Quote:
Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA
I agree with you, Tore, that compassion for non-human animals is mostly an evolutionary byproduct of our ability to have compassion (for certain) people. My observation is that humans have the innate ability to feel empathy and caring for others, both human and non-human animals, but environment has a big hand in shaping whom we include within the circle of compassion.
Evidence that whom we care about, and don't want to eat, is primarily learned rather than inherited:
(1) Some people truly love their pets, wanting these individual animals to have full, long and happy lives for the pets' sake, and they would adamantly refuse to eat their pets. This shows that people, even meat-eaters, *can* feel great compassion for animals. If people can feel compassion for one animal, two animals, three animals, etc., then they have the capacity to feel it for more.
(2) People who are meat-eaters sometimes convert to vegetarianism for emotional, ethical reasons: they begin to feel regret about killing and eating an animal...just like you would feel regret about killing and eating a human. People's emotions toward animals can change and are *not* fixed.
(3) People's compassion for other humans is *very* much shaped by their environment/culture...and so it is logical to conclude that the degree to which they value animals' lives is also greatly affected by experiences/culture.
If you have not done so, I recommend you read some Holocaust concentration camp survivors' accounts of people's brutality and callousness toward other humans, for example Ana Novac's The Beautiful Days of My Youth, or Schoschana Rabinovici's Thanks to My Mother. Also, observe the development of genocides (common around the world) and the policies that exacerbated them. For example, the U.S. intentionally limited the number of Jewish people who could come here during WWII, even after the U.S. government knew of the Holocaust and what such limitations would cause: more deaths.
History and the present show that people are very capable of feeling other humans' lives have little or no value, just as people are capable of feeling animals' lives are of little or no value.
I agree with you that people are not meat-eating machines: many thoughts are involved in the process by which people learn to feel that some other individual, whether human or non-human animal, has no inherent worth and is expendable. However, I feel people do sometimes end up as meat-eating machines, lacking feelings and thoughts as they eat animals as if those animals were no different than oranges. Remorseless. Unperturbed. Unable to comprehend or be affected by the fact that the victim's life had value to her.
|
I think I should've written that edit a bit better perhaps. I didn't mean to say your compassion for non-humans is completely wired.
When it comes to human social interactions (like cannibalism), my point was more that as a highly social species, I think we favour strategies that are likely to result in peaceful interactions with other people. I don't think most of us extend that sort of concern to animals. Basically, at some level there is a difference between humans and other animals that is important which has nothing to do with intelligence or capacity for pain. At some point, I think most of us have more concern for humans than other species animals simply because they are humans. This is what I think is wired as in it's been a general adaptive trait in our evolutionary history.
Culture can of course turn everything upside down and play havoc with what I just wrote, for example by the way it defines the "us" and "them" as you point out. This is something I of course am well aware of but chose to disregard as I don't think it falsifies my original assumption that we in general tend to elevate humans over other animals when it comes to moral considerations. I think holocaust and so on are examples that took place despite this capacity.
The whole point of my edit was really just to suggest that to humans in general, other humans are not simply animals like a cow or pig. Although it can be explained by culture, I think it's also part explained by our biology. If you accept that, using logic as a way to say we could just as well eat humans as non-human animals then fails (we're not machines, we're humans!).
edit :
I'm talking about general trends here - averages - which I tend to assume is a given! Certainly there are cultures who treat certain people "worse" than animals and cultures that eat other humans, though I'm not sure in the latter if the role of humans in the diet is normally explained by them being regarded as food. There may be other cultural reasons why people want to be cannibals.