Is ‘speciesism’ as bad as racism or sexism?
- Thread starter Samson
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Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
there's a few way of having a relationship to the inhuman world as humans; while i didn't study it particularly as a graduate in "philosophy of nature" or whatever, i had a course about art-that-dealt-with-nature in musicology (yes, is actually relevant) that dealt with a number of ways you could value the "natural" world. i'll see if i can even remember, and organize the numerous ways... also note that i shorthand "nature" here as the world we have that are basically not us, the inhuman or the things detached from us directly (although obviously still attached in an ecosystem, of course); nature here is the world without humans, if it could be imagined.
value classes:
- nature has no value (surprisingly the rarest relation we have to nature)
- nature has current use value
- nature has potential use value
--- and within the use values, there's value of emotional value (pleasantry), economic value, and an axiomatic value of utility that deal with factors not inherently connected to sheer pleasure or making money (healthcare comes into mind)
- nature has ordered value (eg.: animals are more valuable than plants)
- nature has spiritual value to us
- nature has religious/liturgical value to us/divinity (hard for me to articulate as an atheist, but you get the point)
- nature has value in itself
i might've butchered the classes, but it's somewhere around that. been a long time since i studied this.
beside that basic organization of natural value, there's additionally the question of whether we value ourselves below, at the level of, or above it, or that we consider ourselves valueless. so you can have different forms of inherent value in nature while still having an anthropocentric (and specieist) relation to the world.
nature having value in itself is of course something we can understand, but i want to use an example here. a specific way i took up relating to the values is: often when we think value of nature, we think value of life as a bountiful ecosystem. it's often an imaginary of flourishing lifeforms, a sheer density of things that are being destroyed (such as the destruction of the amazon). businesses that market "nature" usually uses pictures of flowers and rolling fields and forests and cattle and stuff, all things related to our own order of life in a direct relational way. pro-nature people often like wolves because they're something big and directly understandable as life in an ecosystem. but that's a very "positive"-attributed way of relating to nature, locating things. a good example of value of nature that is, well, "negative"-attributed or ordered in a different way is the case of the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant in iceland. the power plant is an interesting case because it got a lot of local attention of icelandic environmentalists. so a water power plant is usually conceived as green technology, and in iceland, there isn't actually as much obvious life you are destroying, since the country's so desolate. it's not a jungle; there's not thousands of species dying out in the immediacy of the power plant being constructed. still, it got some attention, and Sigur Rós (a band some of you might know) played a concert during a protest of the dam's raising. (song & video here; the band dressed down their electric equipment save the camera and sung a eulogy for the valley being submerged.)
the reason i bring up the power plant is because it's a locus of the problem of nature having a value in itself, something that actually baffles a lot of environmentalists in general. so environmentalists are often very careful to preserve things they can relate to, and they still care about human life, so they do things like construct green energy infrastructure in desolate areas, because they're desolate, right? and it's green infrastructure, right? so green advocates can construct things like this and still be surprised when other environmentalists get miffed over such construction projects. there's a discrepancy of values here in the details, where orders of life are prioritized to some people, while others think of nature as something to be valued in itself. because even in its desolace, the sparse life of iceland is still life; and uniquely so (to the degree that whenever someone has visited iceland, one of the strengths of the island is always the sheer beauty of its landscape). so nature having value in itself can be thinking that moss, lichen, rocks, all have a place in the world completely independently of humankind. yes, even the germs.
most environmentalists like the moss, lichen, and rocks (hell, in the end, most people actually like those things, environmentalists or not, there's a reason iceland has a tourist industry), but even being an environmentalist is actually segmented into a number of value systems. it's not one thing.
anyways, thread.
specieism then comes into question as an order of values that's not very well shared in common language. it's similar to the question of environmentalism here. depending on the claim that you're specieist, specieism can mean that you don't value nature at all; it can mean that you don't attribute a particular kind of value to nature, while still attributing other classes of values; or it can be that you have an anthropocentric view of the world, regardless of the many values you attribute to nature. it all depends on the claim of specieism.
