Are Humans More Equal Than Other Animals? An Evolutionary Argument Against Exclusively Human Dignity

  • PDF / 374,785 Bytes
  • 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
  • 79 Downloads / 255 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


Are Humans More Equal Than Other Animals? An Evolutionary Argument Against Exclusively Human Dignity Rainer Ebert 1,2 Received: 22 October 2019 / Accepted: 4 March 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract Secular arguments for equal and exclusively human worth generally tend to follow one of two strategies. One, which has recently gained renewed attention because of a novel argument by S. Matthew Liao, aims to directly ground worth in an intrinsic property that all humans have in common, whereas the other concedes that there is no morally relevant intrinsic difference between all humans and all other animals, and instead appeals to the membership of all humans in a special kind. In this article, I argue that both strategies necessitate drawing a line that is both arbitrary and implausibly opens a moral gulf between individuals whose difference from one another in terms of empirical reality is entirely unremarkable, providing reasons to reject them that go beyond the standard objections in the literature. I conclude that, if all humans are to be included in the community of equals, we must lay to rest the idea that we can do so without also including a wide range of non-human animals. Keywords Human dignity . Moral status . Egalitarianism . Moral equality . Liao

The belief that each human being has equal intrinsic worth or dignity, and hence ought to be treated with equal respect, is likely one of the most widely held moral beliefs, and has found frequent expression in the law. At the same time, it is likewise widely believed that non-human animals lack such worth and are not our moral equals. Philosophers who think that the equal worth of all humans, to the exclusion of all non-human animals, would have to be based on an intrinsic difference in developed cognitive capacity, such as rationality,

* Rainer Ebert [email protected]; http://www.rainerebert.com

1

Department of Philosophy, APK Campus, University of Johannesburg, P.O. Box 524, Auckland Park, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa

2

Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, College of Humanities, University of Dar es Salaam, P.O. Box 35158, University Hill Post Office, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Philosophia

have long been skeptical about whether this pair of beliefs can be coherently held. As Jeremy Bentham (1789: 143) already noted in the eighteenth century, “a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old.” Not everyone, however, shares this skepticism (George and Gómez-Lobo 2002; Gómez-Lobo 2002; Kass 2002, 2008; Kumar 2008; Lee and George 2008a, b; Rolston 2008; Sulmasy 2008; Liao 2010; Lee 2013; Kagan 2016).1 Modern secular arguments for equal and exclusively human worth generally tend to follow one of two strategies. One strategy is committed to moral individualism and, accordingly, seeks to identify an intrinsic property that is necessary for membership in the human species and at the same time sufficient for full moral status. The s

Data Loading...