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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
Peter Singer and Richard Posner have been debating the subject of animal rights. The results aren't especially impressive:"I do not agree that we have a duty to (the other) animals that arises from their being the equal members of a community composed of all those creatures in the universe that can feel pain, and that it is merely "prejudice" in a disreputable sense akin to racial prejudice or sexism that makes us "discriminate" in favor of our own species... I start from the bottom up, with the brute fact that we, like other animals, prefer our own—our own family, the "pack" that we happen to run with (being a social animal), and the larger sodalities constructed on the model of the smaller ones, of which the largest for most of us is our nation.
I do not feel obliged to defend this reaction; it is a moral intuition deeper than any reason that could be given for it and impervious to any reason that you or anyone could give against it. Membership in the human species is not a "morally irrelevant fact," as the race and sex of human beings has come to seem."
The problem with this argument from Posner, as Singer is quick to point out, is that that the construction of these sodalities is historically, not biologically contingent; in the past exactly the same arguments could have been used to defend the notions that race and sex justify the social inferiority of certain groups. Equally, Posner may well be correct to note that what has altered that was more easily attributable to socio-economic forces that debate, but that does seem little more than a counsel of despair; a case could very easily be made that the collapse of communism was entirely due to such forces rather than the actions of any individuals like Vaclav Havel, but I am less than convinced that Posner is likely to cleave unswervingly to such a notion of realpolitik.
What suprises me is that Posner fails to advance the simple point that the notion of any 'transhuman' community is heavily limited by the fact that only certain beings (i.e. humans) could possibly fully participate in it, with all others having rights assigned to them. It seems rather unlikely that discrimination can be overcome without figures like Luther-King or Pankhurst demanding, rather than passively, receiving rights. Given that, the more moderate reforms Posner suggests (in anys like farming conditions) seem a rather more practical way forward than any vision of the future based on the view that rights are simply something Big Brother hands out.
posted by Richard 1:23 pm
