I think we care should about animals/people in proportion to how much they're able to suffer, and to appreciate being alive.
So moral status based on central nervous system development as a rule of thumb. Okay. This seems reasonable. Indeed more reasonable than treating chimpanzees as though they had the mental capacity of slugs.
And I agree that it makes more sense to spend our time and energy where the improvement in happiness will be greater, and thus wild animals interactions with each other should be beyond the scope of this inquiry at this time.
I think where I depart from utilitarianism is that there are some things I think are not okay even if they would lead to a net improvement in happiness. Murdering one person with a particularly fortunate (or unfortunate) tissue type in order to provide replacement organs for two people (or ten people) who will die without them, for example. I just can't make my gut happy with that. Greatest-good-of-the-greatest-number-wise it seems to make sense, but...no.
So the fetuses thing for me--well, of course in one's own personal decisions one can put oneself at any disadvantage one likes--but in practice in society this works out to either we force pregnant women to carry unwanted fetuses to term to produce unwanted babies or we don't. And I can't get past the unfairness of enslaving women, (and only women) to save fetuses, and only fetuses (we don't enslave people to be hooked up to Uncle Walter to act as Uncle Walter's kidneys, even if Uncle Walter will die without it), to say but so many more people will be alive, and some of them will be happy--let's do it.
(For that matter there is the issue of who gets tapped to support the unwanted babies; they will be something like 25% of the birth cohort, at least in the US.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-06-30 09:38 pm (UTC)So moral status based on central nervous system development as a rule of thumb. Okay. This seems reasonable. Indeed more reasonable than treating chimpanzees as though they had the mental capacity of slugs.
And I agree that it makes more sense to spend our time and energy where the improvement in happiness will be greater, and thus wild animals interactions with each other should be beyond the scope of this inquiry at this time.
I think where I depart from utilitarianism is that there are some things I think are not okay even if they would lead to a net improvement in happiness. Murdering one person with a particularly fortunate (or unfortunate) tissue type in order to provide replacement organs for two people (or ten people) who will die without them, for example. I just can't make my gut happy with that. Greatest-good-of-the-greatest-number-wise it seems to make sense, but...no.
So the fetuses thing for me--well, of course in one's own personal decisions one can put oneself at any disadvantage one likes--but in practice in society this works out to either we force pregnant women to carry unwanted fetuses to term to produce unwanted babies or we don't. And I can't get past the unfairness of enslaving women, (and only women) to save fetuses, and only fetuses (we don't enslave people to be hooked up to Uncle Walter to act as Uncle Walter's kidneys, even if Uncle Walter will die without it), to say but so many more people will be alive, and some of them will be happy--let's do it.
(For that matter there is the issue of who gets tapped to support the unwanted babies; they will be something like 25% of the birth cohort, at least in the US.)