Gray Steiner sözleri

Darwin, a younger contemporary of Schopenhauer, takes up the same Romantic ideas that guided Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation had a lukewarm response and went virtually unnoticed when it was first published in 1818. By the time the second edition was published in 1859, the same year as the 0rst edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Schopenhauer’s ideas had become highly

inluential. Schopenhauer’s thought, together with the teleological-organic views of nature developed by Blumenbach, Reil, Kielmeyer, Goethe, and Schelling in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, set the stage for the emergence of Darwin’s theory of species continuity.

Whether or not Empedocles’ views are beset with anthropocentric prejudices, his core beliefs about the continuiy of human souls with other living things in the cosmos show a fundamental connection between Empedocles and Homer, Hesiod, and Pythagoras. Each of these early thinkers subscribes to a conception of living things as sharing a common basic nature. These thinkers recognize the

distinctiveness of humans among living beings, but they do not assert a metaphysical distinction between human beings and animals in the manner of many later thinkers. The fundamental distinction for these thinkers is not between human and nonhuman beings, but rather between mortal and immortal beings. This is the crucial background for the emergence of the predominant theories of human and animal

natures.

Anthropocentric arguments have long exercised their influence on thinking about animals in the history of Western philosophy. These arguments have their roots in Aristotle, and particularly in the thought of the Stoics, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. These philosophers’ views about animals are linked by an underlying logic: that all and only human beings are worthy

of moral consideration, because all and only human beings are rational and endowed with language. Only such beings are capable of genuine self-determination and moral responsibiliy, and are moral beings in the most complete and authentic sense. As nonrational beings, animals are due less moral consideration than human beings, and on some accounts animals are due no moral consideration whatsoever.

At its core, then, Regan’s rights-based approach to the moral status of animals is subject to the same anthropocentric prejudice as Singer’s utilitarian approach. It is important to consider the question how awareness of the long-term future, the abiliy to envision and cultivate a more complex and self-aware life, and the abiliy to reflect on the meaning of enjoyment and sufering entail a

superior moral status for human beings vis-à-vis animals.

According to virtue ethics, moraliy is de0ned not in terms of duties or utiliy, but in terms of the moral life. Such a life is understood primarily in terms of Aristotle’s notion of character and the ideal of cultivating particular moral virtues such as courage, temperance, and compassion. Aristotle envisions a whole human life or the life of a human communiy as the proper unit of measure for

moraliy. Particular actions are not moral unless they are chosen for their own sake, are in accordance with right reason, and proceed from a stable character state that the agent has developed over a long period of time.34 On Aristotle’s view, animals are incapable of moral virtue because they lack the rationaliy requisite for satisding these conditions. “Animals and plants can lourish, but

eudaimonia [Aristotle’s term for the moral life] is only possible for human beings.”35

None of the extant fragments explain why, on Empedocles’ account, we should not abstain from plants as well. This may be one of several indications of anthropocentrism in the thought of Empedocles. Diels states in a footnote that transmigration on Empedocles’ view follows a trajectory from plant to animal to human being to god.77 This is a highly speculative thesis, but there may be some

support at least for the idea that human beings are closest to the gods.

All subjects-of-a-life possess inherent value, and all such beings possess inherent value equally. This means that animals possess inherent value and deserve respect, just as human beings do. Regan rounds out this picture of the basis for animal rights by noting that the subject-of-a-life criterion is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for attributing inherent worth to a being.24 He makes

this qualification because he believes that natural objects can have inherent value even though they are not subjects-of-a-life.25 Regan thus seeks to avoid the problem of anthropocentrism by acknowledging the possibiliy of making a case for the moral status of natural beings that does not depend on mental capacities.

In the case of ancient thinkers such as Hesiod and Ovid, the complete satisfaction enjoyed in our golden beginnings had as its gastronomic component a diet of fruits and grains that corresponded to the peaceful coexistence of human beings and animals in a gardenlike paradise.36 Neither Hesiod nor Ovid explicitly recommends vegetarianism. But one clear implication of their conception of the course

of time as a Verfallsgeschichte is that the sufering, corruption, and overall dissatisfaction of later generations such as our own are products of the turn to violence against both human beings and animals. Some later advocates of vegetarianism such as Porphyry appeal to Hesiod’s story of the ages of man in arguing that the killing and eating of animals is fundamentally impious.37

Hume suggested that “the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”5 From the standpoint of contemporary prejudices about the relative value of human beings and animals, Hume’s statement is ridiculous. Oysters possess no central nervous system and thus are not even capable of sensations of pain; they are so lacking in sentience that it seems absurd to

accord them any moral status, let alone a status on a par with human beings. Nevertheless, my working hypothesis leaves open this possibiliy. If we proceed on the a priori assumption that creatures such as oysters cannot possibly have anything like the moral status of human beings, our arguments will be undermined by anthropocentric prejudice. Even if we ultimately conclude that oysters do not

enjoy the same moral status as human beings, I argue that we must start with openness to the possibiliy that they do.

Singer emphasizes interests because on his view, pleasure and pain are part of a larger complex of ways of relating to the world. They are not merely discrete experiences that some beings have. Mountain ecosystems, the Grand Canyon, coral reefs, and giant sequoias lack moral status because they are incapable of experiencing pleasure or pain, and hence are incapable of having interests. Because

they have no interests, it makes no sense to consider whether their interests are being promoted or frustrated. Beings such as sequoia redwoods and oysters cannot be bene0ted or harmed, hence they have no claim to inclusion in any utilitarian calculus. The interests of people or certain animals may be afected by the things we do to forests or ecosystems, and to this extent our actions afecting

these sorts of beings often do 0gure in our utilitarian calculations. But in such cases, the harms or benefits are not to the forests or ecosystems but to the people or animals in question.