personally, i am quite the radical environmentalist (yes, i really am, and in places where people often think it's at the cost of humans); but i am still at my core brutally anthropocentric and my value system of the natural world does not really care about nature having value in itself. i believe i think nature has value in itself, but it's absolutely dwarfed by my relationship with nature as different kinds of use value to humans. i believe a healthy ecosystem is the foundation of human life, and therefore i want stuff like more forests and nonintervention; and if we've overstepped our boundaries in nature, we've simply overstepped, and things will correct their course by removing our premises for food production. i like agriculture, therefore i want agriculture to be restricted, so denmark doesn't get submerged, so agriculture (here) doesn't become impossible. i argue to restrict our industry in order to make it possible.
am i then a specieist? maybe. it depends on which class of value one would think i weren't living up to when claiming i was. there's a danish poet i know, nanna storr-hansen, who believes you can't be a proper feminist without being a radical environmentalist and being a vegan, since she views all of those movements as opposition to patriarchy. how would i measure in her worldview? i don't know. i haven't in her end heard her thoroughly articulate what she thinks of my position, all i've got is my more loose discussions with her, and her poetry, which is, in the end, ephemereal to outlining her worldview.
but i do not think specieism is as bad as racism (or sexism, or whatever). because i value humans above animals.
still, i don't think this is a blank check for animal cruelty. just because something isn't as bad as something else doesn't mean we should freely do it. the ways our research & industry is organized right now is not just cruel to feeling things (ordered as a class about say lichen), it's absolutely horrendously stupid to safeguard our own presence on this planet.
i also think the appeal that specieism being as bad as racism isn't very rhetorically sound (besides personally feeling it is wrong). in things environmentalist, we have to carefully maneuver making on-the-line people kneejerk, so it's not a pragmatic appeal. even if you want to do away with specieism, you have to maneuver your language in ways that you can actually push through policy. this is, of course, a pragmatic appeal, moreso than me personally wanting to do away with specieism. i think there's plenty of arguments to safeguard lichen beyond arguments against specieism.
value classes:
- nature has no value (surprisingly the rarest relation we have to nature)
- nature has current use value
- nature has potential use value
--- and within the use values, there's value of emotional value (pleasantry), economic value, and an axiomatic value of utility that deal with factors not inherently connected to sheer pleasure or making money (healthcare comes into mind)
- nature has ordered value (eg.: animals are more valuable than plants)
- nature has spiritual value to us
- nature has religious/liturgical value to us/divinity (hard for me to articulate as an atheist, but you get the point)
- nature has value in itself
i might've butchered the classes, but it's somewhere around that. been a long time since i studied this.
beside that basic organization of natural value, there's additionally the question of whether we value ourselves below, at the level of, or above it, or that we consider ourselves valueless. so you can have different forms of inherent value in nature while still having an anthropocentric (and specieist) relation to the world.
nature having value in itself is of course something we can understand, but i want to use an example here. a specific way i took up relating to the values is: often when we think value of nature, we think value of life as a bountiful ecosystem. it's often an imaginary of flourishing lifeforms, a sheer density of things that are being destroyed (such as the destruction of the amazon). businesses that market "nature" usually uses pictures of flowers and rolling fields and forests and cattle and stuff, all things related to our own order of life in a direct relational way. pro-nature people often like wolves because they're something big and directly understandable as life in an ecosystem. but that's a very "positive"-attributed way of relating to nature, locating things. a good example of value of nature that is, well, "negative"-attributed or ordered in a different way is the case of the Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Plant in iceland. the power plant is an interesting case because it got a lot of local attention of icelandic environmentalists. so a water power plant is usually conceived as green technology, and in iceland, there isn't actually as much obvious life you are destroying, since the country's so desolate. it's not a jungle; there's not thousands of species dying out in the immediacy of the power plant being constructed. still, it got some attention, and Sigur Rós (a band some of you might know) played a concert during a protest of the dam's raising. (song & video here; the band dressed down their electric equipment save the camera and sung a eulogy for the valley being submerged.)
