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In my post on the chimp police I included a short paragraph on the “us against them mentality”. I know that it might seem a little strong to some but I want to discuss it a little further here.

There are two common objections to the equal consideration for the rights of animals; first, because we are human, it is right to value our interests more highly, cats would, and should do the same thing if they could theorise about these things. Second, we give humans special consideration because of our exceptional abilities; we are moral beings who are self conscious etc etc. I don’t think either justifies valuing animals interests less.

The first objection fails because I don’t think we really believe in the moral implications it entails. Consider H. G. Wells ‘War of the Worlds’ the aliens are much smarter than us, and they know a lot about us and our culture etc, yet they still chose to discount our interest in a brutal way. If we take species membership as so important then there is no problem with this, but surely that’s crazy, if the aliens don’t need to kill us to survive then they shouldn’t kill us, full stop! Besides I still think that one needs to provide a more concrete reason why the human category is so special, the moral intuition some cite is insufficient because so many people have used that same intuition to justify all the other unpleasant prejudices, like racism and anti-Semitism. It is not difficult to find chilling stories where colonists hunted the natives because they didn’t know that it was wrong to do so.

The second objection fails because we are not prepared to follow its implications when it comes to humans; we do not discount the interests of infants or severely retarded humans just because they are not moral, self conscious beings. If we can kill animals and eat them because they are dumb, why not dumb humans? We don’t do that because infants or retarded humans have interests and we would be wrong not to consider them.

Finally I’d like to point out that extending some principal of equal consideration of interests to animals is really quite a vague notion. One can argue all night what the relevant interests of different animals are. Perhaps some animals don’t have many interests, so we could continue to eat them, like oysters or mussels. What we can’t do however is claim that it is not in an animal’s interest to avoid the kind of suffering that is routinely inflicted on a factory farm.