Lecture Outline Notes on Animal Rights, cont.

1. Recap of Regan's Argument from Marginal Cases, and some intuitive objections to the conclusion:

• What does it imply about the break failure example? Is that intuitively plausible?
• Is it just 'speciesist' to think that this implication is implausible? I'll explain why I think the charge of 'speciesism' is misguided here.

2. If we reject the conclusion from Regan's Argument from Marginal Cases, we have to reject at least one premise. Which one, and why? I would reject premise 1--the premise that a being's moral status depends on the actual properties it possesses, specifically its mental properties. Possession of fancy mental properties may be sufficient for possessing full moral personhood, but why think it's necessary? Perhaps a being can have the status of moral personhood even if it lacks the fancy mental properties. How might we explain this?

• Does the idea of the possession of a soul really help answer the philosophical questions here?
• An alternative that seems (to me) more promising: we can perhaps explain the full value and rights of 'marginal cases' (i.e. human beings lacking normal mental capacities) with a partly species-centered (but not merely 'speciesist') view of moral status.

• Note how this account allows us to answer Singer's question (from another article): "If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human being to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose?"
• Why Regan's objection of 'speciesism' fails here: (1) I am not arbitrarily favoring just my own species over others, just because it's mine, and (2) the special features I'm citing in distinguishing a species such as Homo sapiens from a species of squirrel, for example, are not at all comparable to the superficial differences that distinguish mere races or genders; the latter are obviously irrelevant to determining moral status, but the former are plausibly very relevant, having much to do with what something is and the kind of life and being such things manifest, in a morally relevant sense. Because of this, (3) while I do accord a severely retarded child a higher moral status than a normal pig, and I do so because the child is human and the pig is not, this is not 'speciesist' in any objectionable sense, since my appeal to the child's humanity is neither arbitrary nor morally superficial.
• Having said that, the idea of speciesism does have some plausible applications: (1) are our very different attitudes toward dogs and toward pigs consistent and rationally defensible, or do they exhibit an irrational speciesism? (Actually, there may be inconsistency even within species, e.g. between our attitudes toward our pet dogs and the use of dogs in painful psychological research.) (2) humans vs. ET-ans.

3. If I'm right, then we needn't go as far as Regan, in granting all experiencing subjects of a life an equal inherent value and right to equal consideration of interests. But he may still be right that non-human animals have inherent value and rights of at least some kinds, to some degree: their being experiencing subjects of a life may be sufficient to guarantee such rights (unlike with plants, for example), perhaps to different degrees of strength depending on the species in question. Cf. the gradualist view of moral status, only now applied across species instead of stages of human development.

4. How much do we owe non-human animals, even on this moderate view? Can we justify eating them (given that it's not strictly necessary for our survival)? If so, under what conditions? How do we justify it? (You should be able to explain, among other things, how Pollan makes the case for his thesis that "what's wrong with animal agriculture--with eating animals--is the practice, not the principle.")