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to animals. People will steal, lie, and kill to save their loved ones. And so a willing-
ness to do this or that to someone else to save one's child or grandchild attests to
the strength of parental commitment rather than forming a moral justification.
The argument from care appeals to the truism that we simply care more for hu-
mans or for our loved ones. Sometimes it is added that since humans are more valu-
able, we ought to care more about them, which is why research that saves humans or
improves their quality of life at the expense of animals is justified. Mary Midgley
and, more recently, B. A. Brody, who have presented variants of this argument from
species solidarity, have labored hard to establish a distinction between partiality
(which may be good, say, preferring one's family over strangers) and discrimination
(which is always bad). Midgley's claims have been criticized in detail by DeGrazia,
and Brody confesses that he has not successfully established this distinction, so it is
not obvious that an updated contemporary variant of this position exists. 16 But aside
from the viability of successfully distinguishing between legitimate and dubious bi-
ases, the deeper flaw here resembles the fallacy involved in the justification from the
greater value of humans. The argument moves from our greater care for and attach-
ment to humans (that jointly support discounting animal interests relative to human
ones), to justifying sacrificing animals for the sake of human welfare. This reasoning,
as S. F. Sapontzis (1988) notes, is unsound: caring more for A than for B justifies
benefiting A before B (relieving human hunger outweighs relieving animal hunger).
But greater care for A cannot justify harming B. Like the argument from superiority,
the reasoning from greater care or natural sentiment to justifying harm conflates bene-
fiting humans over animals (which makes sense when one values them more than an-
imals or cares more for them) with actively hurting animals to benefit humans (which
is not justified). Human-human morality recognizes this distinction all the time: cit-
izens care more for the poor in their own country than the poor of other nations
even if the latter suffer more, and this excuses them aiding the former before assist-
ing the latter (in technical terms, they are “discounting” the interests of some humans
relative to those of others). But countries that harm other countries to benefit their
own citizens are condemned.
Thought-experiments designed to embarrass pro-animal philosophers into accepting
the need to sometimes actively harm animals, thus exposing the higher value of hu-
mans (“Would you pitch a dog or a human overboard to save the survivors in a life-
boat?”) fail, first, because they do not prove lower value (as we saw, even if they
did prove this, no proresearch result follows), and second, because they do not
amount to a moral justification: Ann may prove just as willing to throw Suzan's chil-
dren overboard to save her own children, yet that shows neither that Suzan's children
are less valuable, nor that this action is morally sound.
17
 
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