the title of this presentation is to arguments in favor of non human animal rights so these are going to be philosophical arguments that i think anybody can follow and they're relatively simple arguments but if they're sound they have profound practical about you know the way we comport ourselves in the world if implications for what we eat what we wear how we experiment on things and so on and so forth so so these are philosophical arguments later on in the question and answer period if people want to talk about the theology of this you know i have an interpretation of the bible you know a lot of people who are not animal rightists base their opposition to the animal rights position on suppose a biblical evidence you know god gave us a mission to kill animals and so on i think it's much more complicated than that but these are going to be philosophical arguments that should be accessible to and of interest to anybody you know no matter what your beliefs happen the big so i wonder if i could start with three terms just to get us going here two of which i'm sure you're very familiar with and then the third one  you may or may not be familiar with racism sexism and speciesism these terms are listed there on the handout let's just start out with a preliminary definition of racism as unfair treatment of a being soley or primarily due to that being's race so the strong version of racism would be unfair treatment of a being soley because that beings and that it is a member of a race different from your own a weaker version of racism would be unfair treatment of a being primarily because of being's race but there may be other factors involved as well so i would take it that a preliminary example of racism that we would all see as an example of racism would be slavery on the basis of race ok that's one americans are familiar with so it seems arbitrary that you would make some people amenable to being a slave because they're black and not other people be they're white so it's the arbitrariness of it that is seems especially bothersome  the term sexism is modeled after the term racism so on this preliminary definition we could define sexism as unfairly treating a being primarily because you are say in a strong version of sexism unfairly treating a being solely because that being as a member of a sex different from your own and in a weaker version of sexism would be unfairly treating a being primarily because of that being sex although there may be other things involved as well and i assume that a preliminary example of sexism that we would all agree is an example of sexism would be distributing the right to vote on the basis of sex so it seems arbitrary to give some people the right to vote because they're male and then not giving other people the right to vote or say own property because there are female i'd like to move to a third term which is modeled after both racism and sexism and it's called species ism you may or may not be familiar with this term we can see where this is going right species as is alleged to be a moral evil that is analogous to racism and sexism consists in its strong version of unfair treatment of a being soley because that being as a member of a species different from your own species ok and then the weaker version of species as in would be unfair treatment of a being primarily because of that being species although there may be other factors involved and i don't know that i can start out with an uncontroversial example of speciesism because that's what we're here to examine and i mean this is what it's contested territory and the culture that we live in as to whether or not speciesism is even remotely analogous to racism and sexism and i'm going to suggest that it is for various reasons so let me propose a possible example of speciesism just to get us started and then i'd like to offer two arguments in favor of the claim that nonhuman animals have rights and that speciesism is a moral evil strongly analogous to racism and sexism so the person in every example i'd like to start with something like this and maginot you're at opening night of the opera in any cold weather city and what happens in opening night of the offers people show up with fur coats and if it's new york or berlin i mean these are both males and females who show up with fur coats ok of opening the into the opera so imagine a confrontation between an animal rights protester on the one hand and somebody wearing a fur coat so the way that conversation would go is probably something like this the animal rights protester would go up to the person wearing the fur coat and ask why are you wearing a fur coat ok and then the response probably would be because it's cold outside ok which seems fair enough human beings have a right to you know warm themselves against the elements but then the animal rights protester might ask why in order to keep warm would you be willing to have several dozen mink killed when you could keep warm with a cloth coat ok seems unnecessary that you'd be willing to have all these beings killed when you could keep warm with a cloth coat now the response on the part of the animal rights protests of the of the person wearing a fur coat would be well they're just animals they're just animals and that's enough to solve the issue for a lot of people just by designating them as animals indicates that they're not worthy of moral respect now the animal rights protester that point would probably ask but what exactly is it about nonhuman animals that makes them amenable to treatment like this you know being killed for human services whereas we would not think there would be moral to do that with respect to human beings now at that point it's a very good question i thought at that point i think the person wearing the mink coat would probably say something like this is the standard sort of response to that question it's because we are rational and they are not i mean that that's the standard way that people in western civ for thousands of years since aristotle have differentiated themselves from non human animals and give and in the alleged privileges that we have are result of the fact that we possess rationality in the non human animals do not i think that's a believable conversation the way we go back and forth like that now when i hear a conversation like that all sorts of questions pop up in my head one of the things i start wondering about is where this leaves human beings with