Shirts are really just three sleeves.
==Test for wiki stability==
Here's an entire paper to test the resolve of this corrupted site:
“What morally relevant difference is there between human and non-human animals that justifies the way you treat non-human animals?” Many of my conversations about animal rights begin with this question, referred to as “Name the Trait” in activist circles. It prompts one to justify prejudice towards the interests of humans. While "Name the Trait" is used as more of a catch-all, a similar argument, the Argument from Marginal Cases (AMC), typically focuses specifically on intelligence. The AMC states that if we accept that certain capacities are sometimes absent in humans, we must either exclude those humans from moral consideration or include animals without those capacities. The power of the above question is that it points out an argument’s inconsistencies with remarkable clarity: to give more consideration to a being's interests on the basis of intelligence, for example, is ableist rather than speciesist because when applied consistently it leads to unjust discrimination of humans as well. Asking this question helps people to realize that they often don’t have grounds to treat nonhuman animals the way they do.
Sunuara Taylor points out the entanglement of animal liberation and disability liberation in her book Beasts of Burden: Animal Liberation and Disability Liberation, recognizing that cognitive variations are one of the most common justifications for speciesism. However, Taylor problematizes the AMC, joining author Licia Carlson in deeming it a form of “philosophical exploitation”. In this paper, I will demonstrate how Taylor’s own counters to the AMC are incorrect and that some are even ableist and speciesist. I will develop my thesis by explaining Taylor’s argument, pointing to its issues, and responding to pre-existing and anticipated objections.
A large portion of the “Ableism and Animals” chapter in Beasts of Burden is dedicated to admonishing animal advocacy for its heavy reliance on cognitive/mental capacities as morally meaningful. Taylor argues that this is a form of ableism that leads various animal and human lives alike to be unjustifiably deemed less valuable. She defines the AMC as a “theory [that] attempts to defend the rights of animals by comparing their mental capacities to those of certain humans.” In her view, while the sentiment of there being “no one specific ability shared by all humans that gives us value” is anti-ableist, the AMC continues to be ableist. Mental capacities like self-awareness and language are given moral relevance by philosopher Peter Singer and others based on an unquestioned preference for reason/rationality. She claims this puts the lives of disabled people “up for debate” and unjustly “centers the human as the yardstick of moral worth” by implicitly valuing rationality over other capacities. She writes that another reason this is a harmful way to approach justice since “focusing on similarities… [promotes] a hierarchy of value” where we only privilege animals and disabled humans because they resemble able-bodied humans. She ends the chapter in the same vein by challenging the claim that there is in fact an ability(s) that, once possessed, grants one the right to moral consideration. She says that when sentience, the capacity for subjective consciousness, is used as a prerequisite for moral consideration, it becomes an “ableist goalpost” that denies that non-sentient organisms and non-living things have value. My first point of contention is that Taylor misinterprets the AMC.
Singer’s Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests (PEC) gives rise to the AMC, so it needs explication first. Singer is a hedonistic utilitarian, which is to say he believes pleasure is the only intrinsic value, and pain the only intrinsic disvalue. As developed in his book Practical Ethics, the PEC is defined as a moral requirement to give equal consideration to equivalent interests (preferences) regardless of the being in which they occur. To say I have an interest in survival is to say I have a preference for staying alive. This is distinct from having an instinct to survive; having an interest is more active since it involves wanting things to go a certain way. In order to have interests, one must be sentient. Sentience is the capacity for feeling. Without the ability to phenomenally experience, one cannot have an interest. A tree does not have an interest in survival because it does not have a preference for staying alive. Instead, a tree grows because of distinctly perceptually-absent processes like the interaction of cells and sunlight.
Importantly, Singer and many other moral theorists agree that a fundamental interest shared by all sentient life is that of avoiding suffering. In this context, differences in intellectual ability are morally relevant insofar as they give rise to different types of experiences and, thus, different interests. The PEC does not say ability is morally relevant as a barrier for entry into the moral sphere; in fact, it proposes the opposite. No matter a sentient being’s intellectual ability, they should be given moral consideration because they can be harmed. Though all sentient humans have a fundamental interest not to suffer, we can contrast the instrumental interests of, for example, human infants from those of humans with fully developed brains. These are differences we should take into account when making decisions.
The PEC works under any moral theory that meets two conditions: intrinsically valuing pleasure and/or intrinsically disvaluing pain and containing the maxim that sentient beings have a fundamental interest in avoiding suffering. Philosopher Gary Francione, who is a rights-based moral theorist, has frequently utilized the PEC and AMC despite disagreeing with utilitarian ethics. Though he reaches quite different conclusions about our ethical obligations towards animals than Singer, he also grounds those beliefs on the basis of the interests sentience generates.
The biggest flaw in Taylor’s work is her conflation of the AMC with Singer’s views on disability and personhood. This not only misconstrues, but seriously upends the logic and language of the argument. The source of her confusion seems to stem from the article “From Marginal Cases to Linked Oppressions,” which she cites frequently in the chapter. In it, scholar Daniel Salomon defines neurotypicalism as a type of ableism that “privileges a form of cognitive processing characteristic of peoples who have a neurotypical (non-autistic) brain structure, while at least implicitly finding other forms of cognitive processing to be inferior, such as those natural to autists and nonhuman animals.” He then claims that the AMC perpetuates neurotypicalism because of Singer’s beliefs about what gives a life value. In short, Singer believes that traits such as rationality, autonomy and self-consciousness give one personhood. Taylor echoes similar concerns of Singer’s views in her own critique of neurotypicalism. She quotes Singer’s debunked claims about down syndrome to show how such misinformation has been harmful. However, Salomon, and by extension Taylor, then incorrectly assert that Singer grants the capacity to suffer only to rational beings:
Singer (1999: 327) contends that the fact that non-human animals can suffer is a sufficient basis for giving non-human animals moral consideration. Nonetheless, by arguing that only rational beings can suffer, Singer (1999: 326) keeps intact the notion that reason is an important criterion for giving non-human beings moral consideration.
Salomon cites a Singer book from 1999, but it was missing from his bibliography. I assumed it was cited in good faith and sought out Singer’s works from that year, but I was unable to find relevant material. In the absence of textual evidence, it seems that Salomon conflated Singer’s beliefs about personhood with the PEC/AMC. Given my summary of the PEC from Practical Ethics, I believe I’ve thoroughly explained that Singer situates sentience as the baseline for moral consideration. In short, though Singer believes that reason and other similar cognitive processes give rise to personhood, he maintains that moral consideration be extended to all who are sentient. Persons may generate more moral consideration than nonpersons, but personhood status is still entirely distinct from moral status in Singer's view. If one worries that Singer no longer endorses this picture, they need only reference this lecture from Princeton University in 2015 27:07:
In terms of anything you may think of as morally relevant, humans are going to differ significantly… but one thing you can say is they all have interest in their lives going well or badly and it's wrong to say “I’m going to give more weight to the interests of this being because they are of European descent than I will give to the interests of this person because they are of African descent or Asian descent or another ethnic group I don’t belong to”. That is clearly something we should reject. We ought to say that’s not relevant to whether you ought to give this human equal consideration of their interests. And I think the same is true of animals - that is, the fact that a being is not a member of our species is not in itself a good reason for giving less consideration to the interests of that being when we’re talking about similar interests… including interests in not feeling physical pain.
Regardless of whether Salomon’s citation was accidentally or intentionally omitted, it is troubling that the argument half of his critique rests on is either nonexistent, misinterpreted, or outdated.
Taylor herself uses sentience as a criteria for moral status because she intrinsically disvalues pain. She writes:
Sentience has very serious ethical implications because if you can feel and experience, it means you are a being who, as philosophers phrase it, has “interests.” You care on some level about what is happening to you; unlike a chair or a cell phone, you can be hurt.
However, she seemingly believes there are other criteria for moral status too:
What about the networks of living and nonliving organisms that make up ecosystems? Do they have interests? Do rivers and mountains deserve justice? By focusing on sentience as the line in the sand dividing those with interests and those without, have animal advocates created yet another hierarchy, another ableist goalpost that organisms must clear in order to have their experiences or existence valued and considered?
In calling sentience an “ableist goalpost” because it is a prerequisite for moral consideration in the AMC, she undermines her own argument since it points to sentience as the morally relevant similarity between all (or most, if oyster consciousness is dubious) animals. In other words, her version of the AMC is just as vulnerable to her own accusation of ableism.
Though unlikely, we could learn that plant life is sentient. Taylor herself suggests this in noting that the “jury could still be out on everything.” Certainly it is important to continue learning about sentience and its beholders, but Taylor goes a step further to suggest that non-life should be morally considered.
At the same time, though, the kind of moral consideration that sentience demands should not negate that other forms of life and nonlife also deserve an ethical response, even if of a very different nature.
If what Taylor means is that nonlife should be considered instrumentally valuable, I concur. There are plenty of resources that are of use to human and animalkind alike. Unfortunately, it seems she is suggesting they should be given moral status. This is nonsensical. To make a moral judgment is to make a claim about how an action(s) will affect others, and to be affected, one must be able to have some type of experience of the world. To ask one to ethically respond to the inanimate trivializes sentience – to say that rivers and mountains might deserve justice is to obscure the notion of justice. To ask one to ethically respond to the inanimate also trivializes disability.
There are several competing definitions of disability. The medical model defines disability as biological deviation(s) from the species norm that lead to disadvantages that are a direct result of the cognitive or physical differences themselves. The social model instead concludes that these deviations lead to disadvantage primarily because of discrimination. This is largely in the form of systemic discrimination that privileges environments that cater to traits possessed by neurotypical and able-bodied individuals. The affirmative model rejects the paradigm that disability should be considered solely a disadvantage, socially or otherwise, but instead a core facet of a person's being – another way of experiencing the world – and can produce advantages as well. Taylor seems to endorse a form of the affirmative model:
Disability activists do not argue that disabled individuals are valuable despite our disabilities; rather, value lies in the very variation of embodiment, cognition, and experience that disability encompasses. Disability may include elements of lack and inability, but it also fosters other ways of knowing, being, and experiencing.
Taylor’s flawed interpretation of the AMC shows why her model of disability is at odds with it. If the AMC includes a denial that any beings beside those who possess rationality can suffer, then it would be incorrect and ableist. In reality, the AMC is compatible with both the medical model and the affirmative model of disability. Whether impairments are viewed solely as producing disadvantages or as producing both advantages and disadvantages, they are morally relevant under the AMC precisely because they lead to “other ways of… experiencing”. We can contrast this from something like race being morally relevant. In a vacuum, race makes no difference in one’s conscious experience since it is purely a socially constructed label. On the other hand, if one uses the medical or affirmative model of disability, they will determine that the conscious experience of a disabled individual will be different in virtue of their impairment(s). Taylor goes on to propose:
This valuing of otherness, of other ways of doing and being, is one of the things that makes disability culture profoundly important to conversations around animal justice—because animals are far more similar to us than we have wanted to think while also being extremely different.
‘Otherness’ does not birth moral consideration. If she is trying to propose ‘otherness’ as the characteristic that births moral consideration, this is an unusual claim. Logic dictates that such a characteristic be substantive rather than merely comparative. Even if ‘otherness’ could be a determiner for one’s moral status, it would present obvious problems of arbitrariness.
At this point, I can only speculate whether she believes sentience or ‘otherness’ to be the relevant thread in human-animal moral consideration. However, this passage seems to support the former trait:
Yet, at this point, sentience is one of the only criteria we have to explain why it is more wrong to punch a dog than a rock, a tree, or a cell phone.
Having exhaustively defended the epistemological integrity of the AMC, I will move on to Taylor’s claims about the harmfulness of the AMC’s employment, to which she provides three main arguments.
One of these is that the AMC’s comparison of disabled people and animals “flatten(s) varied communities into stereotypes and say(s) nothing of their differences.” Taylor writes:
[The AMC] is always accompanied by an “all things being equal” clause—it is necessarily hypothetical, because intellectually disabled individuals, infants, the comatose, and elderly people with dementia, and animals are obviously all different. Yet, in the very act of using this line of argumentation, these hypothetical groups inevitably become conflated with real populations.
This echoes one of scholar Bénédicte Boisseron’s issues with drawing comparisons between black suffering in the Atlantic slave trade and modern day animal suffering:
Essentializing the silent subject or the victim has a tendency to desensitize the situation, thereby negating the real (sentient) individual, whether animal or human. Animals, women, blacks, and Jews become merely ideas and concepts, caught in a rhetoric of similes, analogies, and metaphors… Reducing the slave exclusively to a state of suffering risks equating blackness with a generic feeling, a capacity for sentience, which obliterates the complexity and uniqueness of the individual who should not be defined by her pain alone. Analogizing the black experience with the animal experience in an exclusive state of suffering results in essentializing both and desensitizing us to the actual being.
Nothing about the AMC or analogies of black suffering to animal suffering ‘obliterates’ or even weakens the distinctive features of each, nor does it do so to the individuals within these groups. When making moral decisions, animals, women, blacks, and Jews must become ‘merely ideas and concepts’ in order for us to analyze what makes them worthy of moral consideration. While sentience is the starting point of moral consideration, it is far from the end. ‘Complexity and uniqueness’ matter morally because different interests lead to justified differential treatment. Further, ‘complexity and uniqueness’ beyond what is morally relevant also has potential to matter on a personal level; morality’s existence does not preclude this.
In order to avoid strawman status, this argument must embrace a disavowal of categories altogether. While this is theoretically compatible with some of the sentiments expressed, neither Taylor nor Boisseron hold this stronger view since they both implicate categories throughout their writing.
The second argument Taylor makes is that the AMC puts animals and disabled humans in competition for moral consideration. She writes:
Philosopher Licia Carlson, who writes passionately against what she calls the “philosophical exploitation” of intellectual disability in theories such as the argument from marginal cases, vitally asks, “Is it necessary . . . to use the case of intellectual disability in order to make the case against speciesism and to define the moral status of nonhuman animals? . . . Must we view animal interests as being in conflict with the interests of the ‘severely intellectually disabled’?” Like Salomon and Carlson, I am convinced that we need not do so.
The AMC clearly does not position animals and disabled people in any kind of contest for moral consideration. To the contrary, the argument’s aim is to demonstrate that all humans and nonhuman animals' interests matter, no matter how different their cognition is from our own. While Taylor understands the AMC as showing that there is “no one specific ability shared by all humans that gives us value,” this reading is flawed. The ability that gives humans value in the moral sense is the same one that gives animals value: the ability for a subjective conscious experience.
Perhaps the most favorable interpretation is that she believes the ‘philosophical exploitation’ comes through using the existence of disabled humans to prove that animals deserve moral consideration. She may be asserting that drawing this comparison is an act of ableist animalization. To be as charitable as possible, I will provide three possible definitions of term animalization: 1. to compare a human or group of humans to animals in an effort to demonstrate they matter less. 2. to compare a human or group of humans to animals in a way that, intentional or not, demonstrates they matter less. 3. to compare a human or group of humans to animals in a way that, intentional or not, leads at least some others to perceive it as demonstrating they matter less.
The only definition that could potentially apply to the AMC is the third. The first cannot dismiss the AMC as its purpose is to prove that species membership is morally irrelevant. If the AMC has proven that species membership does not determine moral consideration, then the second fails too.
It seems plausible to grant that animalization often brings about harm to minorities, but as author and animal activist Jon Hochschartner writes:
The dehumanization of human groups is made possible by the low status of animals… By successfully linking subordinate groups to animals in the popular imagination, dominant groups are able to justify their position by tapping into society’s widespread speciesism, which views the exploitation or oppression of animals as legitimate.
So it is clear that the perception of lower status on the basis of being like an animal is ungrounded, but the question of whether this perception should be guarded against still remains.
A material consequence of the AMC that Taylor foresees is closely tied to these concerns of such a perception. She writes:
The argument has the truly unfortunate effect of pitting intellectually disabled individuals against animals, implying that if the animals go down, so should the intellectually disabled people. Whether the thinker then concludes that all of these groups are indeed morally relevant, as many theorists do, or that some members of these groups are less morally relevant than rational human beings, the damage has been done. The value of disabled people’s lives has been put into question. For a group of people who have won basic rights and protections only within the past few decades, this is a truly offensive and frightening gamble.
This passage seems to suggest that the AMC relies entirely on intuitions about human worth, which is false. The AMC, being derived from the PEC, presents a positive case for the moral consideration of all humans and animals grounded in the nature of sentience. For this reason, it does not put disabled humans’ moral status into question or imply that any animal or human should ‘go down’. If a thinker concludes that animals are deemed less morally worthy on account of their intelligence, logic dictates that the same apply to relevant humans, not the AMC. Thus, Taylor’s worry is about the use of logic in defense of animals. To aim it at this argument in particular is either disingenuous or naive. Though this is one of the weakest objections, I believe it one of the most crucial to confront. To resort to unsound and invalid arguments in defense of disabled humans for fear of the conclusions that logic may bring is the real gamble, and this seems to be exactly what Taylor is suggesting. I believe the account that gives the strongest case for disabled people’s rights is one that recognizes sentience as the basis for moral worth. If Taylor believes there to be a stronger one, she should present an argument for that account; not dismiss mine because it is supposedly ‘dangerous’.
A less worrisome but still seemingly mentioned consequence is that of such animal comparisons opposing the preferences of disabled people. I say ‘seemingly’ since, while not made explicit, it could also be that the interest of the disabled which Licia Carlson invokes is an interest in not being compared to animals context-independently. By this, I mean that disabled people may have a preference not to be compared to animals on grounds other than the aforementioned potential for material consequence. Unfortunately, the only other ground on which this could be predicated is that of speciesism. As previously quoted from Hochschartner, “dehumanization is only made possible by the low status of animals”. This low status of animals is a result of speciesism. Similarly, speciesism can give rise to personal preferences against being compared to animals despite there being nothing inherently negative about such a comparison.
Imagine two cultures which have traditions of seasonal parades. An individual in one of these cultures becomes offended when you mention that their tradition is similar to that of the other culture’s. When probed, they say that they don’t like being compared to savages. A reasonable response to this would be to object to the characterization of another culture as ‘savage’. I am doing the same when it comes to animals. If a disabled human and an animal share cognitive features, pointing this out does not constitute an insult. To become an insult, the comparison needs to be charged with speciesist notions of superiority.
The final task of this paper is to demonstrate why defending the efficacy of the AMC is important as well as why my refutation of Taylor’s speciesism and ableism is important. Arguments that are sound and valid are inseparable from the pursuit of truth. The PEC, being both sound and valid, is one such argument. The AMC is an easily digestible and persuasive example of how the PEC can be applied. Its effectiveness has been attested to by many activists, myself included. As mentioned at the beginning of the paper, it is a go-to tool in my own work. For this reason, I take criticisms of it very seriously. If it was ever proven wrong or ineffective, I would want to know.
Secondly, to allow speciesism and ableism to go unchallenged is to allow discrimination to persist. In the previous analogy, an individual became offended through a comparison to another culture. Now let’s say they define themself as an anti-colonialist and seek to abolish forms of xenophobic exploitation. They believe people of other cultures to be just as worthy of moral consideration as the people within their own culture. This would then represent an example of cognitive dissonance. Whether recognized or unrecognized, cognitive dissonance is when two or more beliefs are held despite being logically incompatible. Would it not be a disservice to this individual to fail to tell them that their opposition to comparison is xenophobic? That the notion of a ‘savage’ culture is flawed and harmful to the cause of mutual liberation? Similarly, it would be a disservice to Taylor for me to consume her work uncritically.
My hope is that Sunaura Taylor sees this paper as a sign of respect. If I took her and her readers to be close-minded, I would use my efforts elsewhere. Instead, I imagine her to be willing, even grateful, to heed these criticisms and become a stronger advocate for animals and humans alike.
Copyright: Carrie Ciecierski, 2022
(kidding, I don't have this copyrighted, but you still can't steal it or the plagiarism bots will come after you)
References
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