I am proud to be a speciesist. I like humans best. I probably like dogs second best. I don’t give a shit if millions of wasps die. Bacon is tasty.
But I wonder… am I in the last couple of centuries where my attitude is acceptable? I don’t see any particular reason (which doesn’t reduce to axiom or tautology) why specieism is more justifiable than sexism, racism, ageism, classism, or any of the other -isms that would have been seen as the norm only a few years ago.
One is reluctant to attempt to divine the future and I am no Nostradamus. But is this conceivable/likely? May we one day all be vegan?
Dennis Miller’s version is something like “If it takes hooking a chimp’s brain to a car battery to find the cure for cancer, I have this to say- red is positive & black is negative.”
More likely, if we thought killing animals was immoral, we’d be able to manufacture meat in the lab-- just grow some nice, tasty muscle/fat combo. I think we’re either able to do that already, or very close to being able to.
The reason they’d have to talk is because the question is whether we’d treat their species as equals. If they can’t communicate with us sufficiently to convince the majority of us that the majority of them are at least comparable with us from a mental perspective, then equality isn’t going to happen.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to handicapped or comatose humans, because they’re in the same species as us and that species is already accepted. As for their individual status, that’s a completely separate matter that can actually be debated, if one doesn’t mind being seen as predjudiced against handicapped people (which wouldn’t make one a speciesist).
The difference is that it’s true. Are blacks or women stupider than men or whites? No. Do Jews actually rule the world and use the blood of Christian babies in rituals? No.
Are animals actually less intelligent than us? Yes. Are animals actually fundamentally different than us? Yes. Not only is regarding animals the moral equal of people incorrect, but even when treating animals morally you aren’t going to treat them just like humans; they aren’t.
Plants are “species” too. The morally important difference between plants and animals is intelligence & emotions; and if you acknowledge that matters for plants, then it matters for animals.
That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if for moral and economic reasons we eventually move away from eating animals to eating plant or factory produced food; I doubt that someone eating from an engineered “steak bush” or “meat melon” would qualify as a vegan though.
No. The experiment with giving benefits to ever more marginal groups of people will collapse long before “speciesism” becomes the trendy cause du jour. At some point there won’t be enough resources to redistribute to the next-most-disadvantaged group, and the moral preening over “being more enlightened” won’t be worth it.
More or less, yes. Animal cruelty and environmental protection laws have advanced dramatically in the last 50 years, I believe in some states cruelty to an animal is punished the same as cruelty to a person.
But it will also take things like sentience and capacity for suffering into account. An animal that is not conscious, self aware or that cannot suffer isn’t going to get the same treatment.
So more or less the trend will continue (more machines replacing animal labor, more lab grown meat to replace slaughterhouses). However I don’t know if it’ll ever be 100% equal footing.
Just about every non-human animal is more of a speciesist than almost any human. Most humans care at least a little bit about the welfare of most types of animal (well, vertebrates anyway). Most animals don’t care about humans (or any other species besides their own) at all, and the few that do, such as dogs, really only care about humans and other dogs. If speciesism were made illegal, most animals would have to be put behind bars.
I often thought that in the the future, eating meat might become generally reviled and even illegal. It wouldn’t surprise me if our great-grandson would be horrified by our utter lack of morals and taught in school how badly cows, deers and chickens were treated back then.
Note that I’m an happy omnivore, personnaly.
I think the ultimate goal of civilization is to make us innocent. Removal of animal products from our diets and wardrobes will be a part of achieving that innocence.
People keep trying to make this into a black and white issue. Either treat plants as humans, or kill every chimpanzee on the planet to save a dying hobo. Clearly there’s a middle road here. Of course animals shouldn’t be afforded the same rights as humans. That’s CRAZY. Will never happen. But it doesn’t follow from that that we have zero moral responsibility for them at all. We’re the higher species after all, we’re capable of making intelligent case-by-case moral decisions. For example, animals that are capable of feeling pain might be granted legal protection from undue suffering without necessarily having to extend the same right to earthworms or jellyfish. Animals that can be shown to have higher brain functions and social needs might be added even more rights. But never the same as humans of course.