Five Misguided Attempts to Defend Speciesism

1 Five Misguided Attempts to Defend Speciesism Bryan Ross Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science September 2020 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Bryan Ross to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by Bryan Ross in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 3 Acknowledgments I want to thank my supervisors, Gerald Lang and Rob Lawlor, for their priceless philosophical guidance. I am grateful for the patience, promptness, and diligence with which they have read and commented on so many drafts of each chapter of this thesis. This thesis would not have been possible without them. Thank you very much to Jessica Isserow and Patrick Tomlin for giving up their time to be my examiners. I am also very thankful for the financial support received from the University of Leeds, for the first 3 years of my PhD. I am incredibly lucky to have met Adina Covaci, Alison Toop, Emily Paul, Gary Mullen, Marc Wilcock, and Will Gamester during my time at Leeds. I honestly do not think I could have done this without all of you. Finally, I am indebted to my family - my parents, John and Belinda; my sisters, Cathy and Johanna; my brother, Johnny; my wife’s family, John, Sean, and Chloe; and my wife, Lisa- Marie, whom the thesis is dedicated to. They have all kept me going and this thesis would not have been completed without them. 4 Table of Contents Introduction ...........................................................................................................................7 Chapter 1: Regan and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker: Falling Prey to the Predation Argument……………………………………………………………………….14 1. The Predation Argument……….. ………………………………………………........15 2. A More Plausible Defence............................................................................................20 3. A Deeper Worry………………………………..……………………………………..21 4. Regaining Consistency…………………………………………………………….…24 4.1. Disposing of the Agency Requirement: Falling Prey to the Predation Argument…………………………………………………………………………….25 4.2. Disposing of the Permissibility Claim: Embracing a Duty of Martyrdom……….......................................................................................................30 5. Conclusion………………….........................................................................................33 Chapter 2: Regan and the Problem of the Innocent Attacker: Having One’s Prey and Eating It Too………………………………………………………………………………...37 1. Justification Defeats Liability………………………………………………………..38 2. Closing the Gap……………………………………………………………………....41 3. Exploiting the Gap……………………………………………………………………54 4. Bear Attack Revisited………………………………………………………………...59 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………62 Chapter 3: A Series of Unfortunate Accounts of Misfortune……………………………65 1. The Species Norm Account……………………………………………………………67 1.1. Superchimp #1…………………………………………………………………...68 1.2. Superchimp #2…………………………………………………………………...69 5 1.3. Superchimp #1 Revisited………………………………………………………..70 1.4. Superchimp #2 Revisited………………………………………………………..73 2. The Intrinsic Potential Account………………………………………………………..75 2.1. Problems with the Intrinsic Potential Account…………………………………..79 2.1a. Intrinsic/Extrinsic Potential…………………………………………….79 2.1b. Connor & Abigail………………………………………………………84 3. The Role of Misfortune Verdicts………………………………………………………87 4. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..90 Chapter 4: How to Get Away with Speciesism……………………………………………92 1. Is Speciesism a Mere Prejudice………………………………………………………93 2. Embracing Speciesism: Potentiality………………………………………………...103 3. Avoiding Speciesism: Personism…………………………………………………...111 3.1.‘Typical’ in what sense?.......................................................................................112 3.2. The relevant sense of ‘kind’……………………………………………………115 4. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..119 Chapter 5: Humans are Persons or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Generic……………………………………………………………………………………..122 1. Essence and Generics………………………………………………………………125 2. Generics and their Truth Conditions………………………………………………..130 3. Characteristic Dimensions of a Kind……………………………………………….132 4. Nature of Counterinstances…………………………………………………………135 4.1. The Generics Debate…………………………………………………………...138 5. Essence and Personhood……………………………………………………………139 5.1.Yet Another Plague……………………………………………………………..142 6 6. As For Those Pesky Intuitions……………………………………………………...144 7. The Generics Debate Revisited……………………………………………………..145 8. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..146 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….150 7 Introduction Two well-known and related arguments within the animal ethics literature have interested me ever since I read Peter Singer’s book Practical Ethics as part of an undergraduate ‘Introduction to ethics’ module. The first is the unfortunately named argument from marginal cases, and the second is the argument that discrimination based on grounds of species membership is objectionable for the same reasons that discrimination based on sex or race is. Both arguments are frequently appealed to by those who wish to defend some form of moral status for animals. The argument from marginal cases, as described by Peter Singer, holds that human beings are, for the most part, not equal. If we are to seek some morally relevant property that all humans possess, it would have to be a kind of lowest common denominator pitched so low that no human being lacks it. The catch is that any such characteristic that is possessed by all human beings will not be possessed only by human beings. For example, all humans, but not only humans, are capable of feeling pain; and while only humans are capable of solving complex mathematical problems, not all humans can do this. So it turns out that in the only sense in which we can truly say, as an assertion of fact, that all humans are equal, at least some members of other species are also ‘equal’ - equal, that is, to some humans (1975, p. 265). The difficulty, then, is that for any morally relevant property that we can appeal to in order to justify giving more weight to the interests of humans, it will either be the case that some non- human animals also possess it, or it will be the case that not all humans possess it. The second argument holds that those who attempt to defend the intuition that we should give more weight to the interests of humans than to the interests of non-human animals - in virtue of the fact that they are human interests - without pointing to a morally relevant property, are guilty of speciesism, a prejudice objectionable for the same reasons that racism and sexism are. Here is Singer again: 8 Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race…Similarly, those I would call ‘speciesists’ give greater weight to the interests of members of their own species when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of other species (1993, p. 58). For Singer, the type of creature you are makes no contribution to the inventory of morally significant properties you have when deciding whether to count your interests, and how much weight to give to them. Species membership is morally arbitrary, or uninteresting, as is sex and race. For Singer, the properties of species, race, and sex conceal morally significant properties rather than present us with morally significant properties. I have long found these arguments persuasive and yet I find it difficult to shake off what I refer to throughout this thesis as the ‘Common-Sense Intuition’: that the interests of humans count for more than those of non-human animals and that, for example, it is worse to perform medical experiments on a severely cognitively impaired human than on a comparably cognitively endowed non-human animal. Despite the fact that I spend the majority of this thesis arguing against arguments which attempt to justify this intuition, I take this intuition, and the search for a justification of it, as both my starting point and my motivation for the thesis. As I see it, there are two promising routes for defending the Common-Sense Intuition: we can either find some morally relevant property which all and only humans hold, or we can defend some form of speciesism which does not leave us exposed to parallel defences of malicious forms of prejudice such as racism and sexism. Before I look specifically at attempts to defend this intuition, I spend the first two chapters considering problems which follow when we take animal rights seriously and, specifically, Tom Regan’s argument that humans and animals possess equal inherent value and an equal right to be treated with respect. In chapter one, I discuss Regan’s account of animal rights and 9 look at the predation argument which challenges it. According to Tom Regan (2004), animals have a right not to be killed. The ‘Predation Argument’ holds that if humans are often guilty of violating this right, then predators, too, violate the rights of other animals when they kill and eat them. This entails, the argument

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