From: altar@beaufort.sfu.ca (Ted Wayn Altar)
Subject: 2 Criteria for the Ethical Vegetarian
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 18:14:20 GMT



To forward some reflection of why we should move beyond a mere
health conscious vegetarian to being an ethical vegetarian, it
might be useful to provide some explicit criteria of when we
ought to expand our circle of concern to non-human animals.  That
is, to which `beings' or moral patients can we with consistency
extend our own basic right of protection from harm or
exploitation by human agents.  Before I try to satisfy people's
demand for explicitly formulated criteria, permit me to make some
provisional remarks.


PREAMBLE

First, it is really a straw man argument to falsely suggest that
serious animal rights advocates are so naive as to argue for the
abolition of hurting insects or even plants.  I trust we can
dispense with these silly slippery slope arguments.  I also trust
that we can recognize that any demarcation we might formulate
need not depend upon precise, razor sharp borders in order to
still be coherent and useful.  At the lower end there will be
dispute about were the line should precisely be drawn.  But this
unavoidable problem of fuzzy boundaries does not speak against
doing something for those non-human animals who clearly DO
experience pain and suffering and are "subjects-of-a-life" that
matters to them.  In point of fact, everyday we make demarcations
on what are continuums.  For example, there is no clear
demarcation between lightness and darkness, or even between day
and night (hence the terms dawn and dusk), but for most practical
purposes we have no trouble discriminating between the two.  We
can easily specify the darkness of a photographic dark room, or
the lightness of a workplace or street at night.  We set levels
in the continuum of income at which taxation changes.  We set a
level of blood alcohol that makes one liable for prosecution, and
so on.  The border between sanity and insanity, for instance, is
not well-defined but at either remove from the border we do have
clear-cut cases.

Another consideration is that we should not seek simply a
negative criterion, one that begins by a focus upon conditions
for exclusion. Rather, let us work from the more positive outlook
of considering what we should include rather than exclude.   One
last provision.  Please, let us not become overly distracted with
debate about borderline cases when the general principles of
animal rights involves more than academic hair-splitting over
demarcations.

To begin.  Most animal rights advocates, I believe, tend to adopt
either one of two prevalent positions as to how we must expand
the circle of our concern if we wish for better justice and
consistency in our ethics.

There is a third criterion that is often invoked which goes
under the names, "respect for nature", "respect for life"
or "sanctity of life", etc.  While a such a more general prescription
has its importance, I do think that with respect to our treatment
and eating of animals we need to sharpen this more generalized
and vague criterion with either or both of the two more precise
and better defined criteria below.


 CRITERION I: PAIN & SUFFERING

The first pertains to the criterion of physical pain and
suffering.  As Peter Singer as argued, human beings and other
animals share in common a vital interest in the avoidance of pain
and suffering.  These are intrinsic evils which we ought not to
wish or inflict upon others who like ourselves can experience
pain and suffering.  For most people, when actually faced with
the situation, the poignant cries and hopeless struggles of lab
animals (primates, dogs, cats, rats) is sufficient to establish
that real and terrible pain and suffering is here taking place.
If you should insist upon denying any validity to this perception
of their suffering, then we can simply turn to comparative
neuroanatomy.  While worms, crayfish and fish are animals, in the
scientific sense, they are generally seen by animal rights
advocates as borderline cases.  One reason, I would give, is that
they do not possess those central neural systems associated with
the perception of pain (like the intralaminar and parafascicular
nuclei of the thalamus) nor do they possess central neural
centers associated with mediating the emotional components of
pain (like the limbric system). Insects, as far as I know, do not
even have the kinds of peripheral free nerve endings (C fibers
and A-delta fibers) associated with sensing tissue damage.  We
would, therefore, exclude those creatures that do not appear to
have, given our current knowledge, the requisite neurological
enabling conditions to experience pain and suffering.  Now, the
disturbing fact that needs to be dealt with is that we have at
hand millions of mammals being killed annually in our medical
labs, mammals that are well-endowed with the neurological
equipment associated with what we know to be those enabling
conditions sufficient for physical pain and suffering.  I here
recommend Margaret Rose and David Adams scholarly paper,
"Evidence for pain and suffering in other animals" in "Animal
Experimentation: The Consensus Changes" (edit by Gill Langley,
1989).

 CRITERION II: SUBJECTS-OF-A-LIFE

The other criterion, and one which has been ably forwarded by Tom
Regan (see his important work, "The Case for Animal Rights"
1983), pertains to a more global analysis of animal sentience.
To put it simply, we ought to give respect towards those sentient
creatures which are "subjects of a life", a life that matters to
them as to whether it fares well or ill for them. Here we  might
try to assess to what degree certain creatures appear to be
capable of  some representation of themselves as individual
beings, capable of self-direction, and in possession of an
emotional life. Such an emotional life would include the capacity
to feel pain and to suffer and such feelings would figure in
alerting or informing such sentient animals about what it is that
does matter to them or should be of significance.  We are
therefore talking about conscious creatures that have beliefs,
desires, perceptions, memories, a sense of the future including
their own future, preferences and desires, a psychophysical
identity over time, and a sense that their experiential life is
faring well or ill for them.  All such marvelous living beings
have inherent value, a value independent of how we might desire
to exploit them.  For the tender-minded, like myself, the
perception of such other lives with inherent value does not seem
to be difficult to do, at least with respect to humans and other
mammals given our capacity for empathy and fellow-feeling.
Again, if fellow feeling should seem too vague, or removed from
your own experience, we can instead turn to the astute empirical
observations of good ethologists like Jane Goodall and Donald
Griffin.

                                          ted