Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals are entitled to the possession of their own existence and that their most basic interests—such as the need to avoid suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Broadly speaking, and particularly in popular discourse, the term “animal rights” is often used Soal essay tentang kasus pelanggaran ham dalam perspektif pancasila raksha bandhan easy essay in hindi peter singer animal liberation essay. Essay writing phrases english essay on man jeete jag jeet living in the city vs suburbs essay Oct 08, · Differences in Views Philosophy. Plato and Aristotle differed in philosophical thought based on their conceptions of universality. Plato believed that all objects of the universe have a universal form (Allen et al., )
The most dangerous man in the world | Life and style | The Guardian
He is a Nazi, a reincarnation of Hitler's deputy Martin Bormann, a baby killer, a peter singer animal liberation essay hypocrite, and an enemy of civilisation. He even wants to get rid of the Ten Commandments. He has been howled down in Germany and denounced as "Professor Death" by the Wall Street Journal. His appointment has become an issue in the US Presidential election.
His very presence on American soil has been greeted by blockades and boycott campaigns from disabled-rights groups, Christians and good old-fashioned liberals.
He is also a bespectacled, softly-spoken year-old Australian with wispy hair and bad dress sense. His name is Peter Singer and he is, in the words of his enemies, "the most dangerous man in the world today". That's quite a description for an academic philosopher from an obscure university, Monash, in Western Australia. But Singer's appointment to Princeton University's Professorship of Bioethics has detonated an academic bomb right in the quad of one of America's most prestigious Ivy League universities, provoking a thousand hostile editorials and a firestorm of rage in the American establishment.
The US Presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a Princeton Trustee and alumnus whose family has given many millions to his alma materdeclared he would withhold all future donations. The appointment of Singer, declared the Wall Street Journal in an editorial, peter singer animal liberation essay us to wonder by what criteria Princeton might exclude a Nazi or Japanese scholar who saw nothing wrong in the medical experiments on prisoners of war and targeted populations during World War II.
The venom of Singer's critics straddles the globe. Already we allow the killing of the infant in his mother's womb. But Peter Singer wants to take it one step further. He wants to justify the killing of the infant outside the womb, in the rocking chair.
But like some ancient Stoic philosopher demanding more punishment, Singer appears to thrive on the antagonism he generates. And that segment feels in some sense of crisis because it has lost some important battles, notably the abortion battle.
I state my opposition to that viewpoint more bluntly than most people do. This is a society that does need to hear some of the things I've got to say. Peter singer animal liberation essay not hard to understand why some people might hate Peter Singer. He believes humans are no different from animals; a chimp could have a greater right to life than a human infant. And sometimes killing human babies, peter singer animal liberation essay, he argues, peter singer animal liberation essay, is the right thing to do.
Singer's first day as a Princeton lecturer in late September this year was marked by a mass wheelchair blockade of the main university building by the Not Dead Yet disabled-rights group. Chanting, "Children Have Rights I want Singer Terminated - CHRIST - and "We love our crippled lives," the strong protest group, with six television crews in tow, peter singer animal liberation essay, brought Princeton's classes to a standstill.
There were 14 arrests. Along with their chants, peter singer animal liberation essay, the Not Dead Yet group also held up placards denouncing Singer's philosophy: "No one should have to prove their personhood.
It was a clever slogan; the definition of "personhood" is a key concept in Singer's work. But the philosopher was stony faced. Humour is not one of his strong points. Then you would have to say something about why the anencephalic human being is a person and a fully intact chimpanzee is not. Yes, I know that the word 'person' is in common use, and I know that I am trying to shift it by suggesting that non-human animals could be 'persons' and that some humans might not be 'persons'.
But that is a way of getting people involved in species membership. Peter singer animal liberation essay try and get them to break this automatic nexus between species membership and moral status.
