Nathan P Origer — April 30, 2008 at 4:22 pm

““Any species came to be what it is now because of all sorts of interaction in the past,” he said.”

Didn’t these interactions occur in the wild, rather than as the result of deliberate “scientific” “playing God”?

Josh — April 30, 2008 at 6:21 pm

I disagree that human ethics includes principles like ‘don’t torture animals’. I wish that it did. However, it’s not a principle our society subscribes to, given that animals are grossly mistreated and reared for their flesh: animals raised for food are exempted from cruelty laws that apply to pets, even of the same species. The law requires that animals be tortured in order supposedly to establish the safety of consumer products and ingredients of them (see: LD50 and Draize tests). And we freely experiment on and kill millions of mammals a year in laboratories.

All this cruelty–and even the killing–would be unconscionable if we thought that animals had the same faculties that we do. For most philosophers and cognitive scientists, it is axiomatic that humans are different (as you write, “our ethics are human ethics because we are human beings”). If however, humans could breed with chimpanzees, it might very well establish that humans are much more like other animals than we might like to think.

If one is at all concerned about the way humans act toward non-human animals, then this would be a noble experiment indeed.

P.S. It also makes no sense to say that ‘don’t torture animals’ is a valid principle only if one considers the effect on the torturer. Of course it’s bad for the torturer, and that’s enough to make it wrong. But the effect on the animals is enough to make it wrong to torture them. On what basis do you exclude the effect on the animal?

Jesse M. — April 30, 2008 at 7:12 pm

principles like this collapse if torturing animals is bad only, or primarily, from the perspective of the animals being tortured. Torturing animals violates human ethics because it’s bad for the humans doing the torturing.

So to be clear, if we met a species of intelligent aliens, you would say that torturing them is not bad because of the harm it causes to them, but only because of the harm it causes to the human torturers? Philosophically, it seems rather absurd to base one’s morality on shared genetics alone, rather than some broader and more abstract characteristics; if moral principles are thought to be objective and timeless, whatever moral principles we adopt now must be ones that were already valid before the contingent process of evolution which shaped human DNA.

Spine — April 30, 2008 at 7:18 pm

“Torturing animals violates human ethics because it’s bad for the humans doing the torturing.”

Unless it’s for food–then it’s okay. There’s no time for ethics on a slaughterhouse kill line. Profits are at stake.

James Poulos — April 30, 2008 at 8:54 pm

Nathan: yes.

Josh: one harsh example is the difference between making a calf suffer for veal versus making a calf suffer for kicks. Taking pain at face value doesn’t get us the traction we need for rigorous ethical thinking (or so I’d argue). Indeed, Nietzsche, Freud, and others have shown how relative the experience of suffering can be and is. That doesn’t mean that we ought to ignore cries of pain. It just isn’t enough, for ethical purposes, to stop the analysis there.

Jesse: only insofar as torturing is a bad thing to do — versus simply a bad thing to experience — can we make a powerful ethical argument against torture. There are lots of experiences we don’t want to have which nonetheless can be neutral or even beneficial experiences. If you take the torturer out of the moral calculus, it becomes impossible to make an intelligible account of cruelty, for instance. I’d submit that torture is always situated in particular experiences; there is no such thing as torture in the abstract. Thinking this way gives us a glimpse of how talking about torture in the abstract actually feeds justifications for torture by abstracting the relationship between torturer and tortured right out of consciousness — or repressing it, anyway.

And that, in turn, suggests something about the difference between timeless, objective moral and ethical principles and abstract ones. The problem with abstract moral thinking is it requires us to invent or appropriate rhetorical commonplaces and try to account for real life in terms which have no inherent (as academics say) ‘truth value’. The alternative involves beginning with the particular details of life as it’s lived among real persons — complete with our shared stories, experiences, and interrelationships — and working upward to generalize, not abstract, their meaning into principles that have grown organically out of our traditions, histories, and unelective affinities.

