All I can think of is the essay - fear and confusion and complexity!
So I might use this as a sounding board to try to straighten things out...
Let's start again.
Lucy is walking in the countryside. She comes across a pond where she sees a child and a squirrel drowning. She can only save one of them. Lucy tosses a coin; saves the squirrel and the child drowns.
Lucy considers that to deny that the interests of a squirrel merit equal moral consideration to those of a human would be speciesism. Is she right to do so?
In this paper I will explore some of the tensions and complexities inherent in the conception of speciesism as it is usually applied in animal ethics. My particular concern is how to determine the interests of non human animals (NHA) in a manner that is not anthropocentrist. I will be arguing that the most commonly used frameworks for a sliding scale of interests while claiming to be non speciesist can in fact be speciesist and/or anthropocentrist.
In section one I will clarify the concepts of speciesism and anthropocentrism, following the definitions presented by Oscar Horta. In section two I proceed to address briefly three speciesist positions and two nominally non speciesist positions in the contemporary tradition. Moving into section three, I will consider how the two non speciesist positions might be argued to fail to live up to their claims. This leads me to section four where I will attempt to demonstrate that the moral individualist, a stance I favour, has to apply both context dependent interests and concepts from cognitive ethnology when considering the moral consideration of individuals. My conclusion does not intend to offer a new perspective or new moral theory - it is far from that ambitious. Instead, I simply wish to demonstrate that a serious concern with speciesism adds great complexity to considerations of the interests and moral status of individuals.
I
Orcar Horta defines speciesism thus:
Speciesism is the unjustified disadvantageous consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to one or more particular species.
It is important here to note the use of the word 'unjustified'. This allows that disadvantageous consideration or treatment may be justified, i.e. it may not be discriminatory. Such a justification could be that an individual X from species S does not have capacities C and without capacities C, X cannot be harmed in a morally significant way by such disadvantageous consideration or treatment. The claim here is that it is the absence of C, not the classification in species S, which justifies the disadvantageous consideration or treatment.
Horta defines anthropocentrism as:
Anthropocentrism is the disadvantageous treatment or consideration of those who are not members (or who are not considered members) of the human species.
In this definition, the word 'unjustified' is not used. Horta states that even if disadvantageous treatment or consideration to NHA were justified, such treatment would still be a form of anthropocentrism. This relies on a distinction between the terms anthropocentric (relative to anthropocentrism) and anthropocentrist (favourable to anthropocentrism). He explains, 'Hence, we may say that an anthropocentric premise is one that necessarily entails a position that favors humans over nonhumans, whereas an anthropocentrist premise would be one that has been accepted (at some point) with the intention of defending such a position.' In his view, anthropocentrism is an unjustified position as it is anthropocentric speciesism.
(I think I need to work harder on that section.)
With these definitions in place, we can proceed to section two in which I address briefly three accounts of speciesist positions and two non speciesist positions.
II
(That's for tomorrow.)
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