Peter Singer and I Agree on One Thing: Violence
Dear Colleagues:
Peter Singer recently posted the following Tweet in response to the receipt by a UCLA vivisector of razor blades allegedly infected with contaminated blood:
Ugh…how will this help the animals? All it does is give the animal movement the worst possible image. http://tinyurl.com/27xmlkr
12:14 PM Nov 24th via web
I agree with Singer that violence like this provides a negative image of the animal movement and I think the problem is more complicated than just public image. Putting aside any general moral problem with violence, the UCLA antic simply makes no sense. Sure, the UCLA vivisector is unjustifiably exploiting animals. But so is anyone who uses animals, including those who consume animal products. There is really no principled way to distinguish those who engage in vivisection and those who consume any meat, dairy, or other animal products, including “happy” ones. Are those who promote violence willing to regard their grandparents, who cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving, as a proper target of violence? Are they willing to treat their family members or friends who eat ice cream or drink milk, “as “exploiter scum” who are the legitimate targets of violence? No, of course not.
The only way the problem of animal exploitation will be solved is through shifting the paradigm away from property and toward personhood, and that is not going to happen–we will never find our moral compass here–as long as we consume animal products. It certainly is never going to happen as the result of violence. If social thinking and public demand for animal use remains the same, nothing will ever change. If you close ten slaughterhouses today and demand remains the same, ten more will open tomorrow or ten existing ones will expand production capacity. For more on this topic, see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and listen to my Commentary on the subject. I also discuss this topic in my new book, The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation?, which was published in November 2010 by Columbia University Press.
So although Singer and I disagree concerning just about every other issue in animal ethics, I am glad that we agree on the important issue of violence. I hope sincerely that Singer is not the subject of threats and defamatory attacks such as those aimed at me because I have been vocal in my condemnation of violence.
The animal rights movement makes sense only as a movement of peace and nonviolence. Gandhi said:
We must become the change we want to see in the world.
If we want to see a world in which there is no violence against the most vulnerable, we must ourselves become non-violent and present our views in a non-violent way. Non-violence begins with our own veganism and our use of creative, non-violent ways to educate others about veganism.
If you are not vegan, go vegan. It’s easy; it’s better for your health and for the planet. But, most important, it’s the morally right thing to do. Veganism is nonviolence in action.
If you are vegan, then spend as much time as you are able to engaged in creative, non-violent vegan education.
The World is Vegan! If you want it.
Gary L. Francione
©2010 Gary L. Francione
Related posts:
- Peter Singer, Happy Meat, and Fanatical Vegans
- Peter Singer Supports Vivisection: Why Are You Surprised?
- Peter Singer and the Welfarist Position on the Lesser Value of Nonhuman Life
- More on Violence and Animal Rights
- Commentary #5: On Violence
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Unless you live in a vegan bubble, violence is vivisection.
How much weekly allowance is the wife allowing these days, Gary?
CAA is a proverbial wolf in sheepskin.
Prof. Francione would do well to prep on the finer points of science . Animal experimenters will use an ethics debate to indirectly sanction their myths, if they show.
An olive branch is not always an olive branch.
No compromise on total abolition of animal use.
Mr. Ringach, you elude Professor Francione's earnest attempts to elicit straight answers from you. The long thread at 'Peter Singer and I Agree on One Thing: Violence' proves this is a legitimate concern. You had the audacity to accuse Professor Francione of a desire to control everything when it's you yourself who tries to do so. You rejected the podcast because it is immediate. Professor Francione has answered your questions in a forthright manner despite the inane hypotheticals you posed. You had the gall to tell him he asked you the wrong questions and again dismiss his legitimate questions! Your unprofessional maneuvers demonstrate what we can expect should you change your mind and accept Professor Francione's offer for the podcast and follow through without backing out at the last minute. I'm saddened by your maneuvers. You waste Professor Francione's valuable time. Please don't placate us under the guise of civility. It's demeaning to yourself and those of us who work in earnest to end violence in the world.
I am available as early as March to visit Prof. Francione at Rutgers. Soon enough?
