Speciesism is an unjustifiable form of discrimination.

Thanks for a great debate Freeman. Definitions/BOP My opponent in this debate had the burden of proof to explain his system of morality, show that it is internally consistent, and prove that all specieisim is unjustified. He fails to do so in a number of ways: 1) What is specieism??? My opponent seems consistently unwilling to define or explain what he means by this term, or defend any of its implications. He complains multiple times that I “straw man” his arguments, but I am forced to make a number of assumptions because he doesn’t explain his arguments properly himself. Freeman claimed earlier that specieism is discrimination based on species membership, yet he refuses to defend any of the implications of stopping specieism. For example: “I've never claimed that eating meat was immoral”. According to my University of Michigan evidence, Peter Singer thought specieism to include: eating animals and doing animal testing, since we do not allow humans to eat other humans - whether humanely slaughtered or not - or to perform dangerous experiments on each other. However, if we do not allow humans to eat animals, people in certain parts of the world, where the only food available for geographic or economic reasons is animal meat, will DIE. This is a terrible morality system since it discriminates against humans based on their wealth, geographic location, and culture. Specieism would also include freeing animals from captivity, such as in zoos and on farms (like cows kept for milk) because humans cannot be confined without their consent, unless they commit a moral transgression (namely a crime), so neither can animals - else that is discrimination based on species membership. Yet Freeman again claims that releasing milk cows into the wild is a straw man that he refuses to defend, for obvious reasons – because while it is the “right thing to do” under specieism, it would inevitably result in most of their deaths. Because Freeman fails to define specieism and refuses to defend its implications, he utterly fails the BOP. 2) Freeman engages in specieism Remember, Freeman’s morality extends moral considerations only to animals that have the capacity to suffer. If specieism is defined as “discrimination on the basis of species membership” (from Freeman’s round 1) then creating a morality system that says: “you cannot kill dogs, but you may murder as many insects as you like” is obviously a form of “discrimination based on species membership,” when Freeman also defines discrimination as “to treat differently” (from round 3). Dogs are treated differently than insects based on their species membership. He again fails the BOP because his suffering-based morality system engages in specieism. Animal rights critics often point out that we engage in anthropocentrism, meaning that we put ourselves at the top of all hierarchies and then place the animals that most resemble us closest to the top. Freeman’s system, by protecting the animals with the most complex brains and CNS’s the most (because they can suffer most), is guilty of anthropocentrism, i.e. discrimination against animals that don’t resemble us enough. 3) “Suffering” is un-provable Under his second contention, Freeman complains of a straw man again and accuses me of fabricating a quote. However, Freeman said that according to Singer, biological properties alone have no moral significance. Somehow, the word “alone” completely changes the meaning of that sentence, but the reason I was confused by this is because it is impossible to KNOW that an animal can suffer unless we look to biological properties, namely the complexity of that animal’s central nervous system. The only OTHER way to KNOW that an animal can suffer is to engage in animal testing, exposing that animal to gratuitous suffering, which ironically is a form of specieism. So if we can’t look to biological properties and we can’t do animal testing, then we cannot know which animals can suffer (or by how much), and thus Freeman’s morality fails because we cannot know which animals are deserving of moral considerations. On to my case: C1: My opponent claims I engage in the naturalistic fallacy. However, my study from the Infant Cognition Center at Yale proves that morality in humans is innate. Twenty-eight prominent biologists all agree in Evolution, Gender, and Rape that rape is NOT a natural human behavior and was NOT engaged in by our ancestors. [1] Therefore, I reject the proposition that through advances in agricultural technology, we have “grown up” into a new morality, where we do not need to eat animals anymore and can thus reject specieism. If the crops all died in a freak accident, we would need to kill animals once again to survive and would need to engage in specieism once again. Morality cannot be so subject to change. C2: Freeman says, “The ability to have interests and preferences increases with cognitive abilities” and “these qualities have nothing . . . to do with species membership.” While he says this to avoid my argument that a baby chimpanzee deserves more moral consideration than a mouse, applying this same argument to humans means that morality is NOT based on species membership (personhood), but on cognitive ability, so smarter humans get more moral consideration than dumber humans and infants. Freeman himself says that Einstein does not deserve more consideration, BUT if we cannot consider species membership, then we cannot JUST scale animal rights based on cognition, we must do so with human rights as well (contradicting his argument under his C1). (note: he calls my use of the word handicapped another straw man, but his word – mentally “RETARDED” – is no longer considered politically correct; it’s actually extremely offensive. Other than that, the two words are synonyms) With my two-tiered morality systems, I still maintain that animals deserve SOME moral considerations but not EQUAL moral considerations as humans. If you have a choice between saving your dog or saving your daughter, please choose your daughter! She has more of a right to life. Speaking of straw men: to refute this point, Freeman says that an alive gorilla deserves more rights than a brain dead human. However, brain death is “the irreversible end of all brain activity (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life).” [2] Brain death is effectively death. I maintain that comparing any ALIVE human to an alive animal, the human’s rights should supersede the animals, when in conflict, even if the human is severely mentally handicapped. I would like to see my opponent explain to the parents of a child with severe Down Syndrome that her life is worth less than their dog’s. Habermasian ethics, which my opponent complains about but doesn’t refute, tells us to follow our emotions, which tell us that personhood has more intrinsic value than the life of animals. If we found aliens with similar or greater cognition, we would extend the same moral consideration to them as we grant humans. Two-tiered morality allows us to end gratuitous animal suffering, but still carry on our normal lives regarding meat eating, animal testing, etc. and answers all my objections to Freeman’s morality. C3: Reciprocity Freeman says the mentally handicapped can’t become persons. Huh?? I provided evidence that babies and the mentally handicapped DO respect our negative rights (the right to life, for example). Animals do not recognize our right to life, and thus cannot morally reciprocate. Why should we extend EQUAL moral consideration to beings who cannot reciprocate? Thank you all for reading. Vote Con! [1] http://tinyurl.com... [2] http://tinyurl.com...