Radical Moral Ideas: Speciesism

Who Are These 'People' You Care About?

In my previous blogposts I've discussed the implications that radical altruism has for ethics. Yesterday I considered what altruism towards future people might imply. Today I'm going to have a go at considering what happens when we examine our definition of people.

Most people who are likely to read this post won't believe that race is reasonable grounds upon which to care more or less about somebody. If you're truly egalitarian, nation probably shouldn't make a difference either, although the widespread preference of national/local charities over international ones suggests that many give a priority to the welfare of people in their own nation. Why might this not be reasonable?

For me, it seems that it's the quality of subjective experiences that I care about when thinking altruistically. It doesn't matter where you're from, everybody can experience pleasure and pain and all the other complex emotions that make up life. At least, you can experience these things unless you're a human vegetable, at which point (provided we're certain you're not just locked in) cutting off life support isn't doing much harm. Certainly discriminating on the basis of other mental qualities seems unfair to the mentally disabled and young infants. No matter how unintelligent someone is, so long as it is possible for their subjective experience of the world to be made better or worse I find helping them an appealing idea.

If this is the case, then why not care about the suffering of animals? That they're "not human" seems to me to be no more convincing an argument than that other humans are "not English" or "not white". Such an attitude is, to use an ugly word, speciesist. In fact, it seems likely to me that some mentally advanced animals like elephants, dolphins and dogs are probably significantly more capable of meaningful subjective experience than young infants. We should, therefore, care deeply about their welfare.

If you accept this argument, then a few actions seem imperative. Firstly, you should become vegan. The food looks a lot less tasty, I agree. If I were to go vegan, I'd have to learn how to get cooking tofu right, which seems quite a challenge. But all the same, something like 60 billion animals a year are killed to produce food, living lives of great suffering. If you find this argument convincing, you'll also want to check out effective animal charities and donate to them.