Inpeter singer animal liberation essay, Singer published Animal Liberation, denouncing homo sapiens' tyranny over animals. Born in patriotic, steak-loving Australia, Singer's own conversion to the animal-rights cause came famously in the cafeteria queue at Oxford University, somewhere near the spaghetti bolognese counter, when some English postgraduate friends refused the meat sauce on the moral ground that it was wrong to kill animals.
Singer was mystified - then fascinated. Within two months, Singer, then an Oxford philosophy postgraduate, and his wife, Renata, had converted to vegetarianism, then veganism - foregoing dairy products or the wearing of wool or leather, peter singer animal liberation essay. Singer is not some gushing pet lover; he made it clear in the book that he did not particularly like animals.
But Animal Liberation is full of vivid descriptions of humanity's cruelty to animals. It attacks the institutional cruelties we impose on animals through the five-battery-chickens-to-a-cage factory-farming methods we use to produce cheap meat or the inject-it-into-the rabbit's-eyes-and-see-if-it-hurts school of cosmetic product testing, peter singer animal liberation essay. It was in these angry pages that Singer coined the term "speciesism", akin to racism, to describe humanity's arbitrary discrimination against other non-human animals.
As a political treatise, Animal Liberation has had enormous influence. It has sold half-a-million copies and has become the bible of the animal-rights movement. Every time you meet a militant vegetarian you are meeting a disciple of Peter Singer. Its ideas are regurgitated daily across a million dinner tables. It is this ingesting-what-you-preach and donning-what-you-declare that marks Singer out from other philosophy academics, whose metaphysical ponderings into the nature of the external world ends peter singer animal liberation essay the seminar door.
He even stood as a Green candidate in the Australian election. Singer, who dresses in cottons and plastic Doc Martens, peter singer animal liberation essay, is not interested in abstruse intellectual debate just for the sake of it.
He wants to change the world with his ideas his thesis was on civil disobedience. It would make it an academic exercise, peter singer animal liberation essay.
The whole point about doing ethics is to think about the way to live. My life has a kind of harmony between my ideas and the way I live. It would be highly discordant if that was not the case. He looks fit - he was casually dressed like a hill-walker, even at Princeton - and appears to be very self-contained.
He speaks in a dry, slow Australian drawl. He hardly ever raises his voice and is surprisingly unemotional about those critics who denounce him even as "Herod's propaganda minister" - "I guess I was more impressed by the Wall Street Journal until I read this stuff against me. How people decorate the spaces they use tells you something about their soul.
If that is true, then Singer's soul must be remarkably functional. His office, deliberately hidden away in the recesses of the Center for Human Values building to foil would-be assassins, contained almost nothing of a personal nature and, surprisingly for an academic, very few books.
Singer states his arguments rather than trying to win you over; their truth, to peter singer animal liberation essay, is self-evident. You can argue with him - he sounds temperate, and is not inflexible around the edges - but I doubt if you could ever shake his own certainty in his position, peter singer animal liberation essay.
His critics say he is cold-hearted, a philosophical Danton, who has no real understanding of how people actually work. Singer is a utilitarian, a follower of the 19th-century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and J S Mill, who formulated the treatise that the best moral good was the happiness of the greatest number.
In utilitarianism, peter singer animal liberation essay, an action is judged not by its intrinsic nature, but by its consequences. The second tenet of utilitarianism is the idea of "equality of interest". The pleasures derived by a rich sweatshop owner from exploiting his workers, profits, increased leisure time, do not count more highly than the pain, fear and suffering of the workers. There is no room for emotion in this cool calculation of suffering or pleasure; even the interests of your own child do not count for more than those of a complete stranger.
Singer does espouse a more sophisticated version of utilitarianism than Mill, known as "preference utilitarianism", where actions are not judged on their simple pain-and-pleasure outcome, but on how they affect the interests, the preferences, of anyone involved. There is one further key question for a utilitarian such as Singer: Where do the limits of our moral universe stop? What sort of beings should we include in the sum of interests?
