Activism for one ideal isn’t negligence toward another ideal. Fighting for abortion rights doesn’t mean you’re against providing mosquito nets for Africans, which would (arguably) provide much more relief from human suffering.

You’re probably right that the term is speciesist, but you’re wrong in asserting that concentrating on human rights means you don’t care about animal rights. We are each moved to different causes, and it’s not really in your interest to convince abortion rights activists (for instance) to drop their passion and join PETA.

Human rights are animal rights, after all.

Posted: November 30th 2009

See all questions answered by George Locke

The term humanism does seem to be inherently speciesist. Speciesism, as it relates to a plain reading of the term humanist, implies arbitrarily privileging animals who happen to fit the category human. Instead of using metrics such as the capacity for suffering or sentience, membership of humanity becomes the criteria used to determine whether we grant another animal rights or not.

The trouble is, that once we’ve grown out of the egotistical fantasy that humans have a supernatural component to them that other animals lack, it’s clear that there is no qualitative difference that makes Homo sapiens uniquely special in the animal kingdom (creationists seem particularly terrified of this thought).

Even the idea of humanity existing as a clearly delineated category is out of step with reality. To paraphrase Dawkins, the only reason we’ve gotten so comfortable using the discontinuous labels human and non-human is that the intermediate species linking our branch of life to the branches of other extant species are extinct. If we were to see all the relevant ancestors side by side, there’d be no specimen that we could identify as the first human. Instead we’d see animals becoming gradually more human-ish as we followed one particular path towards the evolutionary 'twig’ that represents the modern human.

Using an animal’s status as human or non-human to determine what rights we grant it has implications that, in my opinion, should set off moral alarm bells. For instance, imagine that we came into contact with a race of aliens with a level of cultural sophistication matching our own. Vulgar humanism says we’d be justified in slaughtering them all if doing so would prolong the life of one human (and wouldn’t harm humanity in the process).

While I’m supportive of much of the work of humanist groups, I wouldn’t self identify as a humanist for the reasons given above. If humanism doesn’t really imply the brutal 'vulgar humanism’ that I’ve talked about, then I still wouldn’t self-identify as a humanist because in this case I think it’s a misleading label.

Posted: November 26th 2009

See all questions answered by bitbutter

Yes, I would say that many humanists are guilty of speciesism. I do not see that inclination as necessarily problematic.

Richard Dawkins, excerpted from the Wikipedia article, commented:

Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [...] The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.[6]

He continues:

What I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven’t yet produced to break out of that. It’s a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery.

A focus on humanism for me is not as a matter of fact to exclude all other species from consideration, but to exclude from the arena a divine entity.

I am horrified in general of the raising/hunting of animals to be eaten. I am also like Dawkins, I eat meat. I have tried not to, even excluding it from my diet for about ten years. At present, all I am capable of doing is cutting down the amount of meat eaten.

Though I find Dawkins’ handle of that all species come from the same tree of life, and if there were all the intermediate species present that point would be driven home, as an useful one, there still would be clear demarcation between species.

I also find that the fact that non-human animals do not give a dickie bird about my welfare is also a sticking point.

To summarize, my humanism is more based on the exclusion of the divine of any consideration and the reliance upon other humans than it is to disregard other species. You can be both an humanist and an animal rights advocate.

Posted: November 26th 2009

See all questions answered by logicel