the reason i bring up the power plant is because it's a locus of the problem of nature having a value in itself, something that actually baffles a lot of environmentalists in general. so environmentalists are often very careful to preserve things they can relate to, and they still care about human life, so they do things like construct green energy infrastructure in desolate areas, because they're desolate, right? and it's green infrastructure, right? so green advocates can construct things like this and still be surprised when other environmentalists get miffed over such construction projects. there's a discrepancy of values here in the details, where orders of life are prioritized to some people, while others think of nature as something to be valued in itself. because even in its desolace, the sparse life of iceland is still life; and uniquely so (to the degree that whenever someone has visited iceland, one of the strengths of the island is always the sheer beauty of its landscape). so nature having value in itself can be thinking that moss, lichen, rocks, all have a place in the world completely independently of humankind. yes, even the germs.
most environmentalists like the moss, lichen, and rocks (hell, in the end, most people actually like those things, environmentalists or not, there's a reason iceland has a tourist industry), but even being an environmentalist is actually segmented into a number of value systems. it's not one thing.
anyways, thread.
specieism then comes into question as an order of values that's not very well shared in common language. it's similar to the question of environmentalism here. depending on the claim that you're specieist, specieism can mean that you don't value nature at all; it can mean that you don't attribute a particular kind of value to nature, while still attributing other classes of values; or it can be that you have an anthropocentric view of the world, regardless of the many values you attribute to nature. it all depends on the claim of specieism.
personally, i am quite the radical environmentalist (yes, i really am, and in places where people often think it's at the cost of humans); but i am still at my core brutally anthropocentric and my value system of the natural world does not really care about nature having value in itself. i believe i think nature has value in itself, but it's absolutely dwarfed by my relationship with nature as different kinds of use value to humans. i believe a healthy ecosystem is the foundation of human life, and therefore i want stuff like more forests and nonintervention; and if we've overstepped our boundaries in nature, we've simply overstepped, and things will correct their course by removing our premises for food production. i like agriculture, therefore i want agriculture to be restricted, so denmark doesn't get submerged, so agriculture (here) doesn't become impossible. i argue to restrict our industry in order to make it possible.
am i then a specieist? maybe. it depends on which class of value one would think i weren't living up to when claiming i was. there's a danish poet i know, nanna storr-hansen, who believes you can't be a proper feminist without being a radical environmentalist and being a vegan, since she views all of those movements as opposition to patriarchy. how would i measure in her worldview? i don't know. i haven't in her end heard her thoroughly articulate what she thinks of my position, all i've got is my more loose discussions with her, and her poetry, which is, in the end, ephemereal to outlining her worldview.
but i do not think specieism is as bad as racism (or sexism, or whatever). because i value humans above animals.
still, i don't think this is a blank check for animal cruelty. just because something isn't as bad as something else doesn't mean we should freely do it. the ways our research & industry is organized right now is not just cruel to feeling things (ordered as a class about say lichen), it's absolutely horrendously stupid to safeguard our own presence on this planet.
i also think the appeal that specieism being as bad as racism isn't very rhetorically sound (besides personally feeling it is wrong). in things environmentalist, we have to carefully maneuver making on-the-line people kneejerk, so it's not a pragmatic appeal. even if you want to do away with specieism, you have to maneuver your language in ways that you can actually push through policy. this is, of course, a pragmatic appeal, moreso than me personally wanting to do away with specieism. i think there's plenty of arguments to safeguard lichen beyond arguments against specieism.
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We do that every day (ham sandwich, anyone? Sausage is one of my favorite pizza toppings).
Regarding animal research: I have to sort out where I stand on that. If it's for a frivolous reason (ie. testing cosmetics), it's bad.
But insulin is what I need to stay alive. I inject myself with it every day. And it's thanks to pigs that this discovery was made.
The closest I've ever come to understanding this has been when I've either been watching an aurora (indigenous spiritual beliefs) or hiking through the temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island.
As for music and nature... the natural world has all kinds of music associated with it, and I don't just mean birdsong, animal vocalizations, or whatever it is that whales and dolphins are talking about.
Plains-Cow
Best Resource; Always Wins
No hurt cow, pls.
Nawt to worry, cheezburgers come from real cows, not cows who post on CFC.
