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(applause)
Adrienne Asch: I guess I could just comment in some ways just after related
to the last two comments especially, but ... Jeff, I have a real ..., this
is not a rhetorical question. Why ... what is the purpose of this effort?
If it's not the ethics of exclusion, I don't know what it is.
I think it's a fair question to say why human beings and animals count, and
in what ways do they count. And maybe we should be making differentiations,
or maybe we shouldn't. And like the previous speaker, as a carnivore, I had
better think damn hard about why I am one and I don't think I've got a good
answer. And thank you to Peter Singer and a lot of other people for making
me think about that. I don't think we should be wantonly killing squirrels,
and I don't think we should be wantonly killing humans. And the old
question of our work should be why can't we figure out a way to have human
beings and animals live the best lives they can, with their particular
kinds of endowments, born into the kind of societies they are born into. I
don't want species membership, or coming out of a mother's body, or being
genetically related to a particular father to justify why we have to care
about human beings But I do want to know what are you trying to do in this
project that doesn't lead to the ethics of exclusion.
Jeff McMahan: My guess is that there are a lot of politically liberal
people in this room, who appreciated the picture of George Bush, and so on.
A lot of people in this room who are sympathetic to feminism, and so on.
Is abortion part of an ethics of exclusion? Sure looks like it to me.
That's a pretty radical form of exclusion, isn't it?
Well, to answer Adrienne's question, the way I ultimately got into all of
this, and the reason I raise questions about moral status, the purpose of
this effort, to repeat Adrienne's phrase, in my case came from a concern
with the morality of abortion. I really wanted to know. And I have thought
about that for a couple of decades. And when you think about the moral
status of a fetus, you have to confront this question, you have to ask
yourself: What is it that people find about a human fetus, that they don't
find in an animal, that makes a lot of people in our society think that
the abortion of an early term fetus is ***, and the killing of a
chimpanzee, or an ape, or any kind of animal is absolutely nothing. Most of
you ... people are saying that they are carnivores here. Everybody is sort
of confessing that, as is that's an ok thing to say. Well look. You're
telling Peter and me that you actually eat these beings, that are sensitive
beings, that have sociality, that care about their own young in exactly the way that you do.
One of the questioners said "We're just finding out all kinds of things
about the capacities of the cognitively disabled. In 50 years, you may not
be able to find them." Well, I will tell you something that you may not
know. And that is that they are finding exactly the same things about non-
human animals. But we don't bother to do very much investigation there in
the way that we do about those to whom we are related. But if you looked
you would find a helluva lot more than I think people find there now, and
you wouldn't be so complacent about announcing that you eat the bodies of these sensitive creatures.