Greenpeace

The Case Foundation is currently running a program to give awards to nonprofit organizations.  The deal is that, every day, the cause with most unique donors ($10 minimum donation) through Facebook Causes is given $1,000.  Most of these awards have been given to groups with 40-80 donors for that day (though some have had a little over 100 so to be safe we should aim for say 150-200 donors).  My idea is to get at least 100 people (hopefully more) to agree to donate $10 through Facebook on the same day (January 27, I think).  One hundred ten dollar donations would be $1,000, plus the $1,000 award would be $2,000.  Furthermore, at the end of the overal period (which is February 1), the group with the most total unique donors gets $50,000 dollars, the next two get $25,000, and there are ten $10,000 awards for runners-up.  Currently the leading group has 533 donors, and the 13th placed group (on pace to win $10,000) only has 151, so plausibly if we got enough people to do this we could get not only the $1,000 daily prize but a 10k prize as well.

 I think I can get probably two dozen donations from the Greenpeace chapter at my university, and I am going to contact other campus chapters about doing this as well.  If any of you are involved in local chapters, or just willing to give ten dollars on the appropriate day, please let me know!  I want to keep a list of people who've agreed to this.  If you send me an Email address or phone number, I will contact you that day to make sure you remember.

 Notes:

 1.  The donation has to be done through Facebook, and it has to be done with a credit/debit card.  It is not hard to create a new Facebook account if you don't have one.

 2.  The 'day' for the prize system starts and ends at noon, not midnight--so you would need to wait until noon on Jan 27 to donate, not early morning.

 3.  If you are willing to give more than ten dollars, you could donate ten dollars for yourself, then have as many friends as you want login and donate through their accounts as well to get a higher number of unique donors.

 4.  If you are already on Facebook, I have created an event for this.  Look me up (Alex Fields, at ETSU) and contact me and I'll send you an invite, and you can invite as many other people as you want who might be interested.

1. To prevent suffering of animals. Ninety-some percent of the animals farmed for meat/eggs/dairy in the US are raised in misery in factory farms.  And, if I am right about the arguments in my last post, we have no right to cause suffering to these animals for our own gain (even if I'm not right about equality between humans and other animals, can anyone seriously think that the suffering of animals counts for nothing?  and if it counts for anything at all, doesn't that amount of suffering serve as a compelling reason to give up something as trivial a culinary habit that can easily be changed?).

2. To benefit the environment. Animal farming is the number one cause of deforestation in the world and has always been so. Deforestation is a problem for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it is the second greatest cause of atmospheric carbon dioxide, releasing about a quarter of total emissions each year. Also, amusingly but, unfortunately, truly, methane from the flatulance of farm animals is one of the leading environmental pollutants, and methane is more than twenty times as effective as carbon dioxide for trapping heat in the atmosphere. Yes, seriously--you can do a lot to fight global warming by going vegetarian. Furthermore, animal farming results in the deposit of far more excrement than the land can absord onto farmland, resulting in pollution of lakes and rivers and destruction of valuable farmland. And the water used for animal farming (greater quantities than humans consume) is quickly depleting underground water pools which many dry areas rely on.

3. To save energy/money. Plant farming is vastly cheaper and more efficent than animal farming. It produces ten to twenty times the amount of protein per acre, five to ten times the calories per acre, and as much as fifty times the proportion of food calorie output to fossil fuel calorie input. Animals consume many times the amount of food that they yield. Replacing animal food production with plant food production in first world countries alone would yield enough surplus to feed the entire world's population on a healthy diet with room to spare.

4. To protect the poorest people in the world. Animal food consumption in western nations harms the world's poor populations in a variety of ways. Large scale fishing greatly reduces yield of fishers in areas that rely on fish for survival. Deforestation for animal farming (which benefits only western nations and the richest people in third world countries, never the poor population of those countries) causes soil erosion and consequent flooding which is catastrophic for poor rural people, reduces rainfall in those areas which is harmful in a number of ways, makes much needed firewood scarce, etc.

5. To have a healthier diet. There are no nutrients that cannot be obtained from a totally vegan diet, and vegetarian vegan diets are much lower in bad cholesterol and saturated fats. Vegetable protein is also healthier than animal protein, which increases the chances of many chronic diseases including diabetes and several forms of cancer. Studies of longevity and centenarians consistently show that the oldest people usually eat very little, if any, meat. I could go on but the arguments for the greater health of a well managed vegetarian diet are easily found and, I think, the least of the reasons I've given here for being a vegetarian/vegan.

And the only reason not to do this is a selfish desire for the taste of meat. Going totally vegan overnight is difficult, sure, but it isn't all or nothing. It is VERY easy to eat without meat. It is difficult to find a restaurant that doesn't have at least one vegetarian option if you look closely, and most have several (in my experience, there are few if any restaurants which can't serve you something totally vegan). Make a gradual transition if you have to--start by limiting your meat intake, then eliminating it later...start by giving up mammal and bird meats and give up seafood later...stop eating eggs directly even if you can't avoid them in baked goods and deserts...etc.

Most people, even those who to an extent support animal rights and think it wrong to cause suffering to any creature, still believe that the moral status of all humans is somehow significantly different from that of all nonhuman animals and that, consequently, the moral obligations owed to nonhuman animals, while possibly legitimate, are significantly different (and significantly less vital) than those owed to humans. I question this assumption on the grounds that there is no legitimate basis for making such a distinction.