Seriously, though... if everyone stopped consuming farm animals (or what they provide without having to die), what part would they play in the ecosystem? If cow-emancipation happened tomorrow, what would we do with all those suddenly-free and legally protected cows?
I currently sport a cow valve!
GenMarshall
High Elven ISB Capt & Ghost Agent
Ask me when we make first contact with sentient aliens from another solar system.
Narz
keeping it real
We could eat all the currently enslaved animals & then not breed them anymore & they would simply die out.
IIRC, most of the factory farmed animals we eat are so warped biologically that they wouldn't survive on their own, they are bred to produce maximum flesh & profit for those who sell them. Wild chickens & cows would carry on living as normal & in the space where all the factory farms existed we could build vertical farms & animal holocaust museums for future generations.
Any animals that suffers solely for the purpose of human enjoyment (including dogs w smushed faces that have respiratory problems but look cute) should not be bred.
Joij21
🔥Deny, Defend, Depose!🔥
Umm, we eat animals. So we sort of have to be speciest. Unless we were cannibals but then we'd be murdering humans.
But I mean I guess it's bad to abuse animals, but like even when treated well they shouldn't have rights exactly like us. Like preventing dogfights, cockfights, etc is good.
I guess it gets more controversial when it comes to how food animals are treated in the feedlot and slaughterhouse because policies against such would have an impact on food inflation. You and I all know how prices we're impacted since the pandemic.
But I mean I guess it's bad to abuse animals, but like even when treated well they shouldn't have rights exactly like us. Like preventing dogfights, cockfights, etc is good.
I guess it gets more controversial when it comes to how food animals are treated in the feedlot and slaughterhouse because policies against such would have an impact on food inflation. You and I all know how prices we're impacted since the pandemic.
I think Peter Singer would say we have the option of going vegan rather than going cannibal.
banzay13
King
Narz
keeping it real
Pretty sure pig is already asking you not to
banzay13
King
We are not at this stage of development to discuss specieism. imho
There were times when human life was worthless, then there were times when it began to be worth something, then times when human life was worth a few cows (or vice versa), then people of one race became worth more than another, and there were times when we simply destroyed people of another race.
But it is a progressive process that goes on in time (although it happens to go in the opposite direction. The most recent example is ISIS. How the territory of the Islamic State has fallen into a state of dark medievalism in the 21st century). And it has to do with the development of science and technology. Some time will pass and people will learn to understand the language of animals (and possibly plants), technology will be such - that there will be no need for severe exploitation of nature in a broad sense (ITER, at least). Then mankind will be ready to translate this question into practice. In the meantime, I'm reminded of a scene in the movie (5 minutes from the beginning) Cloud Atlas, where they discuss the racial theory. (The book is much better, by the way, and it has no happy ending at all.)
That is, of course, if we do not destroy everything on Earth. Or AI will not do it)) Or the Matrix doesn't get shut down.
banzay13
King
Not necessarily. When you catch a chicken and slit its neck in your backyard (farm), the bird is frightened and most likely understands that death awaits it. A cow, on the other hand, is not even that frightened - she probably doesn't expect that from a human, because she has been living with him for a long time (a year at least, and he is her breadwinner and protector). But on the poultry farm, it's different. The chickens don't run away, they don't fight back. They just don't understand. They calmly let themselves be tied up and hung on the line. That's what I assume from my experience.
Joij21
🔥Deny, Defend, Depose!🔥
Or we just continue to discriminate against animals like we always have done with a few exceptions (BUT NO BESTIALITY).
Good to know that you are conversant with the thinking of cows and chickens. How many cows and chickens have you owned, raised or spent time with?
banzay13
King
None. I'm a city dweller. But I have relatives in the country. And as a child spent a couple of months there repeatedly almost every year. Herding cows, making hay, cleaning the corral, cleaning up after the animals...
But I slaughtered a couple of chickens myself. And a couple of times I took part in the slaughtering of a cow. The most unpleasant thing is, of course, the smell of blood. At the poultry farm that smell was somehow less annoying.
At least you have a small bit of experience!
Narz
keeping it real
If you keep human slaves from birth you could probably train them to accept death quietly also
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