This would be mixing up the normative level with the empirical level. The argument from marginal cases seeks to establish that we have reasons against treating beings of different species differently, all else being equal. Under consequentialism, the best path of action (including motives, laws, societal norms to promote and so on) would already be specified. It would be misleading to apply the same basic moral reasoning again on the empirical level where we have institutions like the US army or the establishment of surgeons. Institutions like the US army are (for most people anyway and outside of political philosophy) not terminal values. Whether it increases overall utility if we enforce “non-discrimination” radically in all domains is an empirical question determined by the higher order goal of achieving as much utility as possible.
And whenever this is not the case (which it may well be, since there is no reason to assume that the empirical level perfectly mirrors the normative one), then “all else” is not equal. Because it might not be overall beneficial for society / in terms of your terminal values, it could be a bad idea to allow an otherwise well-qualified someone without a medical license to practice as a surgeon. There might be negative side-effects of such a practice.
A practical example of this would be animal testing. If enough people were consequentialists and unbiased, we could experiment on humans and thereby accelerate scientific progress. However, if you try to do this in the real world, there is the danger that it will go wrong because people lose track of altruistic goals and replace them with other things (altough this argument applies to animal testing as well almost as much), and there is a big likelihood of starting a civil war or worse if someone would actually start experimenting on humans (this one doesn’t). So even though experimenting on animals is intrinsically on par with experimenting on humans with similar cognitive capacities, only the former even stands a chance at increasing overall utility rather than decreasing it. Here the indirect consequences are decisive.
(Edit: In this sense, my example about men and a right to abortion was misleading, because that would of course be a legal right, where empirical factors come into play. But I was using the example to show that being against some form of discrimination doesn’t mean that all differences between beings ought to be ignored.)
Thank you for the response, I think I get the argument now.
I don’t have a good answer for why we allow animal testing but not human testing. If one is fine with animal experimentation then there doesn’t seem to be any way to object to engineering human babies that would have human physiology but animal level cognition and conduct tests on them. While the idea does make me uncomfortable I think I would bite that bullet.
If one is fine with animal experimentation then there doesn’t seem to be any way to object to engineering human babies that would have human physiology but animal level cognition and conduct tests on them.
This would be mixing up the normative level with the empirical level. The argument from marginal cases seeks to establish that we have reasons against treating beings of different species differently, all else being equal. Under consequentialism, the best path of action (including motives, laws, societal norms to promote and so on) would already be specified. It would be misleading to apply the same basic moral reasoning again on the empirical level where we have institutions like the US army or the establishment of surgeons. Institutions like the US army are (for most people anyway and outside of political philosophy) not terminal values. Whether it increases overall utility if we enforce “non-discrimination” radically in all domains is an empirical question determined by the higher order goal of achieving as much utility as possible.
And whenever this is not the case (which it may well be, since there is no reason to assume that the empirical level perfectly mirrors the normative one), then “all else” is not equal. Because it might not be overall beneficial for society / in terms of your terminal values, it could be a bad idea to allow an otherwise well-qualified someone without a medical license to practice as a surgeon. There might be negative side-effects of such a practice.
A practical example of this would be animal testing. If enough people were consequentialists and unbiased, we could experiment on humans and thereby accelerate scientific progress. However, if you try to do this in the real world, there is the danger that it will go wrong because people lose track of altruistic goals and replace them with other things (altough this argument applies to animal testing as well almost as much), and there is a big likelihood of starting a civil war or worse if someone would actually start experimenting on humans (this one doesn’t). So even though experimenting on animals is intrinsically on par with experimenting on humans with similar cognitive capacities, only the former even stands a chance at increasing overall utility rather than decreasing it. Here the indirect consequences are decisive.
(Edit: In this sense, my example about men and a right to abortion was misleading, because that would of course be a legal right, where empirical factors come into play. But I was using the example to show that being against some form of discrimination doesn’t mean that all differences between beings ought to be ignored.)
Thank you for the response, I think I get the argument now.
I don’t have a good answer for why we allow animal testing but not human testing. If one is fine with animal experimentation then there doesn’t seem to be any way to object to engineering human babies that would have human physiology but animal level cognition and conduct tests on them. While the idea does make me uncomfortable I think I would bite that bullet.
The problem is that it makes the Schelling points more awkward.