mental disabilities and if you have to possess rationality in order to deserve moral respect does that mean i hope you can put your seatbelts on on this one does that mean to be ok to eat idiot burgers or we could experiment painfully or lethally on mentally challenged human beings  because they lack rationality my hope is that you're uncomfortable with those possibilities right in other words it makes one wonder whether or not possession of rationality does all of the work that a lot of people think it does in moral theory do we really want to have the criterion set that high that you have to be irrational in order to deserve moral respect i wonder what that does to me and dreamless sleep i'm only intermittently rational  ok there's all sorts of things i think that are problematic about that sort of justification well what if i can jump into two arguments one is called the argument from sentience a and the other is called the argument from marginal cases so the argument from se has it's real simple arguments got to premises and from the two premises i try to drive a conclusion ok and the first premise is a philosophical promise to go something like this any being that can experience pain or suffer now it's going take me a while to get through this argument so many uses terms experience pain and suffer as roughly synonomous a maybe later on you want to make a distinction between physical pain on the one hand and subtle psychological suffering on the other we can talk about that later but but somebody use those terms as meaning roughly the same thing and he being they can experience pain or suffer has at the very least the right and what i mean by a right is a legitimate claim to something  ok so this is an argument not an argument from charity saying like it's ok if you're nice to animals if you want to be nice to animals be don't have to be i'm saying you have to be mean that animals have rights so anything that can experience pain or suffering has at the very least the right not to be forced to experience pain or suffer or be killed unnecessarily or gratuitously so that we're done necessarily is a big word by the way so one of the things that you're being asked to think about here is under what conditions is it necessary that you inflict by the way don't mention on human animals and that first promise just asking you to think about any being that can experience pain when i'm suggesting that basically you ought not to it inflict on necessary suffering or pain or death on a being like that unnecessarily so in a way you're being asked to think about the conditions under which it is necessary that you inflict suffering and in some cases it is if for example suppose you had a separated shoulder and you went to an orthopedic surgeon i know if you've ever seen this happen  to be an orderly in a hospital where the therapy is the orthopedic surgeon gives the patient a localized anesthesia which doesn't help much and then basically what the orthopedic surgeon does is just basically ram the shoulder back into the socket as the person screams in pain ok i take it that no one would want to go up to the doctor and ask him if he was a sadist or something like you know do you get your jollies out of doing this and i think the doctor would say what no there was a necessity in doing this right in other words i had to do this for this patient because if you didn't the person would be much worse off you know with a shoulder dangling outside of the socket for the rest of that person's life ok so so there are conditions under which it is necessary to inflict suffering on beings but when you do that presumably it's for the benefit of the being who is having the suffering inflicted on her on her so so all that's being claimed in the first promise is that you ought not to inflict suffering or pain or death on  sentience you know is capable of experiencing pleasure and being unnecessarily or gratuitously ok so i ask you to think about that first premise to the argument to see if you find it acceptable as are some problem with that first promise  but what would the world be like if the first premise were false you know what would the world be like if you could inflict suffering on a being and there was no necessity in doing so you could just encourage to asli inflict suffering o being who is capable of experiencing suffering i'm alleging that now know if you know that this is the first premise in an argument for animal rights you might just object on principle to what's going on here but if you just look at the first premise all by itself i think it's an acceptable premise i think we all accept that premise i could be wrong about that as it seems to be something really basic to morality to assume that it's not ok to inflict suffering on a being unless there's some necessity to doing so ok that if you inflict suffering on a being were to asli that there's something morally problematic about them so that's the first promise it's a philosophical promise we can talk about by the way of real thick skin when it comes time for the question and answer period i'm open to any criticisms they have regarding this stuff so i know this is all contested territory now the second premise is not a philosophical problems the second premise to the argument from se is in a pure promise it's some sort of quasar scientific claim so that the first premise is one that can be debated philosophically right the second premise is really a matter for people in the sciences to either you know confirm or deny it so we're not going to establish the truth or falsity of the second premise here but i would like to say a few things about ok so the second premise is what it is not necessary that we inflict pain or suffering or death on sentience animals in order for us to have a healthy diet ok so the claim here in the second premise is that you could have a healthy life on a vegetarian basis it's not necessary to inflict suffering and death on animals in order to have a healthy diet now it might be the case that somebody wants to say that that claim is false ok somebody might want to say we have to eat animals right in order to have a healthy diet if you went that route you would have to account for the hundreds of millions of healthy vegetarians in india alone which is a poor country in other words i no trouble if somebody wants to reject the second premise but i would ask them to account for all the counter examples how do you account for the fact that you know hundreds of millions of people around the world are vegetarian and healthy  in the second premise and i'm not trying to advance the something cookie could call the victory through vegetables hypothesis that suggests what you'd have a healthy your life on a vegetarian basis than you would on a mediating basis i'm sure that a lot of people who want to defend your right you know that a lot of studies suggest on a vegetarian diet the rates of heart disease different types of cancer are lower than on a diet we meet so i'm not going f r i'm not trying to say you would have a healthy early life on a vegetarian basis than on a mediating basis i'm just trying to say that you could have a healthy life a decade intelligently like of all you ate were candy bars and hostess jojo's and you know if that's all you ate you're probably a sick puppy pretty quickly but then again if you  unintelligently on a mediating basis you would be pretty sick and hurried as well right so you have to eat intelligently right i think no matter which way you go you can have a healthy life on a vegetarian basis so here's the way the argument goes what i'm claiming is that there's a connection between the first and the second premises of this argument so this is roughly analogous to a math argument is not as rigorous as a math argument but it's something like that another is if you accept the evidence on the premises i'm claiming that the conclusion follows right and we should you know put some weight and in stock in the conclusion so that the words i think that link the two premises together are unnecessarily in the first promise and then not necessary in the second premise so i'm not asking yet whether you accept this argument you may want to trash it later on but i'm asking does everybody see the connection between the two premises or so the first premise is saying what you w not to inflict suffering or death on a being who is capable of experiencing suffering unnecessarily i'm saying that's a general principle of morality i'm alleging that we all accept  already so i'm not saying that i'm introducing anything new to you in the first promise i think the first numbers are something you would already accept anyhow we'll see if that's right but that's what i suspect that's a general promise and then in the second premise saying that and example of unnecessary infliction of suffering and death is slitting the carrot artery of cals at the slaughterhouse or pigs and so on and so forth if it's the case that we could have a healthy life on a vegetarian basis then a prime example of unnecessary infliction of suffering and death is what we routinely do it so houses and you know serving up food for the table so if i'm right there that there's a connection between those two premises it looks like the conclusion follows and that's in the third step therefore killing sentience animals for the table is cruel now you may wonder where the word cruelty comes from in the conclusion because i haven't used it in either of the two premise these old suits that you know boys used to you know have bought for them on easter in the old days where young if you remember these are you know you buy a boy's suit and it would have a jacket and two pair of pants in a reversible vest seat about five or six options for anybody remember these things this argument is like that this is an argument that has to do with eating but you could easily switch some of the premises around to have it apply to clothing that we wear right so the second premise would read is not necessary that we inflict pain or suffering or death on scent in animals or in order for us to hold our pants up with leather belts in order to protect our feet with leather shoes in order to stay warm with me coats ok it has educational implications so i'm not sure if you're wear this but you know in the u k you know there are whole medical school education is cruelty free you know and they they educate doctors you know are pretty competent doctors right  without you know any sort of cruelty in the education of their physicians so the second premise there would read it's not necessary to inflict pain or suffering or death on sent in animals in order for us to have medical professionals right who are competent and so implications for i don't knew i make up the comes on the market you know where you probably are aware of this that you know very often i make up in volves what taking rabbits and dripping trying to figure out how many drops you know of an active chemical you drip into a rabbit's eye until the blisters over and the rabbit becomes blind so you can have an argument here regarding cosmetics and a lot of household products actually what i'm alleging here that this is a really simple argument but if it goes through the noise if it sound it has all sorts of practical ramifications that are you know pretty far reaching most notably regarding what we eat but then a lot of other cases asks that you make a distinction between being a moral agent on the one hand and then being a moral patient on the other so it needs to be a moral agent is to be a being who can act morally or immorally so a moral agent is a being who can do things that are moral or immoral another way to put it would be to say a moral agent is a being who can be held accountable for his or her actions ok now if you ask the question what property do you have to possess or what criterion do you have to meet in order to be a moral agent it's kind of nice just about everybody agrees on what the property is you have to possess in order to be a moral agent and that's you have to be rational ok another may be debates as to whether or not a particular being is sufficiently rational in order to be held accountable for his or her actions but everybody agrees that rationality is the property that you would have to possess in order to be a moral agent so you may remember the character lenny from steinbeck's novel of mice and men write to her you know in some passages it looks like he's rational enough to be held accountable for his actions and then in other passages you know it just looks like he's kept in black and crackers  he can't be held accountable for his actions but still even though there's a gray area like that we everybody agrees that rationality is the property that you would have to possess in order to be a moral agent there are some problems there you know like do we want to say to somebody who's drunk is a moral agent in the same way somebody who's sober you know somebody does something bad under economic duress you know are they moral agents there are problems there but i don't think it's with the rationality criteria now let's ask a different question what property do you have to possess in order to be a moral patient and what it means to be a moral patient is not to be a being who acts morally or immorally but a moral patient  a being who receives moral or immoral treatment from others ok so a moral patient is a being who can be treated unfairly or cruelly another way to put it would be to say a moral patient is a being who could have his or her rights people a lot of people don't notice this distinction and just talk vaguely about moral beings but the really it's quite different being a moral agent on a moral patient i suspect a lot of people don't notice the differences because all of us in this room are both moral agents and moral patients because we're both we tend not to notice if they're two quite different things but i'd like to ask the question as to whether or not there might be some beings in the world who are moral patients but moral agents are there some beings in the world who could be treated cruelly but might not be sufficiently rational in order to be held accountable for their actions so if you ask the question what property do you have to possess or what criterion do you have to meet in order to be a moral patient  sparks fly there's all kinds of debates about this gigs valve's all sorts of issues and not only the animal rights issue but this involves the abortion debate right this involves the debate regarding euthanasia you know all sorts of debates him john what you're going to count as what if we could try all three possibilities here and see what the implications would be of three different directions you could go in regarding moral patients the status and what some people want to say is that in order to be a moral patient in other words in order to receive respect from others or in order to be the possessor of rights you have to be rational people people say this a lot of it's that they think that what rationality does so well as a criterion for moral agency why not have a do double duty and have it be the criterion for moral patients as well so if in order to be a moral agent if you have to be rational why not say in order to be a moral patient you have to be rational now i have a question mark next to that word rationality there and on the one hand out in it is because i think that if we made rationality the criterion for moral patients the status disastrous consequences would fall if we said in order to deserve moral respect you first had to be rational what that would mean is infants would not deserve moral respect  ok mentally challenged people would not deserve moral respect not people in the grip of senile dementia erd danced all timers would not deserve moral respect because they're not rational looking i just find those consequences is totally unacceptable i mean it's just it's it's not a criterion that although a lot of people now the words in order to respect from view deserve respect from others you have to be willing to you know fulfill your part of the bargain you know you have to be rational both what you know both as a moral agent as a more patient i don't know if anybody really believes that to me the consequences are so severe right so what i'm suggesting is if you have a really high criterion or a high hurdle using a track and field metaphor here if the hurdles aside it's more like a high jump rather than hurdle it's at such a high criterion that many people are not going to be able to clear a minority of human beings but still a sizeable minority of human beings if you include infants the mentally challenged people in senile dementia and so on so what i'm suggesting is what we ought to do is reject rationality as a criterion for moral patients status i don't think it's that hard to think this through in other words a lot of people assume that if rationality is what you need to be a moral agent then that's where you need to be a moral patient to a bit i think if you just make the distinction between the two people can see that you don't want to use rationality as the property that you have to have in order to deserve respect from others now if that's too high a criterion it makes sense for people then to lower it significantly so if some people do is claim that life should be the criterion for moral  that all life deserves respect so albert schweitzer right is famous for if you ever read his writings for you know trying to think through what that would be like to read good to show moral respect for all of the things that james sect within hindu ism you know tries to you know play this out as well some people claim to be pro life and think that all life deserves respect and i'm going to try to advance the thesis that this is an equally disastrous move that there's no that can follow from a complete claim that all life deserves respect if it's the case that life is the criterion for moral respect for moral patients he studies then cutting out cancerous tumors would be immoral because actually you're cutting out not just life but life as human genetic material right and has been a fight over human living cells or you know there and multiply the problem with cancer cells right there are flourishing and multiplying and so on and so forth  i think there's some life that should be killed right and that's a case in the grass would constitute something like genocide breathing would be morally questionable as you suck suck in micro organisms when i use mouthwash and i look at the label in us as kills germs on contact that would be morally questionable you know i don't know what we would eat if we really had a consistent pro life view and thought that all living organisms deserve moral respect  using green beans would be problematic you know you only get potatoes when you pull them out of the ground maybe you can wait underneath the apple tree right and have the apple fall into the apple tree would continue to live i don't know but i mean it just coming down chefs of wheat would be morally problematic but i'm not so sure what's problematic about cutting down chefs of wheat you know that the united supplants for all we can tell don't have central nervous systems and don't experience pleasure and pain either at all or with any degree of intensity the way animals with central nervous systems do we can talk about this and some people do become remarkably sympathetic to plants when their cruelty to animals are brought to their attention you know but when i play mozart to my geraniums they grow better you know you've heard these sorts of arguments before there's certainly a qualitative difference there i mean botanists explained growth in plants at the cellular level there's and is no central nervous system there which enables us to understand how they could experience pleasure and pain whereas we can understand hell cal's bigs and lions and tigers and bears experience pain because they have central nervous system so i'm suggesting that rationality is too high a criterion for moral patients status and that life is too low a criterion the hurdle is so low that even you know getting over the hurdle and deserve moral respect it is certainly goldilocks and the three bears you know so it was too hot or it's too cold you want to get some calibrate your way to some sort of defensible position position between the two extremes what i'm claiming here through it begins to look like a more and more defensible sort of property that would have to be possessed to deserve moral respect king the if one of the advantages here is that sentience e is a low enough challenge him a beings are sentience but every once in while you read in the paper somebody who extinguishes lit cigarettes on the arms of a mentally challenged person you know i'm sure you read the paper right and just you just horrendous things that people do so so even though that being is not rational it strikes me that that's you know grossly immoral right why it hurts ok that's enough sentience is not only necessary but sufficient i see as i see things for being the possessor of rights and deserving moral respect you don't need anything more than sentience he deserves more respect some people try to squeeze in between sentience and rationality potential for rationality now if that helps the infants but it doesn't do much for people in senile dementia right i mean the potential for rationality still strikes me as too demanding a criterion for moral respect and there are some beings who do not have the potential for rationality who i still think you know deserve moral respect  so just being able to experience pleasure and pain is enough and as i see things so if you make the criterion for moral patients the status sentience say you protect all human beings ok but the criterion would be relaxed enough that you would have to include animals with central nervous systems but you see where i'm going with us in other words i don't see how there's any way you can develop a theory regarding moral patients the status where you can protect all human beings without also protecting animals with central nervous systems in a way the argument hinges on two really deceptively simple words only and all so only human beings can solve quadratic equations and do calculus but not all human beings can do that like only we have real let's say that for the sake of argument i don't know if that's true if you look at some things the great apes can whales and so on maybe they're much more rational than we think but let's say for the sake of argument only human beings have advanced rationality but not all of us do so if it's the case that we want to protect all human beings we have to have some criterion of respect much you know less relaxed than rationality but then once you relax the standard to you know to sentience even it looks like you're going to have to protect animals with central nervous systems as well hard for us to imagine what the world would be like if people really did believe these two arguments right it's like abolitionists trying to imagine what a world would be like without slavery you know before  on the one hand and speciesism on the other you know they're just massive numbers of animals that are killed right for the table so in terms of the quantity of beings involved the analogy holds i think in terms of the intensity of the pain involved the lives of nine human animals is not on a par with the quality of our lives that i may be right i mean i mean we have plans for the future and you know we have all sorts of sophisticated rational pursuits and things that we worry about you know that perhaps no animal nine human animal would worry about but yeah i'd be willing to grant that for the sake of argument that the quality of our lives is of a higher sort than the quality of typical non human animal lives but i don't know if that's enough to trump the quantity and intensity considerations going to the a number of animals that experience unnecessary suffering and the intensity of their suffering  is sufficient to have the analogy between speciesism on the one hand and the racism and sexism on the other be pretty strong as i see things so i'd like to make it clear that i'm making an argument here for animal rights and not animal welfare the animal welfare is to somebody who would like some reform on factory farms you know that you know give chickens a little bit more room to move and have fairer transport to the slaughterhouse so the animal welfare think that slaughterhouses are ok as long as you kill the animals as painlessly as possible ok so this is an animal rights view which is a much stronger view i think than an animal welfare scale so all of favor of a lot of things the animal welfare or swan no more room on factory farms and so on but i'm not convinced that we get off the moral hook by making sure that animals are killed as painlessly as possible you know like by bludgeoning them before we slit their cat or a carrot arteries and if you've been a slaughterhouse but i'm not making this up ok you know the idea that if you sort of snuck up on them and kill them as painlessly as possible then all the moral problems would be avoided actually i do think the relatively painless killing of animals is better than when they're killed slowly and you know with intense pain or not so i think there's a lot of good that animal welfare is to have done but still all the future pleasures of the animals would have had or deprived right i mean even if you kill them painlessly you would still be taking away their lives i mean as i see things it's the animal's life is its life and not mine so even if you kill it painlessly some serious wrong has been done into murders that i would guess most i kill one were murdered one person in this room and i inflicted torture is pain on the being before i kill the being and then the second person i murdered i killed the killed painless mean the second killing is morally superior to the first but there's still something wrong home have felt taking the way a life of being you know that is its life and not not mine  not trying to make a distinction between an animal rights of you on the one hand and then in a weaker animal welfare wrist position on the other it was one of the you mentioned a rich that these arguments are philosophical arguments that are open to everybody i also have a theological position that i'm willing to talk about later on in the current conversation period where i suspect one of the major forces at work against the animal rights position in our culture comes from not only biblical fundamentalists but you know jews and christians and muslims believe ers who think that they have some sort of scriptural you know support for you know human dominion over animals and i see that as a much more complicated situation than most religious believers think it is so we can maybe talk about that later so i'm willing to stop here and take questions and comments and again i've got thick skin if you have any criticisms got you covered a lot of territory there ok yeah yeah yeah see these arguments he had made the two arguments i have here not now i'm not i don't want to tie them to any particular religious tradition or you know so it's very very complicated how attitudes toward religion toward animals develop in various religious traditions here you can see that this is in a way part of for lack of a better word like a liberal political ideology right so i'm working on the sumption that the people who hear these two arguments think that there's something morally bothersome about racism and sexism ok and consider these two arguments yeah yeah yeah i'm a philosopher and i think i think there's some sort of something really really important about thinking through really carefully so so say the tradition in the find in various religious traditions but then also in secular traditions as well the tradition of anthropocentrism the belief that comes from the greek word anthropos which means human the idea that human beings are the center of the world and everything everything in the world is here to serve our interests it's here for our benefit these are two arguments that call into question the tradition of anthropocentrism right yeah yeah and i'm what i'm working on the assumption of this may be an illegitimate assumption i think i'm safe in this  that you see something morally bothersome about racism and sexism and so if it's the case that there's something bothersome about those phenomena and you ask what is what is it is bothersome about them part of it is the arbitrariness right of making some people a to slave enslavement or some people you know not getting the vote because of their race or sex right what i'm asking is is it not the case that there's something arbitrary about allowing some  beings to have gratuitous or unnecessary suffering or death inflicted on them but not others on the basis of species so the first premise to the argument from sentience is suggesting that there is something wrong like period about inflicting suffering on a being that is on necessary and if some people want to have a culture relative argument in my culture you know we've always i know you know i'm not i know you weren't saying that but i suppose somebody had a rejoinder like that which is pretty common then i'd say well you know i know there are you could have the same sort of our game about racism and sexism right you know in some cultures have wanted to kill people and ethnic minorities right or some cultures are mis agin istic the fact that it's been around for centuries does not strike me as a strong argument for racism or sexism the fact that human beings have been abusing animals for a long time does in does not strike me as a good argument for anthropocentrism or for inflicting on necessary suffering on animals there's animal rightist and singer skates because he's a utilitarian but he thinks that the line should be drawn somewhere around mollusks or crustaceans so cows pigs in the den also fish central nervous systems or something like them such that they experience pain if you're seeing a hook in the fishes mouth and maybe not mollusks and crustaceans for example clams you know have a cluster of ganguly of it make them responsive to the environment in some way but not exactly a central nervous system however there are a lot of people who are inciting more and more studies that would suggest that actually sentience might go down at least to the level of mollusks and crustaceans so but the fact that there are gray areas right does not  should not distract us from the obvious difference between an animal with a central nervous system on the one hand and then a plant on the other certainly a huge difference in terms of level of sentience they are if it's the case that plants are butchery so some people could still stomach you know eating meat if they did their own but you're saying you know but he thinks that most people would not you know continue to eat meat if they actually butchered the animals and skin them and all the all that themselves so it seems to me if you're honest you should be willing to do even if you don't do it if you want to be a mediator should be willing to at least see what's involved in the process and if you distance yourself from the violence involved which typically people do they want to safeway and they buy meat you know wrapped in cellophane it's very sanitized and you know people tend not to see the violence that's involved and don't want to see the violence involved right i so i'm trying to respond to your question you know directly i mean it does seem to me you don't get off the moral hook by having somebody else do it for you i find it interesting that beer drinkers like to go to breweries to see how beer is made people who like cake love to go to bakeries i've never met out somebody you know of the brothers and you know relatives who just love hamburger love me love steak the you know the idea let's let us say let's go to a slaughterhouse they would never want to go i mean it's i don't know that i mean there is a way in which we distance ourselves from what goes on in this practice in ways that are different from the way we distance you know for the way we react to you know bread that we eat or you know other things that we ingest so regarding your second question is is a tough one about you know are there some human beings who do not even meet the sentience criteria like people persistently vegetative states to understand you correctly and you know and then the question is you know do they have lives worth living right is theirs and what are our moral responsibilities to beings who are maybe only marginally sente and who are human beings right it seems to me that if they're still living there still some sort of functioning central nervous system at work right although maybe in a debilitating state right i mean that no no not all are suddenly some human beings are in such a pitiful state that they not only are not functioning rationally you're worried about they might not even function ascent into beings and then the question is how do you protect them right i suspect that they're still minimally sentience in some fashion or other right the fact that they're living at all as human beings  yeah there's also an honorific status they may have as human beings right we we remember them as once sente and beings if they're you know in yeah i mean those are difficult cases of medical ethics  yeah so if you know i say in the wild areas around here for coyote takes down a hair you know if that's natural some people then try to say that it would be natural for a human being you know to engage i doesn't strike me that predators are moral agents like i don't have the sense that a lion wakes up in the morning and asks you know what am i going to eat today i might be going to go mexican veggie you know but we do mean we have you know quite a number of different choices that we can make and whatever choices we make regarding what we eat i'm suggesting we have to morally justify so the fact that there's predation in nature right is not necessarily a moral evil if the predators do what they do of necessity right whereas i don't think we're natural predators and in way to suppress related to this gentleman's question as well i don't buy into the idea that human beings started out as predators i mean they're not an anthropologist but apparently there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the first human beings would have been not and very gatherers and root diggers nodes they would have eaten the way a lot of the great apes eat you know they might have been opportunistic meat eaters who would eat carrion flesh right especially after a forest fire or something but if they didn't have fire you know i mean you know you cover a lot of ground like we'll be able to respond to everything  about trees and i mean is it possible to lower the criterion for moral patients who studies beneath sentencing and i talked a little bit about what would happen if we made a life rather than sentenc g and it leads to just counterintuitive conclusions you know so i for example some people accuse the position i discount as not being unnecessarily and what my response would be to say well it hurts and if it's unnecessary right there's something obviously wrong with that it's like in math you know very often math proofs depend on certain assumptions right you  know axioms you start with and then those are conclusions to prior axioms but then eventually you get to some simple things you don't prove you just see are true like the law of identity equals a hardly anybody ever proves that you know you just hear or see it or you don't so in a way my moral argument is backing up to an intuition that i'm suggesting we have that suggests what infliction of unnecessary pain is wrong and i'm suggesting that everybody understands that promise right that infliction of unnecessary pain is wrong but most people haven't considered what follows from that ok what i'm suggesting is if you start with that premise and then you throw in the second premise right and unconsidered conclusion follows about the deer this is similar to this person's question too i have not tried to develop a whole environmental ethics here you would have to deal with issues like predation what happens when hunters no longer hunt deer deer p proliferate and that's going to have a negative effect on the vegetation around demeanors those are complicated problems so i haven't tried to deal with those here however i think the way to deal with overpopulated up with overpopulation of deer is not to make hunting a yeah yeah but it's a very complicated now as it might be you mean there might be there might be you main ways of regulating population of overpopulated species right you can or population control methods other than violently killing the deer hunting actually the problem backs up on what if human beings kill off all or most of the natural predators right then the deer population explodes and then the very people who killed off the natural predators volunteer to be the ones who are going to solve the problem of the overpopulated deer and they're going to hunt the deer actually me just comment on the last part of your comments you know it takes apparently between about fifteen and twenty pounds of grain fed or something you know eating beef it's so if from a purely anthropocentric or human centered point of view if you wanted to make sure that all human beings were fed it's much easier to do it on a vegetarian basis than on a meeting basis  and i know some people have an argument that range fed cattle would you know be grazing in areas that would not be used for any other purpose but you know you're such a small number of cattle that can be supported by a range fed you know grazing techniques in the west i mean basically in the united states it's like huge you can if you ever driven across the country you know this reaches hundreds and hundreds of thousands of acres millions of acres in the midwest right there grown for so corn and soybeans right and that is all fed to cows and pigs and it's in efficiently you know results in food that we eat but if we really were interested in making sure that all human beings had enough food that's an argument against meat eating rather than an argument for meat eating that's an argument from protein efficiency  perfectly compatible with anthropocentrism right so a lot of people are anthropocentric are human centered environmentalist we should be concerned about destroying the brazilian