Thank you for the reply. As for your eagerness to visit the campus, that is between Professor Francione and you. I hope in the spirit of transparency that everything will be made available to the public. I hope impartial third party moderators will preside over a debate, should that be the agreed upon format. The hypothetical demise of the world questions you presently pose to Professor Francione take the discussion away from a pragmatic reality. No one has absolute knowledge what s/he will do under duress and in extreme circumstances that have yet to occur. I urge you to reconsider Professor Francione's offer to join him on a podcast. It's a fair medium. Your misgivings are unfounded. Professor Francione's approach is commendable. An unedited podcast via Skype gives the public the opportunity to review an enlightening exchange. Should one run for political office, I'd not object to speeches. However, when ethics and/or science are at hand, speeches are impractical. A debate on Opposing Views would serve no more purpose than a debate in The National Enquirer. I sincerely look forward to an authentic exchange between you and Professor Francione in a more formal setting.
"As for your eagerness to visit the campus, that is between Professor Francione and you. I hope in the spirit of transparency that everything will be made available to the public"
Lena,
I hope so too. As you know I offered to participate with the unedited video proceeding made public.
"The hypothetical demise of the world questions you presently pose to Professor Francione take the discussion away from a pragmatic reality. No one has absolute knowledge what s/he will do under duress and in extreme circumstances that have yet to occur."
These extreme scenarios are normally used to test the self-consistency of moral theories. The marginal cases Prof. Francione brings up (such as experimenting in the cognitively impaired) are also extreme situations and another instance of the kind of thought experiments that are are prevalent in moral philosophy.
"A debate on Opposing Views would serve no more purpose than a debate in The National Enquirer."
I hope you agree the exchange, as limited as it was, has served to clarify some of our differences.
"I sincerely look forward to an authentic exchange between you and Professor Francione in a more formal setting."
I am not sure why you think the exchange we are having now is not "authentic". The information is there for the public to evaluate and form their own opinions. In any case, I cannot think of a more formal setting than a university conference.
Mr. Ringach, the informal exchange between you and Professor Francione clarified many things. Character assassination is violence. Your latest statements about Professor Francione's perspective have been illuminating, i.e. “The moral status of a mouse must equal that of a rock or a human”. No logical person, even Professor Francione's detractors, would make such a statement after s/he has read his work. Should his reactions be brusque, it's only that he has reached the limits of all patience. You persist to ask him questions that have little logic. When he refuses to yield the answer you desire, you bludgeon him with more absurdities. Professor Francione is not spiteful. He simply can't agree with an absurdity.
Experiments on cognitively impaired people is not an unreasonable hypothetical, nor extreme. Consider the unethical human experiments throughout history that have occurred. As you know, a university conference is quite different from a formal debate. The public is not interested in more speeches. In addition you said - “In my view, some experiments may be morally justified in mice but not justified in monkeys”. You allow a person to agree or disagree, but s/he must first accept your premise. Professor Francione is not evasive or personally dismissive of you but, as he should, ignores illogical premises.
The problem is many of us find fault with the erroneous premise that animal experiments are applicable to human anatomy in relation to illnesses and drug interactions. Please don't move the burden of proof that belongs to you to Professor Francione or any of us. You have offered no reasonable ethical and scientific position for what you describe as research on animals. We only requested concrete evidence. The public has spoken, and to maintain an illogical position you must choose to be deaf. You made clear that your lack of a valid ethical and scientific position is your position. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION AND INVALUABLE ASSISTANCE TO PROVE PROFESSOR FRANCIONE CORRECT.
Thank you, Jerry Vlasak, for your participation and unique perspective. As you have said to Professor Francione, each of us must follow his/her own path. I respect this. All of us can't agree about everything but we can find common ground in our goal to live more thoughtfully with the earth and to be of help to all animals.
Lena,
Unfortunately, it is apparent you have not read his writings closely enough.
In his theory the only property that matters is sentience. Once you cross a threshold for sentience your moral status is the same as that of a human. Tom Regan has the same opinion, although his criterion is one he calls subject-of-a-life.