And some secular humanists might not find it that absurd to define ‘the human’ genetically. What other yardstick is there? At any rate, although being human isn’t just a matter of genetics, human genes — as opposed to, say, marmoset genes — are a constitutive and unique part of what it means to be human. Human genes, in short, are a necessary, but not sufficient, component of any adequate description of humanness.

Brendan Moran — April 30, 2008 at 8:54 pm

There is no such thing as a universal set of human ethics. If there were such a thing, it wouldn’t be dependent on some ill-defined mystical sense of holistic, inviolate human identity.

There is no rational basis for any set of ethics which holds such a sense of inviolate innate human nature to be self-evident and incontrovertible. On the contrary, all you’re really saying is “You can’t do that because… well, *because*.” There’s nothing there other than a vague sense of unarticulated, unjustified squeamishness.

Plainly put, the bioluddite position you’re advocating has no ethical work, but is instead basically the same fear of the unknown, the same anti-intellectualism, the same knee-jerk know-nothingism which is arguably humanity’s least appealing trait. You’re basically in the same boat as the redneck who hates homosexuals because they make him feel icky.

You don’t like it because you don’t like it, and you throw up a bunch of empty verbiage to dress up that sense of unease and disapproval as something with more intellectual or ethical weight, but no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig of your own ignorance, it’s still not kissable.

James Poulos — April 30, 2008 at 8:57 pm

PS Spine - just to be clear, I fully recognize that torturing animals even for flavor and profit ethically wrong for humans. The issue is what torturing an animal in the context of preparing it to be eaten means. Here there is room for argument, with reasonably clear-cut cases on either side. The key I think is that it’s the moral and ethical argument against making, say, veal that will, if anything, win the day — not an attempt to ban the practice through politics. The former approach fosters the kind of discussion we’re having now. The latter approach, I submit, tends to shut it down.

James Poulos — April 30, 2008 at 8:59 pm

PPS remember there are also instances in which the animals-to-food industry could AVOID torturing animals yet still be unable to prepare them for eating in a manner that isn’t revolting to our human ethics. For instance: bulldozing around dead cows. Or the mere machinery of mass slaughter itself. That I think is where the rubber really hits the road in terms of the philosophy of contemporary human-animal relations.

Jesse M. — April 30, 2008 at 9:52 pm

James Poulos, you didn’t answer my question about the intelligent aliens; it wasn’t a rhetorical question, I was asking it because I’m genuinely trying to understand the ethical principles you’re operating on. You say “some secular humanists might not find it that absurd to define ‘the human’ genetically”, but I imagine you’d find relatively few secular humanists who’d say that intelligent aliens should occupy a lower rung on the ethical ladder simply by virtue of not sharing our glorious human DNA. And if we are defining ethics in terms of shared genetics, what argument would you make against a white supremacist who believes that he owes moral duties only to members of his own race?

John — May 1, 2008 at 2:02 pm

I’m with you on the sources of the wrongness of torture, James, but I don’t think your attempt at a principle that rules out humanzees manages to do the trick. There doesn’t seem to me to be any “making humans less human” involved in this research: rather, what they’re doing is making *new* creatures with human parents but non-human traits. That said, I still think it’s wrong, though I don’t think that we need to come up with a “principle” in order to show that. More here, if you want.

John — May 1, 2008 at 7:44 pm

* Sorry, I should have said, “what they’re doing is making *new* creatures each of which has a human parent but non-human traits”.

Hugh V McLachlan — May 26, 2008 at 5:13 pm

‘I shouldn’t need to say this, and it’s quite horrific that any professor of philosophy should need it explained, but the ethical principle behind keeping the human species pure holds that our ethics are human ethics because we are human beings.’

This is drivel. It makes no sense. You have not specified any ethical principle that is infringed by the proposed research. I do not say that there is none. However, if there is such a principle, what is it?

The arguments against the creation of mixed species animals sound similar to the sorts of arguments that have been used in South Africa in the past to attack sex between blacks and non-blacks, i.e. it is unnatural, it is gainst the will of God and can result in the creation of sub-human beings.