issue of "animal rights" has been muddied and muddled by two events:
1. Controversial behavior and antics by some animal rights activists such as going naked in public to draw attention to the rights of animals, even committing theft and violent acts of sabotage!

An example of this is PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). But rather oddly while they oppose zoos and circuses,
they contrarily assert that pet owners ought to NOT let their cats out-of-doors to roam and explore!

Doesn't that sound like the imprisonment of animals?

2. Looking at the last 30 years of this ethical and philosophical question, some thinkers first bring up a very strange disconcert. They seek to defend animals’ worth and rights by demeaning the human species!

In their effort to defend animal rights, they actually deny human rights!

Semantics. What they mean is that there are no real human rights. Thy claim that human rights are a "myth." Humans made them up, and therefore, animal rights can be constructed, too, because there is no qualitative difference between human primates and other animals in nature.

A few advocates even go so far as to say that an adult ape or other sentient animal is worth more than a human infant.
(See ethics professor Peter Singer's claims)

But what is the basis for such a strange assertion, so contrary to the Enlightenment?

Stating that some animals are allegedly “better” than some humans seems a weird way to establish the worth and rights of other animals.

Besides it’s disconcerting and contradictory since the animal rights thinkers themselves are human. Unless they have some sort of masochistic tendency, it appears that their attacks on the species of homo sapiens itself is rather a rhetorical way of gutting the “transcendent” and the "essential" in human thought.

So why do they, then, think that all animals ought to be assigned value? Unclear.

Even more bizarre—taking us far from what most humans mean by “rights,”—many religious and some secular leaders actually seem to have a real self-hatred of their own species, humankind! The Christian leaders claim that ALL humans are “totally depraved” and “worthless.” While secularists claim that the amoral natural world would actually be better without humans!

But one wonders why?!

In sharp contrast, other human philosophers and scientists think that the general movement in human thought and ethics toward viewing of all animals—at least all sentient animals—
as having inherent worth
has come about through the “widening of the circle of concern” by many human rights activists.

Maybe it’s the old historical oddity that some human leaders try to equalize humankind by reducing and lowering/restricting all humans to the same basic level,
while other leaders,
seek the advancement of humankind by advocating and helping humans to rise as high as they can achieve, and even bringing up sentient species who don't seem to have rational capability.

Part 1:

TO THE QUESTION

Aside from millions of humans’ emotional love of their pets, what is the basis for animal rights and value?

In scientist Steven Pinker’s powerful tome on violence, Better Angels of Our Nature, while he explains the new move toward animal rights, he writes that most humans will never become “vegetarian,” will never adopt animal rights.

“But the impediments run deeper than meat hunger. Many interactions between humans and animals will always be zero-sum.



Animals eat our houses, our crops, and occasionally our children...
They kill each other, including endangered species that we would like to keep around."

"Without their participation in experiments, medicine would be frozen in its current state and billions of living and unborn people would suffer and die for the sake of mice.”


“...Something in me objects to the image of a hunter shooting a moose, but why am I not upset by the image of a grizzly bear that renders it just as dead?” (p.474)
--Steven Pinker
-

In nature, did the moose have any “animal rights”?

Isn’t nature amoral, non-rightful, indeed, centered in natural selection, “tooth and claw”?

Where are there animal rights in the case of cats and mice, sharks and fish?

Lions, crocodiles and wildebeests?

"A fact about the wildebeest migration is that every year, about 1.5 million wildebeest, zebra and several species of antelope uniformly make a circular tour between the Serengeti in Tanzania and Maasai Mara in Kenya, in search of greener pastures.

You can witness the drama unfold as predators lurk in the bushes and prey scamper for safety in what has since been dubbed 'survival for the fittest'...The most notorious among the predators is the lion and the Nile crocodile.

The lion perfectly chooses its arena...shrouded in thick grass cover and gets a strategic hiding spot to attack unsuspecting wildebeest and zebras. During the peak of the migration, vultures circle the air and hyenas laugh in the shadows; an indication of the innumerable wildebeest and zebra that have fallen under the claw of the mighty African lion.

The Nile crocodile however takes the medal as the deadliest predator. It comes in at the climax of the Mara migration - the crossing of the Mara River! This avid killer shapes the events that take place during the crossing of the Mara River."
http://www.kenya-information-guide.com/wildebeest-migration.html

Or elephant male seal versus elephant male seal, bloodying their snouts, seeking dominance and multiple female seals?

It doesn't appear that cats or mice or crocodiles or elephant seals have a conscience,
a sense of ought,
a rational ability to think in moral categories.

For many thinkers, the central issue isn’t really about any actual “rights” of animals but about reducing the public suffering and cruelty to animals:
“In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire."

"According to historian Norman Davies, ‘the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.’ Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world.”

