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The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals

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The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series Series editors: Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn Associate editor: Clair Linzey In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of other scholars have followed, from historians to social scientists. From being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics and in multidiscipli- nary inquiry. This series explores the challenges that animal ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional understandings of human–animal relations. Specififi cally, the series will: • provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out ethical positions on animals; • publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished, scholars; and • produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in char- acter or have multidisciplinary relevance Titles include: ANIMAL SUFFERING: PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE Elisa Aaltola ANIMALS AND PUBLIC HEALTH Why Treating Animals Better Is Critical to Human Welfare Aysha Akhtar ANIMALS IN CHINA Law and Society Deborah Cao AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS AND POLITICAL THEORY Alasdair Cochrane ANIMAL CRUELTY, ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, AND HUMAN AGGRESSION More than a Link Eleonora Gullone ANIMALS IN THE CLASSICAL WORLD Ethical Perspectives from Greek and Roman Texts Alastair Harden POWER, KNOWLEDGE, ANIMALS Lisa Johnson THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS Andrew Knight AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS IN VISUAL CULTURE Randy Malamud CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY AND THE STATUS OF ANIMALS The Dominant Tradition and Its Alternatives Ryan Patrick McLaughlin POPULAR MEDIA AND ANIMALS Claire Molloy ANIMALS, EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY Siobhan O’Sullivan AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS AND SOCIOLOGY Kay Peggs ANIMALS AND SOCIAL WORK A Moral Introduction Thomas Ryan ANIMALS IN SOCIAL WORK Why and How They Matter Thomas Ryan (editorr) AN INTRODUCTION TO ANIMALS AND THE LAW Joan Schaffner KILLING HAPPY ANIMALS Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics Tatjana Višak POLITICAL ANIMALS AND ANIMAL POLITICS Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg (editors) Forthcoming titles ANIMAL THEOLOGY AND ETHICS IN INDIAN RELIGIONS Anna S. King ANIMALS AND ECONOMICS Steve McMullen ON NOT EATING MEAT Sabrina Tonutti The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–57686–5 Hardback 978–0–230–57687–2 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of diffifi culty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals Markk H. Bernstein Purdue Universityy , USA © Mark H. Bernstein 2015 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-0-230-27662-8 A ll rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57659-3 ISBN 978-1-137-31525-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137315250 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bernstein, Mark H., 1948– The moral equality of humans and animals / Mark H. Bernstein, Purdue University, USA. pages cm. — (The Palgrave Macmillan animal ethics series) 1. Ethics. 2. Animal welfare – Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. BJ1031.B465 2015 179Ј9.3—dc23 2015018316 In memory of my father Louis, my mother Matilda, and my friend Knish; and for all those who have needlessly suffered from having been born members of nonhuman species. Contents Preface: The Human–Animal Relationship viii Acknowledgments xii 1 On the Relative Unimportance of Human Interests 1 1.1 Setting the stage 1 1.2 What do we mean when we say that human interests are more significant than animal interests? 6 1.3 Does the cosmos inform us that human interests are more significant than animal interests? 18 1.4 Should humans consider human interests as more significant than animal interests? 39 2 On the Relative Unimportance of Human Life 67 2.1 Setting the stage 67 2.2 The disvalue of death argument 72 2.3 Why your death is less important than you think 91 2.4 The problem with valuing capacities 111 2.5 From preservation to creation 128 2.6 Mill’s argument 133 Conclusion 146 Notes 147 Selected Bibliographyy 150 Index 151 vii Preface: The Human–Animal Relationship I love my dog Wulfie. Reflection on this indubitable truth served as one motivation for this monograph, for in loving Wulfie the way I do, I conceive of his interests and life as significant as any of those of the humans I love. I believe this motivation is reasonable, justifiable, and generalizable. My thesis, baldly stated, is that the interests and lives of nonhuman animals are as morally important as the interests and lives of fellow humans. I recognize how radical most will find this position; few people believe that the interests of nonhuman animals are as worthy of concern as those of humans, and fewer still believe that the lives of animals are as significant as the lives of humans. Even among philosophers, who tend to spend more time thinking about these issues than laypersons, my thesis finds relatively few supporters. While there are some thinkers who believe that the interests of humans and animals deserve equal consideration, there are precious few who depart from the general consensus that, from a cosmic or thoroughly impartial perspective, human lives are more valuable than lives of nonhuman animals. I am swimming against a powerful and entrenched tide. This book scarcely merits a readership if it amounts to nothing more than an expression of an idiosyncratic contrarian. That we have been mistaken in our assessment of the relative importance of human and animal interests and lives had better matter. It does. Consider the fact that some 11 billion (that’s ‘billion’ with a ‘b’ to appropriate the language of the late Carl Sagan) animals are killed annually in the US in factory farming. Since there are slightly more than 300 million people living in the US, there are about 35 animals killed each year for every adult and child in the US, but perhaps even worse than the terrible and premature deaths that await most of these creatures are the ‘lives’ chickens, cows, and pigs endure in preparation for slaughter. I will spare you the details of how these viii Preface: The Human–Animal Relationship ix animals are raised, transported, and murdered – feel free to read my Without a Tearr for some of the grotesque details – but there can be no doubt that if f we believed in my thesis, that is, iff we believed that, respectively, the interests and lives of nonhuman and human animals were on a par, the public outcry would be unprecedented. Imagine we discovered that humans were being intensively farmed in a rural area of Pennsylvania, that there were tens of thousands of humans being confined to the point of immobility, fed a ‘diet’ consisting of scraps of bone and antibiotics served with the sole purpose of fattening the inmates, transported hundreds perhaps thousands of miles in cramped and freezing conditions, and killed by means that often resulted in excruciating painful exterminations. I take it that we would be morally outraged and unexceptionably demand for the immediate abolition of this practice. Without the pervasive supposition that humans have greater moral significance than animals – that animals just don’t matter r or countt as much as humans – we would, and should, have similar attitudes toward the actual institution of factory farming as we would to our fictional case. The stakes, then, are large. This is not a mawkish tract. There will be no references to ‘cuddly’ dogs or ‘cute’ cats. While these omissions are not consequences of believing that dogs are not cute nor that cats are not cuddly (in fact, I believe quite the contrary), I forbear making these fuzzy allusions to these furry animals not because they are, in some way, untoward or insidious, but simply because my argument does not require them. In recent years, feelings have received bad press. We are told that argu- ments that employ ‘appeals to sentimentality’ are evasions, perpetu- ated because authors of such tactics lack ‘tough-minded’ reasons for their views, and so revert to ‘tender-hearted’ ploys playing on the emotions of others.
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