Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Human Animals/Non-Human Animals
In my opinion what sets apart Human Animals from Non-Human Animals is the level of importance. Usually when it comes to humans they put themselves first than their animals. For example when keeping a pet the owner is much kinder to their kids when handling issues but in order to make the pets learn they often get more controlling. They make sure that the pets know who's in charge, the animal often responds like how child would but instead of being told to go in the corner they are faced with either getting it together or go to the pound. Another thing is if there was a choice to save a life usually most people would go for the human being before the animal.
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2 comments:
I disagree that "level of importance" seperates human animals from non-human animals. The only reason that there is a seperation into different levels of importance is because of the hierarchy due to speciesm as defined and explained by Paolo cavalieri. On page 30 of the "animal ethics reader", Cavalieri defines speciesm as "the view that grants to the members of our own species a privileged status with respect to all other creatures". Cavalieri also says, on page 31, "the moral community has a stratified, hierarchical structure, and the continued use of nonhuman beings for our benefit is allegedly justified by their being confined to second-class moral status with respect to human beings". With this reasoning, the level of importance of humans versus non-human animals is not definitive in itself but instead set and accepted by humans. It is a form of oppression by humans and makes humans conceive themselves to be more important than non-human animals.
I also disagree that what separates human animals and non human animals is a level of importance. I also disagree because of the examples that were used in this post. Pets include animals such as dogs, cats, fish, and etc but this “level of importance” should not be referred to such animals because it is inevitable that a pet must listen to its owner. What actually describes this situation here would be speciesism, which according to Singer “does not entitle us to exploit them, and similarly the fact that other animals are less intelligent than we are does not mean that their interests be disregarded” (AE page 36). So I feel that since the author of this post compared the pet to the child, and the owner gives the child more respect even though they may have committed the same wrong this would be speciesism.
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