I don’t think you’ve answered my question. My point was that you have a sliding scale for humans, based on varying factors. In other words, there are varying factors which we need to look at in order to decide what rights a human should have. But when it comes to animals, we apparently don’t even need to check that they fail on those factors to reject them utterly.
That’s the odd point I was referring to. As you say, animals under your system don’t qualify for the sliding scale - but doesn’t the existence of the sliding scale itself suggest that there are factors which are important beyond simply “human” and “non-human”? Even if an animal doesn’t or couldn’t fulfil any of those factors, it doesn’t get a chance to be evaluated against them at all?
The act of gorging them doesn’t, no - the oesophagus of ducks & geese is very extensible (probably not the right word, but it’ll do). That’s how they get to eat large fish whole. Furthermore, storing food in their oesophagus waiting to be digested is also a natural part of goose life. Filling it with corn sludge is no more painful for them than it is for you to pass a large, watery stool.
I’m sure it’s not comfortable or extraordinarily enjoyable, but it’s not torture by any stretch of the word.
The painful part comes much later in the process, when the liver becomes too large & fatty even by duck standards and starts compressing other organs (notably the lungs). But the bird is killed around that time as well, so any suffering is short lived, pardon the pun.
Having witnessed traditional gavage myself, I can say that the geese didn’t seem worse for the wear afterwards. Drowsy and out of breath maybe, but they didn’t struggle, bleat or appear to be in any particular discomfort. They didn’t try to bite the farmer at all, be it before or after feeding - and ganders are usually mean, ill-tempered motherfuckers, I can testify to this much. They might look and walk silly, but like their cousins the swan they will fuck you up.
Anyway, if those were traumatized animals, they either all had Stockholm Syndrome or tremendous poker faces.
Industrial foie gras making is something else, but then all battery farming is barbaric.
Actually, it’s pretty easy to argue that it’s not cruel. If someone slips a tube into me and pumps my stomach up, it’s not really going to cause me any significant amount of discomfort. I bet I’ve experienced more discomfort sitting on hard wood chairs through a meal.
I had a long reply in mind WRT humane domestic US production of foie gras, almost all of which is from ducks and a big portion of that from upstate NY/Hudson Valley farms, but ultimately I find myself not able to conjure up much of a fuck because they are birds and because the end product is so heavenly and delectable that it just doesn’t really matter much to me. The fattening of bird livers is an ancient practice by human beings.
What concerns me mostly about foie gras is its cost. At $75 a pound and up, those tasty lobes of love are just to pricey for me to eat them on any consistent basis. Plus I would need someone more skilled than I to prepare them for me.
Screaming lobsters, force-fed ducks…I just can’t muster up more than a “meh” on that score.
Okay, I’m convinced that foie gras can be produced without using what I see as cruel methods.
Now I plan to find if traditional methods for producing vealhave been replaced by methods not so cruel.
Whether or not cruelty to non-human animals is even a possibility might be a question worthy of it’s qwn thread. Not by me, though.
The sliding scale is an abstraction of the core issue, which perhaps is not useful because it can be too easily misinterpreted.
With relating to the sliding scale, it’s really just a way to express a series of strictly defined universal maxims.
As a quick example:
It is wrong to kill another person - This is an unqualified maxim, there is no “except in cases of self defense” or “except in warfare” or “except when it is a convicted and sentenced criminal.” It is wrong to kill, and when you think about what universal adoption of this maxim would mean it would essentially mean a world of perpetual peace and harmony. So it is very easy to see how this is an ethical “universal maxim.”
It is wrong to enslave another person - Again, unqualified because enslavement is defined as holding someone as property typically for profit or pleasure. Your holding someone as property means on an intrinsic level you are treating them merely as a means and not as an end in and of themselves.
It is wrong to imprison someone who has not committed certain proscribed actions, when those proscribed actions have been agreed upon by society and the proscription published for all to read - Here you see the utility of the sliding scale. It’s easier to represent the idea that there are certain rights “freedom of movement” that some people have, versus trying to demonstrate piece by piece what things are moral and what aren’t.
There is a pseudo-right to free movement ethically, but just as a generalized concept. You really instead have to think “it’s immoral to enslave anyone” “it’s immoral to imprison someone, unless they have broken justly developed laws.”
So there is also not a universal maxim that says:
It is immoral to make decisions for another person without their consent because if that was a universal maxim then you’d be saying it was moral to let children choose to eat poison, because it is their right to decide for themselves. Instead one would have to accept the maxim of:
It is immoral to make decisions for another person without their consent when that person is capable of making their own rational decisions.
So as you can see, the sliding scale probably wasn’t the best abstraction and was not really conveying the idea I had intended. In some situations I think it captures the idea properly, it’s essentially an abstraction to try and avoid the necessity of breaking things down to a laundry list of maxims, but in this particular case that probably would have been a better approach from the beginning.
All of these maxims however are rooted in how your decisions and actions impact other persons. Primarily you should never treat another person solely as a means to your end. But how do we decide who we should and shouldn’t include in our definition of person? Because really, only a person should be given moral consideration. But why is that? Well, because basically everything is a person or it is a thing.
If it is a person, you can never use it just as a means to your ends. However, if it is a thing, whether it be a rock or a horse, it is morally permissible to use it exclusively as a means. If you feel that something “sometimes” shouldn’t be used solely as a means, then to me that’s the same as saying they are a rational being worthy of moral consideration. Once they are agreed to be a rational being worthy of moral consideration, they are a person and not a thing. A person cannot be enslaved. A person cannot be eaten. A person cannot be rendered into clothing or used as involuntary test subjects in medical experiments.
