The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?' -- Jeremy Bentham<\/p>\r\n
\u201cHe who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. \u2013 Immanuel Kant<\/p>\r\n
Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures. \u2013 Dalai Lama<\/p>\r\n
There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings. We all feel joy, we all crave to be alive and to live freely and we all share this planet together. \u2013 Mahatma Gandhi<\/p>\r\n
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. -- Paul McCartney<\/p>\r\n
The history of ethics\u00a0might be looked at a history of the gradual expansion of ethical consideration. Tribal loyalties are replaced by national loyalties, and eventually loyalties to all of humanity; exclusion of women and people in minority groups are replaced by universal rights for all human beings regardless of race or gender. Some philosophers insist that this \u201cexpanding circle\u201d of ethics has not quite expanded as far as it should even with universal human rights. At present most human beings act as if the circle of ethical consideration stops at the border of the human species, as if no non-human animals deserve true ethical consideration. Hence, we keep certain non-human animals as pets, kill them for food and sport, and perform countless experiments on them in labs without even wondering whether this violates ethical rules that we should pay attention to. In this section we are going to examine a number of arguments concerning the proposed expansion of ethics to include granting at least some animals moral consideration. Note that\u00a0moral consideration\u00a0does not mean the same thing as\u00a0moral rights, and that although some philosophers, most notably Tom Regan insist that some animals be granted rights, not all who defend granting animals moral consideration follow Regan in this.<\/p>\r\n
Non-Human Animals: Crash Course Philosophy #42<\/a> (9:46)<\/strong><\/p>\r\n[embed]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y3-BX-jN_Ac&t=1s[\/embed]\r\n\r\nIf you are experiencing issues viewing the video above, please use this link:\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=y3-BX-jN_Ac&t=1s<\/a>.\r\n Before roughly two hundred years ago,\u00a0humans for the most part assumed what I\u2019d like to call the \u201cdogma of difference.\u201d This is the idea that whatever our relationship to animals may be, it is the differences between us and them that should be emphasized, not the (mostly superficial) similarities. In the\u00a0Old Testament, for example, the story is told of how God created animals separately than human beings and grated us dominion over all of the other animals and plants on the earth, to use as we see fit. The differences between humans and animals according to this story are that we are the\u00a0ends\u00a0of creation, and animals are just the\u00a0means\u00a0that we can and should use for our benefit. Likewise, according to this tradition, it is humans alone who have souls, and thus we are in a unique position to control nature, while animals as a part of non-human nature are subject to our control.<\/p>\r\n The seventeenth century philosopher Rene Descartes\u00a0took the Christian idea that animals have no souls to its logical conclusion when he suggested that animals have much more in common with inanimate machines, such as clocks, than they do with human beings. This is because animals have only bodies, the movements of which are subject, according to the scientific perspective Descartes helped to create, to entirely mechanical explanations. If animals have no souls, then they also lack what comes from having a soul \u2013 inner experience, experience of pleasure and pain, experience of one\u2019s own thoughts, fears and desires. Since, as Descartes argued, according to the tradition going back at least to the Old Testament, animals do not have souls, they are thus incapable of experiencing anything, not even pleasure or pain. How then do we explain why it is that animals appear to experience things, like pain for example? Well, when a dog makes noises as a result of being injured, this would have to be the same kind of thing that your alarm clock does when it is set to go off at a certain time \u2013 it makes noises for purely mechanical reasons. Since both clocks and dogs lack souls their noises are not experienced \u201cfrom inside\u201d by anyone or anything \u2013 there is \u201cnobody home\u201d inside a dog or a clock. The ethical implications of this are that there are no ethical implications \u2013 however we treat animals is OK, since not only did God give us dominion over animals, they do not even really experience the kinds of things that we experience when we ask others not to harm us or set back our interests.