Cruelty is, in fact, offensive—but more importantly, it has net negative consequences.
The status explanation doesn’t leave as much room for a similar statement about objectification—in fact it explicitly disclaims that there’s a more important aspect of objectification than its offensiveness. I think this is what’s at stake for a lot of the comments here that defend the concept and reproach of objectification.
And status actually turns out to be a fairly useful way to talk about the consequences of cruelty (over and above the consequences of equal amounts of non-cruel suffering).
If I see what you’re getting at I disagree. For instance it’s not usually possible to lower an animal’s status, but cruelty to animals is deeply upsetting for me.
I agree with you that this notion that status is something unimportant—that it’s all about “high school popularity contests and all that sort of thing” (to quote Skatche) -- underlies a lot of the discussion so far.
And as I said here, I think this is simply wrong… unwarrantedly dismissive of the real effects of status. Low status gets people killed.
As for animals, yes, we disagree: I would say that an animal being treated cruelly is in a lower-status position, one in which it has less ability to effect its preferences, than one being treated kindly.
The status explanation doesn’t leave as much room for a similar statement about objectification—in fact it explicitly disclaims that there’s a more important aspect of objectification than its offensiveness. I think this is what’s at stake for a lot of the comments here that defend the concept and reproach of objectification.
If I see what you’re getting at I disagree. For instance it’s not usually possible to lower an animal’s status, but cruelty to animals is deeply upsetting for me.
I agree with you that this notion that status is something unimportant—that it’s all about “high school popularity contests and all that sort of thing” (to quote Skatche) -- underlies a lot of the discussion so far.
And as I said here, I think this is simply wrong… unwarrantedly dismissive of the real effects of status. Low status gets people killed.
As for animals, yes, we disagree: I would say that an animal being treated cruelly is in a lower-status position, one in which it has less ability to effect its preferences, than one being treated kindly.