I frequently wonder where the line should ethically be drawn. We have to recognise that, as with almost every moral or ethical quandary, we’re dealing with a continuum of grey shades. We do, after all, have to kill things in order to live, and just as we can place, say, humans and chimpanzees on an intellectual scale with humans on top but not without overlap, so we can place chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, rhesus monkeys and pigs, pigs and dogs, and so forth, all the way down to animals so unintelligent that they are no more self-aware than plants. (If we attempt the argument that They don’t count because they’re plants, not animals, that’s just moving the arbitrary species centricism a few steps farther, past genus, family, and kingdom to phylum; a somewhat more distant relative—again a quantitative, not qualititive difference.) At no point on this continuum will there be a clear case of Species A has, qualitatively, ‘intelligence’, whereas species B does not; with no overlap. (More precisely, if we include enough species, we can construct a continuum such that no such point exists. I doubt we’d even need a very large fraction of all living species.)
—And we cannot survive without killing plants at the very least, so we must place an artificial delineation somewhere on this spectrum and say I arbitrarily draw a line here; below this line I am willing to exploit, whereas above I am not; or we must set aside a wide grey area. But all these distinctions are to some degree subjective and arbitrary—even before we review the linear hierarchy we have constructed and realise that it, too, is artificial, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity, and even our opinion on what constitutes relevant intelligence tends to be very human-centric.
Of course exploitation is also a concept with grey areas; maintaining an endangered species for conservation in large, natural-looking enclosures in a modern zoo is not the same as caging a lion in a small steel cage; keeping free-range chickens is not the same as running industrial chicken farms; keeping lab animals under the ægis of an ethical review board, with veterinary overseers and a legal requirement to euthanise any mouse that suffers unduly, is not the same as unbridled animal torture. Nor are all objects the same: Saving millions of people from painful death of cancer or pathogenic disease may well be said to deserve greater sacrifices than developing a more smear-resistant form of makeup.
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Date: 2009-03-09 07:19 pm (UTC)I frequently wonder where the line should ethically be drawn. We have to recognise that, as with almost every moral or ethical quandary, we’re dealing with a continuum of grey shades. We do, after all, have to kill things in order to live, and just as we can place, say, humans and chimpanzees on an intellectual scale with humans but not without overlap, so we can place chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys, rhesus monkeys and pigs, pigs and dogs, and so forth, all the way down to animals so unintelligent that they are no more self-aware than plants. (If we attempt the argument that , that’s just moving the arbitrary species centricism a few steps farther, past genus, family, and kingdom to phylum; a somewhat more distant relative—again a quantitative, not qualititive difference.) At no point on this continuum will there be a clear case of . (More precisely, if we include enough species, we can construct a continuum such that no such point exists. I doubt we’d even need a very large fraction of all living species.)
—And we cannot survive without killing plants at the very least, so we must place an artificial delineation somewhere on this spectrum and say ; or we must set aside a wide grey area. But all these distinctions are to some degree subjective and arbitrary—even before we review the linear hierarchy we have constructed and realise that it, too, is artificial, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity, and even our opinion on what constitutes relevant intelligence tends to be very human-centric.
Of course is also a concept with grey areas; maintaining an endangered species for conservation in large, natural-looking enclosures in a modern zoo is not the same as caging a lion in a small steel cage; keeping free-range chickens is not the same as running industrial chicken farms; keeping lab animals under the ægis of an ethical review board, with veterinary overseers and a legal requirement to euthanise any mouse that suffers unduly, is not the same as unbridled animal torture. Nor are all objects the same: Saving millions of people from painful death of cancer or pathogenic disease may well be said to deserve greater sacrifices than developing a more smear-resistant form of makeup.