Anyone who has studied psychology and neuroscience enough can tell you that the differences between humans and other animals are differences of degree and not of kind. I don’t want to argue for this premise as it is well supported by science and doesn’t need philosophical justification. If anyone disagrees with it I challenge them to name the quality that all normally functioning (not mentally retarded, not senile, etc.), adult humans possess fully and that no other animal possesses at all.

That said, it could be argued that humans possess some quality to a degree necessary to achieve a different moral status, and that no other animals possess the quality to the same degree. If this is the case, I again challenge anyone making this claim to name what this quality is, where the degree is at which that quality justifies a significant change in moral status, and why this point is the relevant one. I am willing to bet that this cannot be done and that any quality and degree of that quality chosen will be arbitrary at best, and that most likely there will be either humans who wouldn’t meet the given criteria or animals who would, or both.

Even if that weren’t the case, however, this type of argument suffers from another serious problem. If it is degree of possession of a certain quality which gives humans greater moral worth than other animals, then the same logic can and should lead us to conclude that some humans have greater moral worth than other humans. There are two ways in which this is true, the first of which is recognized much more consistently. The first is the difference between human children and human adults. Human toddlers, for example, are approximately the equivalents of chimpanzees in most ways. Why, then, do human children have a higher moral status than chimpanzees? There are two common ways of answering this question and I think both are bad. The first is to say the difference is that human children will eventually develop into human adults, whereas chimpanzees will remain chimpanzees. I am not at all convinced that the future potential of a given being should relevantly affect its moral status, but even it does, this potential does not apply in the case of, say, a human toddler who has a fatal disease and will certainly not live to be an adult. Many similar cases can be given, and I think that in all of them we want to say the child has the same moral status as other children. The second way of answering the question is to say that it is wrong to harm human children because of the suffering other humans go through as a result.  But it seems extremely odd to say that the reason it's wrong to harm children is because their parents (or other humans who hear about it) will suffer.  We think it's wrong to harm the child for the child's sake.  This argument also doesn't explain why it would be wrong to harm or kill children in cases where other humans would not suffer or would suffer very little--for example an orphan child with no caretaker, or a newborn baby whose parents don't want it and have no surviving relatives who would regret the baby's loss.

The second way in which the logic of degree should lead us to conclude that some humans have a higher moral status than others (the one which is more rarely mentioned and yet, I think, serves as a more telling argument) is that the capacities of some normally functioning human adults are far greater than the capacities of others. This is true of any of the qualities that I can imagine to be morally relevant (ability to reason, richness of experience, ability to recognize and participate in moral behavior). I think the difference between the most intelligent human adults and an average human adult is probably as great as the difference between an average human adult and a human child or a chimpanzee. These qualities do not either exist or not exist, they exist on a scale along which different humans and different animals fall at different places, with considerable overlap and many humans being significantly further along the scale. If we are going to make moral distinctions based on degree then some humans are going to turn out more valuable than others and some nonhuman animals are going to turn out to be more valuable than some humans. Unless we want to say that Stephen Hawking and John Nash have more rights or deserve greater consideration than most of the rest of us, we should avoid this way of doing ethics. And, quite apart from these dangers, I think this method is completely misguided.

I think the above argument covers the types of reasoning that most people use, but there are two others I want to consider: that humans have a different moral status because they can participate in a contractual moral agreement while animals cannot, and that humans have a different moral status because they have souls or because God has given them that status.

The second consideration is by far the easier to answer: to make such an argument you need to justify belief in a soul (and furthermore, a soul that all humans have and that animals don’t and, even beyond that, the idea that this soul makes a relevant moral difference) or belief in God (and more specifically a God who has given humans a greater moral status and, perhaps most difficult of all, the idea that the whims of some arrogant deity are morally relevant). This has never been done and I doubt that it's going to happen anytime soon. If your religious beliefs are based in faith and not reason, then you should be responsible enough to recognize that you cannot justifiably treat other beings in significantly different ways (specifically ways harmful and prejudicial to them) simply because of a belief you cannot prove to be true.

The first consideration is worth taking more seriously. The first thing to note is that this argument assumes a contractualist theory of ethics, which few philosophers would agree with, and so anyone wanting to make this argument would first need to argue successfully for such a theory. Even if this were done, however, I don’t think contract ethics provides a firm basis for making moral distinctions between humans and other animals. There is little or no evidence to suggest that all normally functioning adult humans are capable of participating in moral contracts in ways than no other animals are. The fact is that the ‘moral’ behavior of most humans is just a combination of instinct and conditioning, and very rarely the product of rational deliberation. Nonhuman animals are capable of acting in these same ways. Arguably, some nonhuman animals are also capable of deliberating and making decisions to some extent—the same as humans are. There are few, if any, humans who consistently behave in ways dictated by a type of rational deliberation that other animals are not capable of. Most of these arguments are based in a simple misunderstanding of the way humans or animals (or both) think and behave. Once these issues are cleared up and a realistic picture of human and animal psychology is formed, there is little or no basis for making firm distinctions.

What, then, is the basis for these distinctions? I think there is none. I do not deny that there are differences between humans and animals, even very big ones, but such differences also exist between humans and I don’t think any of them give some creatures a significantly different moral status from others. The reason it is wrong to torture, for example, applies equally to all creatures: they suffer, and suffering is bad.