Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
mostly killed for their own good. In fact, since humans are highly successful volun-
tary predators—“voluntary” in the sense that they do not have to hunt foxes or
fish—we can imagine these creatures relieved to hear that such hunting is eliminated,
and that they have so many less predators to worry about (recall that EABT asks us
to hypothesize regarding what benefits animals).
But Hare's argument with regard to the fish is somewhat different: being raised and
killed for human consumption makes for an
overall better life
for the trout than being
a fish in the wild, or simply a nonexistent fish. This is the more popular version of
EABT. Against this, one can obviously challenge the plausibility of arguing from the
relative good of nonexistent entities. But I shall avoid this line and assume that it
makes sense to say that an entity benefits from being brought into existence. Veget-
arians deal with this argument through analogous thought-experiments with regard to
potential humans that will be victimized through practices that would, at the same
time, bring them into existence. We would have no problem judging immoral a pedo-
philic society that brings some children into the world in order to sexually exploit
them—providing them with otherwise pleasant living conditions—and then killing
them painlessly when they mature and lose their sexual appeal, justifying the exploita-
tion and killing through the benefits of being born; banning a reform on the pretense
that it would prescribe nonexistence to these children. Or consider human cloning for
the purpose of creating people who live pleasant and short lives, functioning as organ
banks that would not exist without this purpose. If these analogies are valid then
EABT is wrong. These practices cannot be vindicated through appealing to the bene-
fits of creating the victims, when one pretends to do so from the victim's own stand-
point.
Advocates of EABT will either drop EABT as a plausible justification or argue that
there is some important disanalogy between human and nonhuman animals: human
life is endowed with a different kind of value. They will argue that the considerations
that could support killing people are different from those befitting animals, which is
why the justification does not carry over from nonhuman to human animals. Perhaps
this is what is meant by the attribution of “sanctity” to human life: that the value of
human life is noninstrumental, it does not reside in life being merely a means for op-
portunities, experiences, or actualizing one's potential, but in some intrinsic dignity
that human life possesses. And so the defender of EABT appears to hold that the
value of human life not only is distinct, but also overrides these other ends in the
sense that some very positive experiences and some worthy actualization of one's po-
tential will not justify existence as such. The defender of EABT will then go on to
say that animals' lives are different. They are not sacred, they lack the dignity we
perceive in human lives, and they do have mere instrumental value. Note, though,
