Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose.
Why? I consider that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. What’s wrong with speciesism, beyond the superficial analogies to racism?
The theoretical problem with speciesism is that there is no such thing as a species. The traditional proposed equivalence relation of “ability to interbreed” doesn’t work because it isn’t transitive: every organism would satisfy this relation with respect to its parents, but we have common ancestors with a squid if you just go far enough back. Every animal (and plant, etc...) on Earth is basically part of a single ring species, except that the “rings” of our species are only clear if you picture them arcing through space-time instead of just space. While the ethical status of individuals must have something to do with their biology, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere we can put a bright non-arbitrary cutoff line for that status.
The practical problem with speciesism is that we may soon be getting a lot more “species” to worry about, and it would be good to have an appropriate ethical framework for that ahead of time. What kind of modifications can we give to ourselves or our kids before their “post-human interests” lose importance relative to the unmodified? How much more intelligence can we give to our domesticated animals before we should start feeling concern about treating them like slaves? What if general artificial intelligences start passing Turing tests without any underlying biology at all? Does it matter if their instructions are a priori vs emulations of copied biological brains?
From an intuitive perspective, it seems obvious that human interests are more important than chimp interests, which are more important than pig interests, which are more important than fish interests… but at that point I get stuck, because I don’t see how we quantify “how much more important”, robustly, as the categories start to proliferate and blur.
From an outside perspective, the non-superficial analogy to racism is simple: the human intuitive perspective on ethics is lousy, often leads us to atrocious behavior that we and our descendants regret for generations, and ought to be supplemented by something more reliable if possible.
Why? I consider that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. What’s wrong with speciesism, beyond the superficial analogies to racism?
The theoretical problem with speciesism is that there is no such thing as a species. The traditional proposed equivalence relation of “ability to interbreed” doesn’t work because it isn’t transitive: every organism would satisfy this relation with respect to its parents, but we have common ancestors with a squid if you just go far enough back. Every animal (and plant, etc...) on Earth is basically part of a single ring species, except that the “rings” of our species are only clear if you picture them arcing through space-time instead of just space. While the ethical status of individuals must have something to do with their biology, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere we can put a bright non-arbitrary cutoff line for that status.
The practical problem with speciesism is that we may soon be getting a lot more “species” to worry about, and it would be good to have an appropriate ethical framework for that ahead of time. What kind of modifications can we give to ourselves or our kids before their “post-human interests” lose importance relative to the unmodified? How much more intelligence can we give to our domesticated animals before we should start feeling concern about treating them like slaves? What if general artificial intelligences start passing Turing tests without any underlying biology at all? Does it matter if their instructions are a priori vs emulations of copied biological brains?
From an intuitive perspective, it seems obvious that human interests are more important than chimp interests, which are more important than pig interests, which are more important than fish interests… but at that point I get stuck, because I don’t see how we quantify “how much more important”, robustly, as the categories start to proliferate and blur.
From an outside perspective, the non-superficial analogy to racism is simple: the human intuitive perspective on ethics is lousy, often leads us to atrocious behavior that we and our descendants regret for generations, and ought to be supplemented by something more reliable if possible.