I’m even more disturbed by your argument in favor of what it sounds like you’d happily agree is “speciesism,” because I see no fundamental difference from an argument for nepotism or racism. Defining other beings’ ethical status by similarity to myself is a very dangerous proposition, because if my criteria change by a small degree I’ll suddenly fall in line with some of the worst people in human history. I suspect a great many well-meaning people a century ago were moved to bigotry by similar studies of the behavior and phrenology of “Negroes,” but I don’t think such data should be relevant to ethics even if they were true.

Peter Singer is a major philosophical influence in the animal-rights movement and follows the utilitarianism of Bentham, who said “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but rather, ‘Can they suffer?'” That is, the degree to which we should go out of our way to avoid harming other beings depends only on the degree to which they’re able to experience harm. I have no doubt that some animal-rights supporters do think familiarity and intelligence are the measures of ethical standing (though it might be stylish to include a few examples next time so we know you’re not talking about strawmen), but I hope in the future you’ll address this more conventional and rigorous argument. If you can be bothered to find out what “sentience” is (outside of Star Trek), it sounds like your wealth of knowledge will be very relevant, and I look forward to learning more from you.

In a non-human context, what constitutes a â??fairâ? and non-exploitative agreement is less clear because the non-human party cannot understand the agreement and also cannot accept or reject it. However, we can use the â??reasonable personâ? standard, and impute that the agreement is â??fairâ?, if a hypothetical reasonable person would agree to it under the same circumstances. Another way of determining if an agreement is â??fairâ?, is if it is a normally accepted way of doing things, in effect if it has become standard accepted practice.

Slavery is not an accepted practice because there is asymmetry of power and duress, but the enslavement of mitochondria by eukaryotes has become accepted because of its very long duration such that there is now mutual dependence. A mother may agree to enslave herself to her fetus for the duration of a pregnancy, but that enslavement is (or should be) by her free choice. It is a choice that many women choose to agree to, because they derive the benefit of having a baby that (under most circumstances) is their child.

Under severe food deprivation and metabolic stress, a postpartum mammal will commit infanticide, and sometimes cannibalism. If this event preserves the life of the mother, and enables a future reproductive event then the infant that is killed and eaten would want it to happen, if the alternative is for the mother and infant to both die. Applying a reasonable person standard to the infant, the infant would rather see its mother survive and have a future sibling than for the infant and mother (and all potential future siblings) to die. We can apply the â??reasonable personâ? standard to both parties and determine that in this extremest of extreme situations, the interests of the infant and the mother coincide.

In the context of a woman carrying a pregnancy that will kill both of them if she tries to carry it to term, the interests of the fetus and of the woman are both the same, abort the fetus, preserve the life of the woman, so that she may reproduce at a later time so that the fetus may have future siblings. That circumstance is analogous to the infanticide under metabolic stress that evolution has imprinted into all mammals. It is quite possible that some instances of natural miscarriage are due to the same type of circumstances but human physiology has internalized the cause and effect so that no conscious intervention is necessary.

If we apply a â??reasonable personâ? standard to predator-prey interactions, the reasonable predator and the reasonable prey would agree that stability of their respective species gene pool and the long term maintaining of species viability is the most important species aspiration and goal, and that any individual member of the species can be sacrificed to ensure continuity of the species. This is what the infant wants when its mother becomes infanticidal, it is not unreasonable to extend that to an entire species. Unfortunately, predator and prey species cannot self-regulate their behaviors so as to achieve stability of both species gene pools, but if they could, that is what they would both want, and over time, that is what evolution will eventually produce.

If we postulate that all organisms have a right to live and a right to personal bodily integrity so long as they do not actively harm another organism, where does that lead? A human could then plant crops and surround them by fences that other animals could not penetrate and those animals would be denied access to the food crops that the human is growing. Eventually the human population would expand and cover the entire Earth, and there would be no space for non-human animals. Humans could do this without violating the bodily integrity of any non-human organism and those non-human organisms would go extinct. The reasonable organism would find extinction unacceptable and would be willing to make reasonable accommodation to prevent extinction. The reasonable human would be willing to make a reasonable agreement with the organism to ensure the organism does not go extinct.

This agreement must benefit both parties. The organism that would go extinct would greatly benefit if humans controlled its population in a sustainable way so that it does not go extinct. What benefit can humans derive from doing so? Humans can derive benefits from consuming the flesh of organisms. Humans can derive benefits from studying organisms and deriving knowledge from their physiological processes, humans can derive benefits by testing drugs on non-human organisms. If humans sequence the organism’s DNA, the DNA can be preserved, and new organisms can be generated once humans develop the technology to do so. If humans terraform other planets and inhabit them with a biome that contains organisms from Earth, that is a very large benefit to all organisms included in the biome.

The major benefit the organisms derive is their non-extinction, and that benefit is of essentially infinite value. There are extinction events that only humans can prevent, large asteroid impacts for example. Preventing such extinction events is an infinitely large benefit to many species (including humans).

Since individual organisms are willing to sacrifice themselves to preserve the reproductive capacity of near kin, the reasonable organism will be willing to do that to preserve its species.

Provided humans are willing to prevent the extinction of a species by using a member of that species under conditions that are no worse than the organism would experience in its natural habitat, then the reasonable organism should willingly agree to such treatment. The â??prevention of extinctionâ? agreement is one of very long duration, essentially until humans are on the verge of extinction too.

In conclusion, from the postulate that all organisms have the right to life and bodily integrity I have derived a non-exploitive framework for using animals as food and experimental subjects by humans, and have laid out obligations on the part of humans that make this a mutually beneficial relationship between humans and non-human organisms.

I had just been perusing some meta-ethical readings on moral realism, congitivism, non-cognitivism, moral facts, error theory, and so on.

I guess my head was swimming with those ideas when I asked if your view on rights was similar to you view an all moral positions.

Didn’t mean to come across as insulting your moral integrity or ethical intelligence.

Cheers

But, as I said above, no so much for hominoids.