On Nov 3, 2006, at 10:06 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> Humans do not exist as isolated individuals,
humans do not exist as individuals if we don't consider each individual's alterity.
> and the groups you name do
> not exist as isolated groups;
being part of a group does not negate individuality.
>
>
> P.S. How broad is your definition of "senile"? My grandmother,
> though in
> many ways senile from around the age of 85, clearly enjoyed life, ate
> vigorously, argued with herself in the mirror, up to a year or two
> before her death at the age of 102. The last words my father ever
> spoke
> to me were "I wish I were dead" just before continued strokes reduced
> him to a total vegetable. Two quite different cases. The main right my
> completely senile father should have had was the right to die.
your post sciptum appears to be in contradiction with your previous statement(s). Your father's right to die is quite "individual". The same could be said of your father's pain.
Now, what I find interesting (and useful) about the "specieism" argument has to do with the concept of the "individual." We should concentrate upon the individual because it is the individual - not the race, the nation, or the species - who does the actual suffering. For this reason, the pains and pleasures of several individuals cannot meaningfully be aggregated (if that aggregation negates the very existence of singularities), as occurs in utilitarianism and most moral theories. BTW, that's one of the reasons why the "multitude", as a whole of singularities, better describes contemporary subjectivity.
ciao, alessandro