On Thu, 1 Sep 2005, Luke Weiger wrote:
> I didn't say that suffering "needs" to be wrong (as I said before, I'm
> actually an error theorist, and believe that all moral claims are in some
> sense necessarily false). What I said is that arguments against cruelty to
> animals don't require the avoidance of needless suffering as the "paramount"
> moral criterion to succeed--they probably work so long as we give the
> avoidance of needless suffering any non-negligible ethical weight. In other
> words, you completely misread what I wrote.
Let me try again: why are we compelled to "give the avoidance of needless suffering any non-negligible ethical weight"? It's possible and quite common that avoidance of suffering is not a component of moral decisions and action. Do you have any principled argument beyond "suffering is bad"?
> Here's a thought experiment to show that (intuitively) being a human isn't a
> requirement for moral standing:
>
> Imagine that aliens were to land tomorrow. Let's suppose they were just
> like us, but a lot smarter and nicer--so nice, in fact, that they were
> entirely pacifistic. Would it be OK to raise their children in pens and
> slaughter them for food when they became meatier adults?
I suspect you'll hate my answer, but I'll state it anyway: if the social consensus among humans was that the aliens are human-like, and deserve respect, then it would not be okay. If the consensus was that the aliens are a danger, or a source of food necessary to keep people alive, then--in that social world--it would be okay.
To steal shamelessly from Wittgenstein: moral claims are part of a form of life; they are not fundamental axioms that exist above and beyond the social relations that create them.
Miles