Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
she has a soul/can reason/ can communicate in an elaborate manner? I think not. So-
mething more basic appears to be going on when such decisions take place. One is
tempted to use the word “instinct” here, as such decisions appear to resemble in-
stinctive actions, such as fighting to save one's child, at whatever cost to others. One
is not acting from a sense of moral duty or obligation. These concepts can be used
after the fact to justify in hindsight an action that issued out of more immediate and
less cerebral routes. It might be true that most human lives are richer than the lives
of animals. Some of us may also experience an overwhelming sense of solidarity
with other humans. Others might think that humans have rights that animals do not
possess, and therefore one should attach more weight to their interests. But such
claims, even if admitted, appear to be less of a reason for action, and more of an at-
tempt to justify a strongly held intuition.
Moral philosophers (rightly) regard intuitions gingerly. But since this is not the
place to plunge into the debate over intuitions, their value (or lack thereof), and
whether or not moral reasoning can be purged of them, I will appeal to a conservat-
ive theoretical principle: choose your battles when advocating reform—avoid replacing
existing beliefs/intuitions/considered judgments that can be harmlessly maintained. Res-
cuing the woman by pitching the dog overboard does not appear to me to conflict
with or contradict my own liberationist sensitivities. It does cohere with my speciesist
bias to promote the welfare of humans before that of animals, even if the humans
happen to be profoundly retarded and inferior in mental capacities in relation to the
animals. And it constitutes precisely the kind of case in which I am prompted to act-
ively discount the interests of an animal. The same holds for eating animals: if per-
sonal or collective survival requires eating animal flesh, I would give up my moral
vegetarianism. The justification I can give to this does not amount to anything more
sophisticated than an engrained favoritism. Similar deep-seated intuitions underlie my
liberationism: primarily, the immediate, nonderived conviction that needless tremend-
ous suffering and death take place, and that these can and should be eradicated.
Lifeboat situations thus do elicit a speciesist intuition in me, which I see no reason
to shun. Yet a second moral intuition that surfaces in me when considering lifeboat
cases and that I should record is the inclination to look for ways by which survival
conflict can be dissolved and through which lifeboat “either/or” decisions can be fin-
essed. The only lifeboat-like situation with regard to interspecies ethics relates (per-
haps) to a very small portion of applied research. Allocating substantial resources to
alternative research models might make this conflict go away.
Here, then, is the version of speciesism that, unlike (5), coheres with lib-erationism
and can also digest the most compelling speciesist intuitions:
