A commitment to the well-being of all sentience has far-reaching implications for humans and non-humans alike - ranging from the abolition of factory-farming and closure of the death factories to compassionate – and systematic - intervention in the living world. A commitment to the well-being of all sentience also – I’d argue - entails adopting a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle. ~ Dave Pearce
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes a useful distinction between "empathetic intelligence" and "autistic intelligence".
ReplyDelete(cf. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html to test where your cognitive style falls on the empathising / systematising spectrum.) I often urge my high IQ/high AQ transhumanist colleagues to give greater weight to the interests of cognitively humble beings. Sheep and pigs, for example, are just as sentient as prelinguistic human infants and toddlers. They deserve equal care and respect. Hence the case for adopting a cruelty-free vegan lifestyle.
But as animal advocates, our benevolence also needs to be comprehensive and systematic. Thus IMO it makes no sense to protect young, handicapped and vulnerable members of our own species from human predators while at the same time trying to conserve species of carnivorous predators - at least in their existing predatory guise. For in promoting species of nonhuman predator we are harming the interests of sentient beings in no less need of protection.
Is it arrogant of Homo sapiens to "play God"?
Yes, no doubt. But this century, for better or worse, mankind's God-like powers over the rest of he living world are only going to increase. Realistically, the issue at stake is whether we are going to be benevolent or callous in exercising these God-like powers - not whether the world would be better or worse if we reverted to the lifestyle of our Palaeolithic ancestors. Sociologically speaking, a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not going to happen.
Might botched interventions in Nature do more harm than good?
Yes again. But the argument for intervening to help members of other species is no different IMO from the argument for intervening to help members of other races. For sure, providing e.g. disaster relief for famines in Africa may lead to further pressure on ecological resources if human population growth thereby continues unchecked. Perhaps it is indeed arrogant of rich Western nations to try and impose our notions of family planning and contraception on traditional cultures. Yet the alternative of _not_ intervening just ensures tragedy unfolds on a massive scale as "Nature takes its course". So instead of adopting a "hands off' approach to the well-being of human and nonhuman animals, I think we should focus on making our compassionate interventions more rational, more comprehensive, and more effective. This will involve going a long way outside our normal psychological comfort zone.
I remain skeptical that human beings will ever be able to re-engineer other animals such that they will neither suffer nor cause suffering. I wonder whether it would even be a good thing, even if we could accomplish it. However, I agree that, if the interests of other animals to live the experiences of their own lives are interests that ought to be respected and protected, then when we have the means and opportunity to see that those interests are respected and protected, then we owe it to them to do so. It can hardly matter to an antelope whether she is killed by a human or a non-human hunter. Either hunter is as dangerous to her as the other and she deserves protection from both.
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