It's always been one of my issues - say you want a piece of fruit and you like apples and oranges equally. At that moment, you have no preference. You might say, well I don't have the bother of peeling an apple. But then you might think, yeah, but that about balances the enjoyment of juice, which I don't get from an apple. I mean, you could choose between apples - the bigger one, the riper one, the less bruised one - but to choose between two identical apples and to choose between an apple and an orange both, though for different reasons, demand a coin toss. In the first case, they're too similar. In the second, they're too different.
I've been thinking about difference. Humans expand their moral circle by seeing similarity despite difference. Finally recognising that black people and women were more similar to white men than different. Then with animals, the smart ones, the ones that look human, the ones that behave like humans, the ones that feel pain like humans. Hence why it took so long to give a damn about octopuses. They're too damn weird.
When we look at animals, we like to see how they are like us - showing greed and jealousy or loyalty and affection. And we like to see them as a mirror - what they teach us about ourselves. Our evolutionary history. Our neurology.
People who like animals see the similarities, rather than the differences. That said, I'd like to know if people anthropomorphise their crickets and the like.
But what I want to say is this, they don't matter because they share stuff with us or they can teach us about ourselves. they matter because they fucking matter. They may not matter to people or to other species - but then we don't matter to other species (except instrumentally). Mattering is about being alive and having relationships. Morality is about finding some way to address all the mattering. The problem with it is that it's all from this one perspective: the human.
I know, I know, we're the only ones who can, right now, as far as we know, construct it. But if it's morality, something that's meant to be of intrinsic not instrumental value, then how can it be right if we construct it in our image to serve just us?
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