“This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.”
--Steven Pinker (p. 145)

But, of course, the central philosophical question then nags:
Why ought humans to reduce the public suffering and cruelty to animals,
especially,
if far more suffering and cruelty continues in the millions of slaughterhouses around the world that supply billions of slabs of meat for all carnivorous humans?

Are not these billions of meat-eaters, basically, assigning worth to their pet dogs and cats, but denying worth to all the pigs, chickens, cows, and sheep?

Where then are there any “animal rights”?

The evidence of history, nature, and science seems to deny the reality of animal rights.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

After mulling on this difficult topic for years,
I'm currently at this place: Animals have inherent worth, BUT not Rights.

To be continued--


In the Light of difficult ethical questions,

Daniel Wilcox

Widening Our Circle of Concern: Vegetarianism

"Pigs by nature are every bit as loving, sensitive, and full of personality as the animals we call "family."

"Pigs dream, recognize their names, and are gregarious and affectionate being who form loyal bonds with each other and other species including humans."
--

If so, why do millions of American citizens sit down to fancy feasts of ham, pork, sausage, and bacon, especially at Thanksgiving and other holy days?

Sometimes these pork-barrel* times include their deeply loved pet dogs in attendance, waiting impatiently for any pig scraps to gobble up.
("Chester Collins Maxey in the National Municipal Review...
claimed that the phrase originated in a pre-Civil War practice of giving slaves a barrel of salt pork as a reward and requiring them to compete among themselves to get their share of the handout.")
from wikepedia

YET, "the curious and insightful pig is the smartest domestic animal in the world, with intelligence beyond that of a 3-year-old human child."

"In their natural setting, pigs spend hours playing, mother pigs sing to their piglets while nursing, and groups of pigs enjoy lying close together in the sun."
--from vegetarian poster

Consider these startling facts from scientists:
from "Pigheaded: How Smart are Swine?"
By Andy Wright
"Candace Croney is an Associate Professor of Animal Sciences at Purdue University and once taught pigs to play video games...
she participated in a study that set pigs to a task that previously only Rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees had been asked to perform."

"The pigs were provided with specially made joysticks that they could control with their mouths or snouts and then tasked with the job of moving a cursor around on the screen to make contact with different target walls that would shrink and move away."

"Croney did not think the pigs would be able to do it. But they could..."they’re really very fast learners... learn novel things quite quickly and quite well.”

"She soon set her pigs to other tasks...They were given odor quizzes, correctly picking out, say, spearmint, from an array of other smells that included mint and peppermint."

"Some studies have shown that scent is so important to a pig that if you cover up a part of a pigs’ cheek, they have trouble recognizing each other because that is where they emit a certain pheromone."

"Croney says the pigs were extremely clean, that they housebroke themselves and that at the end of a play session they put their own toys away in a big tub."

"Pigs are social, they remember locations well, they remember negative and positive experiences, can tell the difference between individual pigs and humans, recognize themselves in mirrors and learn from other pigs," says Dunipace.

"Kristina Horback, an ethologist (a person who observes animals in their natural habitat): “The social structure of pigs is just like elephants, they have the increased prefrontal cortex like primates and humans because they eat meat and they have the need to hunt and forage."
from "Pigheaded: How Smart are Swine?"
By Andy Wright
READ the whole insightful article at Modern Farmer:
https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/pigheaded-smart-swine/
--

Of course, for those of us who are moving toward vegetarianism, who have long ago quit pork and beef, but who still eat salmon, cod, and shrimp-- and sometimes fowl food at family meals to be courteous--for us in transition toward non-face food, there is this problem:
"Seth Dunipace, a veterinarian and post-doctoral fellow at University of Pennslyvania...thinks we should be asking ourselves why we care how smart a pig is. “I don’t think that’s necessarily fair because they’re using intelligence as a stand-in for suffering."

“And its this kind of thought that allows us to eat fish, and fish suffocate to death or bleed out over a course of thirty minutes, but a cow or pig must be rendered instantaneously insensible at slaughter. It’s a double standard."

"And fish do feel pain, fish do have memory. But we just don’t think of them as intelligent. And intelligence, I don’t think, should factor in to how greatly an animal can suffer.”

Hmm...we need to work toward a world of a widening circle of deep ethical concern, but keep in mind that we are all on this life voyage at different places.

Hopefully, we will live deeper and deeper into ethical truths,

Daniel Wilcox

To Eat or Not to Eat: That Is the Question--Sounds Fishy

Is There a Moral Case for Eating Meat?

Is Vegetarianism a Virtue?

Do We Need to Give Animals a Life Worth Living?

Are Human Beings Meant to Eat Meat?

Why Are Only About 1% of Humans Vegans?
--

Here's the beginning of an intriguing, thought-provoking article from Vox and Grist:

"Is There a Moral Case for Eating Meat?"

by Nathanael Johnson

"Where are the philosophers arguing that eating meat is moral?

