EPLASS CDE

The circle may have expanded to include more beings in more places over the centuries, but the expansion is by no means linear. For some, like the Jains and Quechua people, the inclusion of all animals and of nature in the circle has long been morally obvious. So when talking about expanding the moral circle, it’s worth taking care to avoid Eurocentrism, the concept of progress that views Western historical innovations as the only ones that count.
On the phone after the hearing, Singer’s lawyer told me his plan to appear, uninvited, at a hearing two hours later, which forced me to wait around at the courthouse when I should have been working on my complaint. Even if I were not representing myself, it would have been unusual not to grant an extension from a Friday to a Monday morning, especially when the Defense Counsel did not even show up to object. I send out DawnWatch media alerts, aimed at encouraging activists to encourage the media to give animal issues better coverage, so that people can make informed choices in line with their own values. We have a lot of success with those; the 2019 International Conference presentation I mentioned above shows how they work. But I may be best known for bathing and blow-drying turkeys on TV.
I love that example because Guide Dogs for the Blind breeds Labradors, many of whom don’t make the cut and end up needing regular homes, while thousands of dogs whose temperaments would be perfectly suited for the job are killed in shelters. Imagine Gloria Steinem, with a book titled Women’s Liberation Now coming out, focusing a New York Times piece on a cause she deemed “equally” important. Jainism, which was founded in the sixth century BC, has long emphasized the supreme value of ahimsa, or nonviolence to all living creatures. Many monks take this so seriously that they cover their mouths with fabric to avoid accidentally breathing in insects, and sweep the ground ahead as they walk to avoid stepping on them. Some activist movements have been more successful than others. So in trying to figure out how advocates can boost their chances of successfully expanding the circle, it makes sense to investigate what contributed to the success or failure of past movements.

Moral status of animals

• Yet it is what the child’s future will be like that is really relevant.
• Almost every person, as they saw two others ignore the cries for help, just kept walking.
• Nature’s rights to exist and flourish are even enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution.
• Singer argues his infanticide stance logically, but it is likely to send chills up many spines.
• Ableism has a sound purpose when it calls out discrimination against disabled people on grounds not related to their disability.
• When a famous man, only tangentially involved in our movement at the time, puts his name on the work of women devoted to it, and puts his name first, he continues to get writing assignments on animal issues, as editors view him as the leading voice.

This was reminiscent of his demeaning the work of the brilliant pioneering activist, when, due to unhealed bad feeling between them, he denied her a chapter that was rightfully hers and handed it to a young activist he was sexually pursuing. That was profoundly professionally punishing, given his standing in the nonprofit world, and another act he omitted from his summary of the situation before the auditorium. He omitted that part as he summed up the issue to the San Francisco auditorium, surely calling into question the ethics professor’s honesty. Singer argues his infanticide stance logically, but it is likely to send chills up many spines.
I will, if necessary, summon the other women I know he has gravely harmed over the years (again, to challenge his credibility, as is allowed by California law). And I will call on one previously unknown to me, who I learned about from our movement’s lead feminists during my quest for legal representation for an appeal. She compares her interaction with Peter Singer to “rape”, not because he forcibly held her down but because of the sway he held over her, which interfered with her power to refuse him. Let me make it clear that I am not accusing him of rape, and, to my understanding, nor is she. But I have no doubt that her testimony would be of grave interest to a truly disinterested judge and to a jury.

Social Media

• The first group experience pain and pleasure but don’t think about themselves in any meaningful way.
• There is a serious difficulty with using self-awareness and the preference to stay alive as criteria for full moral status.
• From that book I learned what I had already suspected, that humans can barely fathom the way other animals experience the world, with senses far more impressive than ours.
• I told him I could not move forward with that dynamic, and I filed suit.
• Krista Hiddema‘s chapter on Esther the Wonder Pig is one of my favorites.
• After consulting with lawyers, I decided not to appeal the court’s ruling, that my sexual harassment claim against Peter Singer had been filed beyond the statute of limitations.

It is unclear, however, what it takes to be potentially rational. But then Peter Singer is in no ethical position to discuss diet on behalf of our movement. It is probably impossible to be totally vegan in this society – car tires aren’t even vegan – so we must all draw our own lines. Eating animals, however, is well beyond the cheat level of most people who would consider themselves to be part of the animal rights movement. Yet in his most recent Guardian interview, Singer announces that he has no objection to eating oysters because he doesn’t think they can suffer. Examples like these complicate the Western narrative of moral progress.

Inanimate objects and insentient organisms

” The piece basically decries that 50 years after the release of Animal Liberation, animals are still treated badly before they are killed. But the idea that plants are sentient is hotly contested — a status reflected by their outlying position in the moral expansiveness scale. Both Reese and Singer told me they don’t see plants as sentient, although they said they’d change their views if convincing new evidence were to emerge. Singer went on to argue that reason, by its nature, doesn’t tolerate inconsistency and arbitrariness — so if we follow the path of rational thinking, it’ll lead us to push past inherited biases, whether they’re against other people or other species.
Our having any disagreement about the way I arranged the event is pure fantasy, surely invented to avoid acknowledging that we were arguing about our sexual history, a fact made clear by our subsequent email exchange. Anybody tempted to agree with Singer that oysters, and other mollusks he eats (he once wrote me that he had ordered mussels rather than be “stuck” with bread and salad) should read Ed Yong’s extraordinary book, An Immense World, which I mentioned above. From that book I learned what I had already suspected, that humans can barely fathom the way other animals experience the world, with senses far more impressive than ours. Meanwhile, how wonderful to see the movie Guardians of the Galaxy III making sure a generation grows up with the message that animal testing is just plain wrong – not wrong sometimes, depending on how greatly humans think they might benefit from it. The presumed need to focus on environmentalism goes against research done by Faunalytics, which reveals that the majority of people, and the vast majority of women, are interested in protecting animals. It flies in the face of the entertainment industry rule, “Never kill the dog,” because people will change the channel if you do.

Should animals, plants, and robots have the same rights as you?

Extreme forms of confinement also still dominate the US states with the most pigs and laying hens. Animal experimentation is now regulated in many developed nations, but what’s notable is how minimal it is in the US, where the vast majority of animals used in experiments aren’t covered. On animal sentience, we now have strong evidence that fish too can feel pain. There are also good reasons for thinking the same of some invertebrates – the octopus but also lobsters and crabs. How far sentience extends into other invertebrates is unclear.

Sentientism

The first group experience pain and pleasure but don’t think about themselves in any meaningful way. Such organisms must have ‘interests’, because only organisms with ‘interests’ are able to value one experience more than another experience.
The segment showed an actor pretending to be hurt and crying out for help. In a candid camera type of situation, Dateline watched the reactions of people walking by. Almost every person, as they saw two others larabet casino ignore the cries for help, just kept walking. But once that first person stopped, every person who came along joined in to help. People care about animals, so we need not hide our concern for them while trying to save them using backdoor approaches. In recent years, some have argued that plants have some degree of sentience.

Would it be wrong for you to chop down the last redwood tree, just for fun? 12 Many people think it would be wrong for you to do this, and it’s easy for biocentrism to explain why, because your doing so would be bad for a living thing. If parents have a newborn with a severe disability and that child needs to be on a respirator to survive, doctors will invite parents to decide whether to allow the child to die. Yet it is what the child’s future will be like that is really relevant. If that is ableist, then it isn’t always wrong to be ableist.
Maybe you think it would be wrong to discriminate on the basis of substrate, so we need the legal system to recognize robot rights, a theme Northern Illinois University media studies professor David Gunkel explores in his new book of that name. How humanity’s idea of who deserves moral concern has grown — and will keep growing. Only organisms that value one experience more than another deserve moral consideration. The first route isn’t particularly promising as evidenced by the fact that if we found out that some small percentage of the “human” population were actually rational space aliens disguised as humans, we wouldn’t infer from this that they didn’t matter morally. Defending anthropocentrism against the charge of speciesism requires arguing either that species membership is morally relevant or that there is some other morally relevant feature that all and only humans have. You argue there are certain situations where we could replace the animals we experiment on with humans…During the Covid pandemic, I supported 1Day Sooner, an organisation of well informed volunteers offering to test the efficacy of candidate vaccines.
How sad to see such a strong stand on shots and weak stand on meat from the author of Animal Liberation Now. “That is a call for animal welfare now, a worthy goal but one that lags behind most of the animal advocacy movement and even behind current trends in society. That’s a fair point, and it brings up one last important observation. Although it may be tempting to think that the larger your moral circle is, the more it maps onto contemporary progressive ideals, that’s not necessarily right.