I have read the first 100 pages of this book so far and have found that some philosophical reasoning is extremely tedious. Some of the things Rowlands takes excrutiatingly long to explain seem to be not very helpful, and sometimes the joking tone he writes in is actually off putting. His combination of casual with heavily theoretical almost makes it a bit patronizing. I must admit though, going through the philisophical history of understanding animals in a moral context has brought to my attention some ideas I have not yet explored.
ROwlands starts his book by discussing Cartesian scientists, who deny that animals feel pain. He progressively shows that animals do experience pain as can be determined by behavioral, physiological, and evolutionary evidence. He proves that if we accept the idea that humans feel pain then we must also accept that animals feel pain. He adds fear and anxiety to the list of feelings, like pain, that cause suffering. The good mental states he describes are pleasure, enjoyment, and happiness. On evolutionary grounds he reasons it is rational for a being capable of experiencing bad mental states to alternately be capable of experiencing good mental states.
ROwlands makes a very important point when he discusses whether or not the human capability to think about the future and other long term existenstial issues mean humans are capable of suffering more than animals. He points out that in certain situations the lack of cognitive ability of animals means they will suffer more than humans would in a similar situation.
The moral club is the group Rowlands places beings with consciousness into- it means they deserve moral consideration.
On page 30 Rowlands details a rational method for exploiting the beliefs of your opponent and working within their frame work in order to show them how their system of beliefs actually fits with your point (assumptively that animals deserve moral consideration and some rights or whatever). This seems like a veeeery simplistic solution to the complicated relationships that different belief networks have to each other. I can see how one could manipulate Christian reasoning for instance to show that Christians ought to treat animals well, but I can also see that in some instances a persons belief system might be so distasteful that you would not want to support its logic at all (white supremacy for instance). This tactic also depends on you the arguer being essentially a one subject wonder. If you can campaign for animals by showing Christians why they ought to consider animals great, unless your other beliefs and political stances do not support a strengthening of religion as law. There is a strategic desicion than must be made- do we include animal rights with other agendas or not? ANd I think that speciesism is saying that there are real problems with promoting animal rights in ways that are disconnected from other social oppressions- for instance, many people have problems with PETA campaigns that try to get people to support animal rights and stop eating meat in ways that objectify women. So yes, PETA is working in the framework of people who expect to see flashy advertisements objectifying svelte shaven ladies, but is that tactic ultimately constructive? Long run v. short run is always a tricky balance to reach.
Manipulating people to get them to see the moral implications of their preexisting beliefs seems weird and ineffective to me. I guess, the main issue that I have is that ROwlands described this process as a hyper rationalized formula of one topic agendas. I think that the way this really happens is through conversations with people, not talking at them. Generally if you talk to a person they are not going to want to listen to you until you listen to them, and finding out what their moral beliefs are is going to take time. A lot of times people do know or at one point understood the moral implications of their systems of beliefs- it is not enough to ‘prove’ to them that they ought to consider animals’ interests morally… we all know tons of things we ‘ought’ to do. There has to be more practical ways to show them how, why, what, etc. COnnecting animals to their moral beliefs makes sense, but I think that this can be done in a more subject-matter type way. People tend to get upset if you tell them what they ought to believe or being doing based on their religion or politics- no one likes being told these things. AN approach of figuring out what these people are already active in doing- say protecting the environment, fighting for the small farmer and local community, raising kids, etc.- and then drawing connections between these activities and animals.
There are no morally relevant differences between humans and (many) non human animals- Rowlands puts this in good context by bringing it down to genetics. SPecies differences are differences in genetics. But we do not accept genes as morally relevant because we do not allow for race or gender to be morally relevant differences, and both of those are simply genetic differences. I think this is a very strong argument about speciesism.