So yes, the obvious consequence of such position is that any living being you pick either has the same moral status of a rock or a human. There is no middle ground in such theories. That’s his view. If you pay attention has not deny it.
If you disagree with the conclusion let me break it to you -- you disagree with Francione’s theory too.
“The problem is many of us find fault with the erroneous premise that animal experiments are applicable to human anatomy in relation to illnesses and drug interactions.”
So now you are saying you don’t object animal experimentation due to ethical concerns but due to scientific ones. This is a different topic indeed. I presume you are one of Dr. Greek’s supporters even though you can’t articulate the arguments yourself?
“Thank you, Jerry Vlasak, for your participation and unique perspective. As you have said to Professor Francione, each of us must follow his/her own path. I respect this.”
So you endorse violence too. How can you support Francione and Vlasak at the same time? There is no logic whatsoever in your position.
You are not Lena for Peace. Not for Peace at all.
It seems to me that you are conflating two questions by equivocating on the meaning of the phrase "moral status." One question is whether an entity is of the sort that makes it morally relevant in any way. The second is the question of the sort of treatment that its moral status requires. This is how you can caricature the position with your description that all living things either have the moral status of rocks or humans.
One might hold that sentience comes in degrees of complexity, yet still hold that there is a threshold that "triggers" the moral status of personhood. One might even hold that things outside the threshold have some moral significance despite not having rights. But, all of this is beside the point. The disagreement as I understand it between you and Francione is that Francione holds that once the threshold is reached an entity possesses a set of fundamental rights that are identical to the fundamental rights that human beings have, while you assert that there may be some moral consideration owed to non-human animals but that it is weaker and can be trumped by human interests (at least, the interest in perhaps finding cures for perhaps yet to exist sufferers of various maladies).
It seems to me that there are two avenues open here. Either a version of Warren's "weak rights view" or a weaker view that creates some sort of thin moral status, something like I take Cohen to hold.
I would argue that the problem with the weak rights view is that it wouldn't support the vast majority of experiments on animals, which unlike the tiresome hypothetical (kill one mouse for eternal life?) are compromised, among other reasons, by their shear moral recklessness. It is as though we started to randomly execute dogs because it might at some point save some lives by preventing a few incidences of rabies, and then tried to justify it with the the hypothetical, "If you could save one person from being bitten by a rabid dog by killing that dog would you?" I would argue that even on the weak rights view such a program would fail to be justified (though rat culling would be an interesting case to think about here, since the claim might be made that the circumstances could rise to a level of "self-defense" of a population from a health risk). Even if on this view, we might be justified in killing a snake in order to create anti-venom to save someone's life, it is unlikely that the recklessness of contemporary modern biomedical research could be defended (imposing severe harms on many animals for the slim possibility of discovering something that has a slim possibility of perhaps contributing to the possibility of benefit to some indeterminate human being).
You need to weaken moral protections further than that in order to be able to justify using animals as instruments for pursuit of human interests, and at that point, if we hold this sort of view, there is little reason to think that humane protections for animals do anything other than allow scientists to preen about how they experiment responsibly on animals. The moral protections hardly deserve the name on this view, they're largely PR.
I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to the idea that the harms we can reasonably and morally impose on some animals (such as mice) would be travesties if imposed on other animals (such as the monkeys, I believe you have worked with). But for the same reason that I think that there are some harms that I can impose upon my companion animals that I could not impose upon my child. I think that this can be made consistent with the claim that there are some harms that it is simply wrong to impose on either child or dog and monkey or mouse.
I too hope that you accept Francione's invitation, it would be very illuminating.
By "Moral status" I mean that they are beings deserving moral considerability. No doubt that animals have moral status. But, Francione says that they deserve equal consideration to normal humans. I disagree.
We have a different view on what goes on in the laboratories, for what purpose, and if it can be justified or not. Certainly "randomly executing dogs" is not what I consider scientific research to be.
In any case, what you propose is exactly the kind of national dialogue that is needed to form guidelines as to what kind of experiments we (society) thinks it would be justified in various species. I welcome just discussion. It is the only reasonable way for society to resolve these issues.