Are Turkeys Morally Equal to People?
Apparently so, according to animal liberationist guru, Gary Francione. Over at the First Things blog, I discuss this and other aspects of Francione's ideology. I also point out that, in my view, Francione, while profoundly misguided, is a man worthy of respect based on his integrity and promotion of peaceful advocacy. I conclude my post with these words:
"I just wish Francione would turn his considerable talents and intellect to solving more urgent problems involving human injustices and oppression. Of course, from his point of view, that is precisely what he is doing, since he doesn't recognize any moral distinction between humans and fauna. But at least he promotes his agenda with intellectual honesty, skill, and a total eschewing of violence and threats. That's more than you can say about many of his co-believers. The animal-liberation movement could use a lot more leaders like Gary Francione."
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:33 AM
12 Comments
12 Comments:
Wesley Smith: "If you believe a turkey equals a child or a woman, Francione is right. If not, he is beyond wrong and is anti-human. And this is precisely the bottom-line dispute between a worldview that accepts that human beings have unique value and moral status—human exceptionalism—and the animal-liberation movement, which views human exceptionalism to be literally as odious as racism."
I agree. I think it is immoral to suggest that animals are equivalent to humans in value. A person promoting such views may act decently enough but they are propagating a recipe for atrocities by others who will accept these beliefs and live with more integrity to their beliefs.
I received this missive from a reader who is not registered with Blogger:
I read your post on the FirstThings site and found you by googling The Discovery Institute and from there found a link to your blog. Skimming the link in your piece to Mr. Francione's article, I have this question. He wants to extend rights to all "sentient nonhumans". Sentience, in his rendering, seems to boils down to, or at least include, beings that can feel pain. Veganism is his "moral baseline" behavior, and he urges us all to live up to that "baseline". My question is - can he offer a tenable distinction between non-human fauna and non-human flora? Because it seems to me that if he is right about animal rights, he can not deny plants their rights to a non-violent existence. He cites sensitivity to pain as one core part of sentience. There are scientists who believe plants are sensitive to pain. So would it not be unfairly discriminatory to exclude flora from Francione’s "moral community"? I think so, if you start where he starts. I have to say it grieves me to see such good minds go to waste working so loyally and faithfully on projects that in the end are just losing propositions.
This is my response to the above anonymous comment:
Thanks for writing. Animal liberationists use two justifications for elevating animals to the same moral status as humans. One is sentience, and the other is the ability to feel pain, sometimes called "painience." I think flora fail on both those measurements. At least, I presume that is what Francione would say.
I was just thinking in conjunction with this of the professor that expressed his hopes that humanity be all but wiped out by plagues in a different light than the mere disgust that I had held him in before. From a standpoint closed against transcendence and holding anytthing such as human life as sacred, I can see why he might think that. Being well acquainted with certain sectors of the biological world and their beauty and form and be taken with that aspect of what is seen, surely the destructiveness of human beings is bound to look like an aberrant destructive force of nature that threatens marvellous ecosystems, etc. The distaste of the naturalist for man's destructivenss is much easier to understand than the distaste of the naturalist for nature. But because the view is wrong and there is the sacred, it amounts to malevolent misanthropy that probably will feed into man's destructiveness much sooner than curbing it.
Moreover, the deep ecologists who want to end the human invasion, as they sometimes call it, by reducing human population to 500,000 or so, never think that THEY will be the ones eradicated.
WHO, praytell, is advocating the human race be reduced to 500,000 or so?
I think you are exaggerating, Wesley. Moreover, if we are not proactive about the environment and overpopulation, disease and war are going to make the decision for us.
I think you are confusing real concerns about the pressures on the environment with those of the bioethicists and eugenists. They aren't necessarily the same thing.
The reduction of the human population is a very fringe environmental position. That belief is certainly not shared by the mainstream environmentalists.
But more fundamentally to this discussion - I feel to see how giving compassion to animals that feel pain somehow dehumanizes people. In fact, I find that notion quite ridiculous.
For more elaboration, I refer you to my posts on the chimp thread, two posts down.
I didn't say deep ecologists were mainstream. But, it is undeniable that one of the foremost principles of the movement is a "radical and potentially ruthless scaling-down of the human population--indeed, population reduction as an issue has been named the "litmus test" of deep ecology." This is why some deep ecologists wish for pandemics and etc. Got to substantially erradicate the vermin species, e.g. us, off of Gaia.
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028143511520
Susan writes: "WHO, praytell, is advocating the human race be reduced to 500,000 or so?"
I haven't heard of anyone advocating a reduction to 500,000 but I have heard some environmentalists (such as Garrett Hardin) advocating a number of 100 million or so, which is still an extreme reduction. But the actual numbers are beside the point -- Wesley is correct in claiming that "deep ecologists" in particular seem to have it in for humanity... excepting themselves, of course.
But your point that this is basically a fringe view is entirely correct as well, and I doubt that Wesley would really contest that.
An amusing story about Hardin: In an interview some years ago (in Omni, IIRC) he said that he would rather die than have to use a wheelchair. (I believe he was beginning to suffer from post-polio syndrome at the time.) A few years after that he had a debate at my campus which I attended. To my great surprise and amusement, he came using... a wheelchair!
I was well-behaved though -- I didn't ask him "Hey, shouldn't you have killed yourself already?"! But I was and still am genuinely interested in whether his apparent gaining of perspective softened his support for eugenics at all.
My recollection is that the number was 500,000. It might have been 500 million, a distinction without a substantial difference. Deep ecology is profoundly anti-human, and many of its adherents hope for the human race to suffer a profound calamity. Check out this blog entry from earlier in the year: www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2006/04/rooting-for-human-extermination.html
Along these same lines, fringe groups such as the Church of Euthanasia and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, call for very radical depopulation, and in the latter case, eradication of people. See: http://www.vhemt.org/aboutvhemt.htm#vhemt
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