A moral philosopher and an evolutionary biologist in conversation
In this episode of The Poetry Of Reality, we sit in on an engrossing conversation between Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer on stage in Melbourne, Australia.
Peter Singer is a moral philosopher, known for his work in bioethics and being one of the intellectual founders of the modern animal rights movement.
He and Dawkins discuss everything from nature and evolution, to god and ethics, through the lens of their work as prolific authors and discoverers of truth. Tune in to listen to two great thinkers explore rich questions, around the survival of genes and human altruism, the suffering native to nature, reason and its application to morality, the role of design in the universe, and the meaning behind pain and consciousness.
Every species is inherently specieistic. If one species is able to exploit another one, it will always do so without restraint or limit.
Humans are the only species who could potentially refrain from exploiting another species because of their capability of rational thinking. So, the commonly used argument that factory farming is „against nature“ is simply wrong. The exact opposite is true: limitless exploitation is the true nature of nature.
The only valid argument against factory farming or any kind of cruelty against animals is human moral. To call something „cruel“ is already a human-specific value judgment. Non-human animals cannot be cruel, just because of the fact that they do not have a set of values, which would be a prerequisite to apply a term like „cruel“. Only with the evolution of human civilization, a set of values arose that put humans in the position to judge their actions on a certain subset of values, called morality, that defines these actions as good or bad, kind or cruel, right or wrong.
Of course, it would be a good thing if humanity would act with respect to its morality and rationality, but the problem with that is, that only individuals have morality and the ability to think rational, humanity in its entirety does not.
EVOLUTION
(a poem inspired by the book "Your Inner Fish" by Neil Shubin)
My child, my child
You're my flesh and my blood
Yet you look nothing like me.
Your eyes are big like a bullfrog's
Your jaw is more like a gill
Your arms have the bones of a shark fin
Your body is like the trunk
of the sea anemone.
My child, my child
Why are you not like your father and me?
Oh mother, stop fussing
I am perfectly human
Why can't you see?
Just like you and my father
I evolved long ago from a lamprey
that walked right out of the sea!