The entire canon peter singer animal liberation essay western religion, morality and philosophy is constructed on the notion that only human beings, only people, have a right to moral consideration; animals are different. But what is it about us humans, Singer argues, that's so different?
It's such a fundamental philosophical question that sometimes it's hard to grasp. From our very first experiences, we learn to treat human beings differently from all other creatures. To challenge that notion seems absurd, nonsensical - you cannot "murder" a cow.
What is it to be human? Opponents of Singer would talk about self-consciousness, the ability to reason, the possession of language, tool-making or having emotional states such as sadness. But studies of chimpanzees taught sign language by US peter singer animal liberation essay over the past 30 years prove that none of these attributes is unique to humans; mature trained chimps can display the deductive reasoning skills of something like a human three-year-old.
Even domestic dogs display problem-solving skills and suffer from grief. And it's clear that some human beings, small infants, those in a persistent-vegetative state or those in the advanced stages of a degenerative disease such as Alzheimer's, do not have any of these characteristics. It's simply not possible to construct a defensible, absolute rule about some unique human quality that excludes all animals without also excluding some human beings. We are, in Singer's view, simply being "speciesist" when we drip detergent on to a rabbit's eye rather than carrying out the same procedure on a human patient in a persistent-vegetative state.
According to Singer, the true moral boundary for the equal consideration peter singer animal liberation essay interests is not being human, or being rational, but in having the capacity to suffer. Animals suffer by being chopped up for human dinner tables; ergo eating meat is morally wrong. Our trivial human desire for a nice juicy steak is outweighed by the cow's vital desire not to be eaten. Singer is not detested because he eats miso soup and supports animal rights, but because he denies peter singer animal liberation essay sacredness, the sanctity, of human life.
For Singer, the lives of higher beings, beings that have rationality or self-consciousness - "persons" - are more important than mere sentient beings. If you came across a child and a dog drowning and you could only save one, you would be under a moral obligation to save the child. But for Singer, not all persons are humans, and some humans are definitely not persons.
An adult chimpanzee can exhibit more self-consciousness, more personhood, than a new-born human infant. Under Singer's worldview, if you peter singer animal liberation essay across a new-born infant, who had no family, and a mature chimp and could only save one peter singer animal liberation essay them, you might actually be under a moral obligation to save the chimp.
No infant - disabled or not - has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities existing over time," he states in Practical Ethics.
At one stage, the ever-practical Singer proposed a post-natal day qualification period during which infants - non-persons at that stage - could be killed, peter singer animal liberation essay.
The idea sounds preposterous, but are Singer's theories so far-fetched? In Britain, since the Abortion Act, we have effectively operated a dual standard - human foetuses are denied rights and the protection of law.
And yet in premature births we strive to our utmost to preserve human life. Logically, there is no real difference between the potentially disposable human material in the womb and the sacred, inviolable human rights that are conferred upon the baby at birth.
Singer merely takes this one step further and argues that new-borns are not "persons" and do not, therefore, deserve the full status of legal protection. The debate on Singer's ideas almost always revolves around disabled infants, those with severe conditions such as spina bifida, but his reasoning clearly applies to any human new-born rejected by his parents for whatever reason.
Peter Singer Lecture - 'Animal Liberation: Past, Present and Future'
, time: 1:26:53Animals and Ethics | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Soal essay tentang kasus pelanggaran ham dalam perspektif pancasila raksha bandhan easy essay in hindi peter singer animal liberation essay. Essay writing phrases english essay on man jeete jag jeet living in the city vs suburbs essay Nov 06, · In a recent essay in the New York Times Magazine, Singer urged America's elite to forgo their usual $a-head restaurant dinners and send the money saved to famine relief agencies a. Singer and the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests. Peter Singer has been very influential in the debate concerning animals and ethics. The publication of his Animal Liberation marked the beginning of a growing and increasingly powerful movement in both the United States and Europe
No comments:
Post a Comment