rainforest because of all the medicines that could help us that we won't get you know i mean so i'm suspicious of anthropocentric or human centered arguments like that this is an argument that well that is sentience centric any being the can experience pain deserves moral consideration and that's what i'm claiming yeah i mean holmes rolston is a in vironment lettuces to has this phrase super killing so i'm talking about killing of individual beings but if you killed all the members of a species right then that would not just be a killing it would be a super killing you know you'd be killing not only every token but you'd be killing the type  which yeah yeah there's all kinds of examples of that right there be i'm opposed to species extinction i want to go on record which is something bothersome about species extinction however species don't suffer members of species do if they have central nervous systems ok so some people now it's like cow hood does not suffer so some people who are concerned about species extinction are worried about snow leopard hood and maybe not individual snow leopards you know i mean are there concerned about cowherd but not individual pigs it's individual pigs and cows who suffer not cow hood so so i think you can over concentrate on species to locus of suffering are individual beings so that somebody if somebody said that this argument is individual as to forget who said that but in one sense it is i mean it is individuals who suffer and then it's individuals who matter in that regard that does not mean that i'm not interested in whole populations of human beings or dear you that's a whole area you talked about i didn't talk about yes i defend rights i think it's and they're important reminders of moral claims to say that somebody has a right to something means that they have a legitimate claim something i'm afraid to the without the notion of rights then our moral deliberations would be decided in the aggregate like you know that we could get sacrificed the interests of some if it's for the good of the whole  actually i think the word for that is fascism actually that you can fight sacrifice the interests of some and for that for the good of the whole  yet that's problematic isn't it for example i think yeah i don't think that's right and i think you'll agree with me is not right do you think that mentally challenged human beings only have rights if they're also rational enough to  fulfill their responsibilities do you think that infants do not have rights because they're not yet responsible and i think you can't have rights without being responsible instance mentally challenging the beings have rights i think sure if you're talking in a political context of people like us that you know somebody who constantly asserts their rights and doesn't fulfill their responsibilities that's a problem but i think there are beings in the world who are moral patients but not moral agents and i shudder at the thought that we would not be willing to acknowledge their rights because they're not rational enough to fulfill their responsibilities this person is head of a long time ago i'm sorry i think there have been i don't think there are a huge number of examples of moral progress ok but i think there are some examples of moral progress i think the abolition of slavery was an example of moral progress increasing attentiveness to the issues of race right are examples of moral progress treating women as equals right to men as an example of moral progress we're living through a period in which there's you know some evidence right that the evils of racism and sexism right her being ameliorated and not as quickly as we would like them to be eliminated right i'm not saying that the battle is over so on and so forth but the idea that you know we're no better off having abolished slavery than we were when we owned slaves actually my relatives were in poland they didn't own the slaves but any health you know i mean that you know that they did the idea that it in franchising women are not examples of moral progress i find really counterintuitive and what i'm asking here is is there room for moral progress not only with respect to questions regarding race and sex but then also regarding species ok i'm not i hope i'm not pollyannish here i realize that this is still a minority position right but there are many many more people who are vegetarian in western culture of them were vegetarian a few generations ago right does it strikes me as not being not outside the realm of possibility that speciesism will generally be seen as a moral evil right if not in my lifetime over you need a wide angle lens here right i mean the battle against slavery took me you could say that you know the writings of st paul right were a protest against slavery in some ways and then took a long time took two thousand years until christians finally got rid of slavery  i hope it's not that long with respect to speciesism but you know i don't think it's outside the realm of possibility there could be marketed moral improvement of human being human beings behavior with respect animals over the course of time so the roe was viewed as a nut in the one nine hundred century because of a chapter in walden that you know talked about higher laws with respect to treatment of animals and now i mean they're pretty normal right to t hink of the sort of things that the roe is thinking about and defend them in public so i have ever spun to everything you're getting at but if what you're if what the claim is is that you know human beings have done terrible things right and there's always the possibility that we will revert back to selfish behavior that is either anthropocentric or racist or sexist yeah i mean i've read history yes you have beings of done terrible things and it's always possible they will end up doing terrible things again but  know i think even the best thinkers in previous ages and this is one of the distressing things about reading some of the founders of the united states as if you know even the best thinkers are brighter than we are like jefferson was you know brilliant guy who just basically defended things that we think today are indefensible so i do think it's possible to have moral progress i don't want to overstate the case though of not trying to say it's going to happen automatically and i'm not trying to say  no very difficult theoretical issues and practical issues that have to be resolved but