<\/p>\r\n This extreme view\u00a0of the dogma of difference was challenged somewhat, though not entirely, by later philosophers, like Kant. Kant believed, as we have seen that the basis for genuine moral relations with other persons is their ability to understand what it means to respect another being. This requires rationality, the ability to understand the abstract idea of respect. Since, in his view, animals lack this ability, they neither owe us nor are owed respect. In terms of Kant\u2019s distinction between persons and things, animals fall entirely on the side of things, possessing merely instrumental value. However, Kant did recognize that certain animal behaviors bear an analogy with human behavior \u2013 hence a dog cries out in pain when beaten. Whether the animal is \u201creally\u201d feeling pain when a person beats it does not matter as much as the fact that it seems to. Kant reasons that if it seems to us that animals feel pain when mistreated this may serve to harden us to human suffering, and this would be an unwelcome outcome. Kant clearly endorses the dogma of difference since it is only his belief that mistreating animals will have bad effects on human relations to other humans that underlies his view that we should not abuse animals too much.<\/p>\r\n Since the nineteenth century however,\u00a0the development of the science of biology has fundamentally challenged one of the major supports of the dogma of difference by challenging the strict separation between animals and humans on scientific grounds. As modern biology has amply demonstrated, we are made of the same basic stuff, the same complex biochemicals organized in the same ways into the same types of cells, tissues and organs as other animals. Further, as is now completely accepted by biology, we are related to all other living things, from the lowliest fungus on up the scale of complexity to the most complex mammals \u2013 we are all part of a single, vast family tree going back to the first appearance of life on earth some four billion years ago. In addition to these deep similarities between all life forms, there is much evidence that human behavior is not as different from animals\u2019 behavior (especially the behavior of other mammals) as Descartes and others believed. The evidence comes in the form of studies of the physiological basis of human and animal experience and behavior. Although we can never really know from inside what it is like to be a dog or a cow, we do know that dog and cow brains have the same parts that support experiences of pain and pleasure in us. In addition, scientists have spent years documenting the complexities of social organization in such animals as chimpanzees and gorillas and the picture that emerges here is that certain animals are not really that different from humans.<\/p>\r\n Biology, however,\u00a0does not simply point out that we are much more closely related to other living things than we previously suspected. It also provides us with a powerful set of tools for more effectively and efficiently exploiting animals for our purposes. Consider the modern \u201cfactory farm\u201d in which biology is put to work to maximize the yield from animals for human purposes. Modern methods of animal production involve:<\/p>\r\n\r\n All of this is made possible\u00a0by our increased understanding of the way animals work. So the ironic result of biology is that it supports the idea that animals are not that different from us and so maybe might deserve more moral consideration, and at the same time enables us to make much more efficient and ruthless use of animals as meat and milk production machines. As a result of biology, animals, paradoxically, appear both more like persons that have moral value and more like things that have only instrumental value. Rather than solving the problem of the moral status of animals, modern biology presents us with a dilemma: our knowledge of the way animals work gives us both more reason to respect them and more opportunity to exploit them.<\/p>","rendered":" The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but rather, ‘Can they suffer?’ — Jeremy Bentham<\/p>\n \u201cHe who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. \u2013 Immanuel Kant<\/p>\n Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures. \u2013 Dalai Lama<\/p>\n There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings. We all feel joy, we all crave to be alive and to live freely and we all share this planet together. \u2013 Mahatma Gandhi<\/p>\n If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. — Paul McCartney<\/p>\n The history of ethics\u00a0might be looked at a history of the gradual expansion of ethical consideration. Tribal loyalties are replaced by national loyalties, and eventually loyalties to all of humanity; exclusion of women and people in minority groups are replaced by universal rights for all human beings regardless of race or gender. Some philosophers insist that this \u201cexpanding circle\u201d of ethics has not quite expanded as far as it should even with universal human rights. At present most human beings act as if the circle of ethical consideration stops at the border of the human species, as if no non-human animals deserve true ethical consideration. Hence, we keep certain non-human animals as pets, kill them for food and sport, and perform countless experiments on them in labs without even wondering whether this violates ethical rules that we should pay attention to. In this section we are going to examine a number of arguments concerning the proposed expansion of ethics to include granting at least some animals moral consideration. Note that\u00a0moral consideration\u00a0does not mean the same thing as\u00a0moral rights, and that although some philosophers, most notably Tom Regan insist that some animals be granted rights, not all who defend granting animals moral consideration follow Regan in this.<\/p>\n Non-Human Animals: Crash Course Philosophy #42<\/a> (9:46)<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n \t