So to me, if you think you can’t force feed a goose because it is wrong because you are harming the goose who is a rational being that must be treated as an end in itself then it is also wrong to own the goose, wrong to kill the goose, wrong to eat the goose, wrong to use the feathers of the goose in bedding and clothing and etc.
But how is it that I’ve determined say, a goose isn’t a person but a severely incapacitated human is a person? These classic “marginal cases” are a historical problem with this whole way of thinking for which there are many answers. My personal opinion is this:
I afford other human beings of sound mind the status of “rational creatures” and I feel rational creatures must be afforded moral consideration. The reason I afford other human beings of sound mind this status is I know that I am a human being. I know that I am of rational mind, or I at least believe myself to be. Thus, I logically conclude it is most likely other apparently sound minded humans are rational creatures. There is a common rabbit hole in that we can never definitively know that any other human is anything but an automaton and we’re the only rational creature in existence. I choose to believe that since I am a rational creature humans who are of the same species and appear to be rational, are rational. In essence I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt based on my own status as a human and a rational creature, because I feel otherwise I’d basically be justified in doing any immoral act to any human, and I don’t want to go in that direction.
Now we get to the severely incapacitated human beings. I think in plain words most of us would say a comatose man is not a rational creature, and thus by my own definition he would not be a person. I could rape him, eat him, torture him, render him into byproducts and etc, right? Well, I say no to that. I say no to that because I still know this: that man is human. And I do not know with absolute certainty he is so impaired as to no longer be rational further I do not know with absolute certainty he may never be rational again. So if there is any chance at all the man is rational or that he may again become rational I feel I have no right to use him as solely a means, but I must afford him status as an end in and of himself. In the “marginal case” we must err on the side of “rational creature.”
So then let us arrive to the goose, a creature I have decided is not a person and is not a rational creature. As I said, the reason I accept you are rational is because I am human and I know I am rational and you are human so I make the assumption you are rational like me. I am not a goose. So I have no inherent reason to presume the goose is rational at all. However, I posit non-human rational creatures could exist. If an alien species traveled here on an advanced spaceship, I would probably presume them rational because my definition of rational is such that any spacefaring species would almost certainly have to be rational to be spacefaring.
So why not the goose? Because as Kant says:
So for me to weigh the animal as worthy of moral consideration, I would need some proof that it is a being capable of the representation “I.” Further, I would need some proof that the goose not only has conscious thoughts but has thoughts about having conscious thoughts or that they have that necessary element of self-perception that is a prerequisite for reason and rational thought itself. So not only must they have some concept of self, and conscious thought, but the ability to reason and think about both of those things.
Finally, I will need some incontrovertible means of knowing this through observation or through the goose communicating with me directly. I think observation is a nearly impossible hurdle for practical reasons and the fact that sophisticated irrational animals can appear to meet many of these criteria because of natural physiological responses to certain stimuli. So the most incontrovertible proof would be a creature that can communicate with me in undeniable, unambiguous terms that it is a person and that it should be thought of as such.
“Facilitators” can make it appear that the great apes are talking with us, but we have good reason to doubt this is actually happening. My presupposition is if extraterrestrial spacefaring species came onto the earth they would have some undeniable means of communicating to us their intentions and not in a manner in which they could be “massaged” by some facilitator to hold a conversation. They might lack the ability to speak or hear, maybe even lack the ability to communicate non-verbally with human beings, but an advanced technological alien species would have some means of crossing this divide.
I think animals deserve some respect as living animals not only for the sake of the spiritual welfare of humans but because even yummy animals shouldn’t be caused unecessary suffering unless it gives people a lot of utility (see Foie Gras is yummy, rodeos are fun, bullfights are thrilling) but senseless torture is bad for its own sake.
Martin Hyde are you seriously stating that it is impossible to be cruel to an animal no matter what? I could take a kitten and and burn it with a hot cigarette and swing it around by its tail and that wouldn’t be cruel because, well its not a person.
Cruel is just a word. My opening point is that in the context of being “cruel to others” you aren’t cruel to an animal because an animal is not an “other.”
Under a different meaning of cruel, in which you just use the word to mean “something inhuman and immoral being done” yes, I believe you can engage in “animal cruelty.”
I’m not too hung up on the “cruel/not cruel” aspect but more the “moral/immoral aspect” that’s what is really important, right? Being just a word, cruel can be applied to many situations both moral and immoral.
I’ve definitely used the term “animal cruelty.” But on the more important issue of moral/immoral, I don’t believe “cruelty to animals” is immoral because of the animal, because the animal is not worthy of moral consideration.
As Kant says on this:
When it comes to other people, you must never treat them as a mere means to your ends, when it comes to non-persons you can treat them as a mere means and be acting perfectly moral. However, sometimes treating them as a mere means dehumanizes yourself and is immoral because of what you are doing to yourself.
For example if I’m driving to work and see a puppy in the road, and accelerate my car to run over it because I’m running late and have no regard for slowing down, that is immoral because of what I am doing to myself and the inhumanity that it breeds to act that way.
When I force feed a goose it’s a different matter, because I am not doing something that hardens my heart to other men but am actually doing something to make others happy and glad.
