Abstract
Just as one line appears to be longer than another in an optical illusion, we can have a spontaneous moral judgment that one individual is more important than another. Sometimes such judgments can lead to moral illusions like speciesism and other kinds of discrimination. Moral illusions are persistent spontaneous judgments that violate our deepest moral values and distract us away from a rational, authentic ethic. They generate pseudo-ethics, similar to pseudoscience. The antidote against moral illusions is the ethical principle to avoid unwanted arbitrariness. Speciesism involves unwanted arbitrariness, and psychological research as well as the problem of wild animal suffering demonstrate that moral illusions such as speciesism can be very persistent.
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Notes
Although the unwantedness seems to give this principle a subjective flavor, the principle is objective in the sense of being completely independent from the beliefs of the ethicist who applies the principle. What counts as arbitrary is a matter of logic, and what counts as unwanted is determined by the person who does not want the consequences of the choice.
This principle resembles a Kantian categorical imperative (“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” Kant 1785) and a contractualist principle (“An act is wrong if and only if any principle that permitted it would be one that could reasonably be rejected by people moved to find principles for the general regulation of behaviour that others, similarly motivated, could not reasonably reject” Scanlon 1998). Parfit (2011) argued that such formulations can unify rule consequentialist, Kantian and contractualist ethics: “An act is wrong if and only if 1. such acts are disallowed by some principle that is one of the principles whose being universal laws would make things go best, 2. one of the only principles whose being universal laws everyone could rationally will, 3. a principle that no one could reasonably reject.”
In practical ethics contexts, the anti-arbitrariness principle is also reminiscent of moral consistency reasoning (Campbell and Kumar 2012).
Many defenses of speciesism reflect essentialism, by referring to personhood or humanity (the human species) as a ‘kind’, having a ‘substantial nature’. (See e.g. Chappell 2011; Cohen and Regan 2001; Lee and George 2008; Scanlon 1998, p.186; Scruton 2000. See McMahan 2005 and Tanner 2006, for an extensive critique of the ‘argument of kinds’.)
This body ownership issue is complicated by body transfer illusions (Petkova and Ehrsson 2008) such as the rubber hand illusion (Botvinick and Cohen 1998). For the moment, I will assume that a person can autonomously decide what counts as his or her own body, e.g. using thought experiments where the person can decide which body parts and objects such as rubber hands cannot be tortured.
Note that this right not to be used against one’s will differs from other rights, such as the right not to be killed against one’s will. Think of genocide: people who hate other people, prefer the absence of those other people. The end or goal is their absence, so their presence is not required to reach this end. Killing those other people does not violate their right not to be used, but does violate their right not to be killed.
Experimental evidence of cognitive dissonance indicates that most meat eaters have moral values that conflict with their consumption of ‘factory farmed’ meat (Loughnan et al. 2010; Bastian et al. 2012; Bastian and Loughnan 2017). Such cognitive dissonance experiments could give indications about our hidden, deepest moral values.
The animal rights advocates mentioned in this section, include attendees at animal rights conferences. Their presented arguments are based on personal communications.
These are known as epistemic, instrumental and axiological rationality (Kolodny and Brunero 2016).
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Bruers, S. Speciesism, Arbitrariness and Moral Illusions. Philosophia 49, 957–975 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00282-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00282-7