When I started researching this piece, I’d already read a lot of arguments against meat, but I hadn’t seen a serious philosophical defense of carnivores. So I started asking around. I asked academics, meat industry representatives, and farmers: Who was the philosophical counterweight to Peter Singer?

In 1975, Singer wrote Animal Liberation, which launched the modern animal rights movement with its argument that causing animal suffering is immoral. There are plenty of other arguments against eating animals besides Singer’s, going back to the ancient Greeks and Hindus. There are even arguments that Christianity contains a mandate for vegetarianism. Matthew Scully’s Dominion argues against animal suffering; Scully rejects Singer’s utilitarian assertion that humans and animals are equal but says that, since God gave people “dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,” so we have a responsibility to care for them and show them mercy.

The arguments against eating animals are pretty convincing. But surely, I thought, there were also intellectuals making convincing counterarguments. Right? Nope. Not really..."

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/9/9122907/meat-ethics


http://grist.org/food/is-there-a-moral-case-for-meat/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed
--

As you probably remember from a past post, I am on a long journey toward vegetarianism. Currently, I am mostly a fishetarian (read crab, salmon, catfish, etc.) though occasionally I eat foul food;-) with my extended family and friends.

I resigned off pig many years ago. Easy for me to do since I don't like pork. Then left the cattle grazing on a thousand hills about 15 years or so ago. (Though, when my allergies let me, I still borrow cheese and milk.)

Back in the late 60's, my first vegetarian experiment came about because of the influence of a friend. Shortly before she went down to D.C. for King's March on Washington, she adopted vegetarianism. By the time I was in full swing, living on only vegetable, fruits, and nuts, she quit and resumed meat dishes. But me, I went nuts.

Yes, I followed the radical advice of health food fanatics including a 6-medal Olympic swimming star, Murray Rose. It worked for him and others.*

Bode Miller

http://www.ecorazzi.com/2012/07/27/top-10-historic-vegetarian-and-vegan-olympians/

One can't become an Olympic star easily. But my body couldn't handle a vegan only diet. I lost almost 50 pound, down to about 117, when I ought have weighed 175! Got malnurished. Looked like a stupid-sort of gandhi, without the wise side. More of a not-so-wise donkey.

I know that the official name of a fish-eater is pescatarian, but that not only sounds too academic, it sounds like being a pest;-)

Because, this time around, 40 years later, I'm taking vegetarianism slower and wiser, not evangelizing, don't have a knife to grind, just want to move toward a more spiritual and ethical level.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Living Toward the Garden: Part 2

Back before my recent battles against the hellish dragons of modern Christian theology and politics, I was ruminating on my ‘fishy’ eating habits ;-):

Hear about the ugly friar at the monastery, who visitors said looked like a chipmunk? He got kicked out of the monastery because he preferred fish and chips instead of meat, not just during Lent, but year round, and would often sneak fish and chips into his room at night.

He was known as a “’finished’ ‘chip monk’ who got ‘cod’ eating.” Groan…

Photo by Joachim Muller

My fairly recent move toward vegetarianism (in the last 10-15 years, since turning 50) isn’t intellectually driven, but more of an emotional/ethical intuition, an inclination toward the ideal world of Creation before death and decay, before tooth and claw, before kill or/and be killed. The move is toward the perfect world of the future in the Chosen One.

And on the levels of commitment, my choice is only an educated opinion, not doctrine or conviction. When I began the move, I didn't even tell anyone of my change--just stopped eating pork, then beef, and finally cut back on chicken and turkey. Only when family members asked did I briefly mention I was focusing on fish, but didn’t explain.

I still do eat some ‘foul’ food sometimes with my family and relatives. In harkening toward Heaven in the field of cuisine, I’m not a legalist at all; it's more about heavenly and healthful eating. And if medical professionals—not likely—came out with a scientific study proving that humans should eat chicken or sausage or even steak, I probably would.

I don’t inhabit health food stores, don’t try and find “organic” food, but often buy my eats at Wal-Mart:-)

Though I am amazed by and sometimes buy from Whole Foods Market.

Another feeling and reason why I’ve made the move down the food levels toward non-sentient life is I empathize with conscious animal life. I suppose so, more than many humans.

However, I'm not an animal rights activist, or nearly as concerned with animals as the biologist Richard Dawkins is (on the valuable worth of monkeys), or as much as C.S. Lewis was against animal vivisection. Though in the case of both I do think animals are of worth and that vivisection ought to be stopped.

Also, our insurance provider and our doctor have emphasized that I need to fill up on anti-inflammatory food, medicine, etc.

So I do.

Now where’s that salmon I want to smoke with the nonalcoholic mixed drink of Mountain Dew/Strawberry-Lemonade and wedge-fries from BJ’s?

I’m not in the least famished by what I choose not to eat, but am now fin-ished;-).

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox