What all forms of discrimination like racism or sexism, but also speciesism and nepotism have in common is that they are just different forms of irrational ingroup favoritism that deny that the reason as to why it’s bad to be discriminated against is the capacity to experience suffering itself, not membership of the particular group, it’s discrimination based on an irrelevant factor.
Adherents to more socially acceptable forms of ingroup favoritism, like speciesists like to claim that comparisons to the holocaust, racism and sexism are unfair when one is talking about what is done to non-human animals, because that’s unfair to humans that have been dehumanized by the racists and nazis, not understanding that this is just another irrational ingroup bias on their part, assuming that if something is not human, it is fine to harm it anyway without needing further explanation.
Speciesism is bad for the exact same reason that racism and sexism are bad.
A simple enough question to ask, what is the characteristic that makes it important for you to be put into the category of things that have rights (e.g. a right not to get randomly assraped with a chainsaw)?
- Is it your skin color?
- Is it your genitalia?
- Is it your particular family origin?
- Is it your country?
- Is it your species?
The answer is no to all of these, the reason why you want to avoid getting anally raped with a chainsaw randomly is because you are sentient, that is the characteristic that makes it important to be put into the category of things that have rights, sentience, the capacity to feel things, not skin color, not gender, not species.
Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia“).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience
- P1: Sentience is what makes it possible and bad to be harmed.
- P2: Most non-human animals are sentient.
- C: It is bad when said non-human animals experience harm.
If one is sentient, one can produce sensations, and sensations are of different qualities. They can be better/less bad, e.g. I’m in a blanket and this feels good because it protects me against the cold, or worse/less good, e.g. I poured gasoline all over myself and set myself on fire, this is a little too warm.
On the other hand, if you were a completely braindead human vegetable on the same level as literal vegetables like carrots or broccoli emotionally, you wouldn’t care if I set you on fire even though you would still contain human DNA and be alive, that’s because you wouldn’t be sentient, so it doesn’t feel bad anymore, it doesn’t feel like anything, so this proves that it’s not the possession of human DNA that makes the avoidance of harm an important priority.
A speciesist ignores this and downplays the suffering, just like a racist slave owner ignores the capacity to suffer of the black slaves. Like the other ingroup favoritists, they pretend that the characteristic that makes it a really important priority to avoid being harmed is membership of their ingroup, when obviously the characteristic that in reality makes it an important priority to avoid being harmed is simply the capacity to experience harm itself.
- ”You can’t call it rape!”
That is something that speciesists sometimes insist when it comes to cows getting restrained and forcefully impregnated, because it’s a human concept supposedly.
How so, why exactly do they think that is a sensible definition? Rape at its core describes having your preference not to engage in a sexual activity or especially to be penetrated violated, particularly the unwanted penetration of your sexual organs, otherwise it can also be referred to as a molestation.
Human DNA is not the enabling function of a preference, sentience is the enabling function of a preference, that is what creates preferences that can either be alleviated or frustrated.
Can I rape a braindead person that has absolutely no preference not to get raped? Is it not rape if I were to restrain a dog in a rack and stick my arm up its asshole? I’m sure if any of these speciesist bigots walked in on someone violently fistfucking their cat, they would be perfectly comfortable saying ”that guy raped my cat”.
You could dishonestly refer to what dairy farmers do as ”just artificial insemination”, but if they have to be restrained because they don’t want to be artificially inseminated, that entirely fails to capture the aspect of forcing yourself on someone else, it’s not as though the cow is consensually making a doctor’s appointment to be artificially inseminated.
These ingroup favoritists that proclaim to be against against racism and sexism but get offended when one discusses the non-human animal holocaust have learned nothing from past mistakes of humanity, they foolishly think racism and sexism were only bad because it harmed other humans, how horrible, as if that is somehow a relevant factor.
Smashing a braindead human with a sledgehammer is by itself not any worse than doing it to a car or a computer, it could only produce some amount of badness in the sense that it affects sentient organisms that care about said braindead human, if the family of said braindead human cared more about their plasma TV than the braindead human, it would be worse to smash that plasma TV with a sledgehammer.
That’s the only reason why it could ever possibly be bad to destroy a braindead human, if some other sentient organism, like their family were to be negatively affected by it in some way, human DNA in and of itself is absolutely worthless, just like skin color or genitalia.
In reality the reason why black slavery was bad was also only because blacks were sentient, not because they contained human DNA, if really all the blacks had been braindead it wouldn’t have mattered that whites enslaved them, and that’s why it’s also bad to enslave pigs, because they are generally not braindead.
In fact, it wouldn’t have even been slavery anymore of course, because again, in that instant, if there is no sentience, there exists no preference/desire not to be enslaved either, you cannot enslave a rock, this entire concept of raping or enslaving something that has no will is absurd.
It’s absurd how those humanist bigots that criticize racism and sexism are offended by the racist and sexist analogies because they feel that it downplays the suffering blacks and women go through, when in reality it’s the exact other way around if anything, comparing what they go through in the first world downplays the suffering of non-human animals.
The last time I checked black men aren’t getting castrated without anesthesia, immigrant children aren’t being thrown in a meatgrinder, women aren’t being kept in a cage and repeatedly forcefully impregnated, then have their offspring ripped away and slaughtered.
This doesn’t mean they can’t face any problems, but certain non-human animals have not and are not even considered as subjects under the law for the greatest part of history, blacks and/or women are generally not considered property under the law anymore, it’s fair to say their sensibilities are almost always considered less important, by default.
They make it out to be like someone getting called a fat cunt or receiving an unwanted sexual compliment whilst walking down the street is simply inherently worse than getting raped multiple times, then having your offspring ripped away and slaughtered, then having your throat slit open once you can’t produce any more milk, because one happens to a lifeform that contains human DNA and the other one doesn’t, as if that actually means anything to how much suffering is being produced any more than which skin color or set of genitalia you have.
Completely distorted priorities stemming from a psychology that is ironically no better than that of the racists and sexists they like to criticize, it’s the manifestation of their ingroup bias, they are acting no better than the nazis and fascists they take issue with.
Of course, some animals may have a lower capacity to suffer than humans, so if you were forced to throw either an animal of lower sentience or one of higher sentience in a meatgrinder, it would be more rational to throw the animal of lower sentience into it, but this is not an irrational discrimination based on species membership alone.
It’s not more important to protect a human than a cockroach because the human is part of the human species, it’s only more important in the sense that the human has a higher capacity to experience suffering upon being thrown into the meatgrinder, so you throw the cockroach instead of the human infant.
In fact, were the human entirely braindead, or were we talking about a human embryo that is likewise not sentient, some variation of human that is less sentient than cockroach, then at that point it would become the more sensible option to throw said human vegetable in a meatgrinder than the cockroach, it would generate less suffering, better squash a thousand human embryos than one cockroach, it would cause less negative sensation to be produced.
You don’t want to avoid suffering because you have human DNA, just like you don’t want to avoid suffering because you have white skin color, you want to avoid it because suffering is simply an inherently negative experience, that’s why you put on the seatbelt and get anesthesia during a surgery, that’s why both speciesism and racism are a failure, you fully know you wouldn’t want to be that thing you discriminate against when it’s experiencing harm.
Same principle applies to nepotism as well, another more socially acceptable form of bigotry, which is all it ultimately is as well – bigotry, this tendency already starts with your family, because I know that some bigots are so deep into their bigotry that they would answer the typical vegan question of:
- ”Why pet the dog but eat pigs?”
with simply more narrow-minded bigoted rhetoric like:
- ”But, I also treat my child better than every other child, nothing hypocritical about that at all.”
Is the fact that someone’s child is someone’s child really what makes it important for the child to avoid harm though? No.
It is not the fact that your child is your child that makes it bad for the child to suffer, it is bad simply because suffering itself is bad just like water is watery, even if it happens in a different vessel that is not your child, water in a different bucket is still just as wet and watery.
You don’t want whether or not you have a right not to be tortured based on whether or not others are positively biased towards you, so it’s still hypocritical to say that the dog’s value is dependent on you being positively biased towards it.
Or did you only care about avoiding harm as a child because you were of some use to some nepotistic bigot, is that what determined your value? No, of course not, even if your parents died when you were 5 years old, you would’ve still tried to avoid it if someone tried to set you on fire, you wouldn’t have volunteered to be burned alive, saying:
- ”Well, I’m given no extrinsic value by my parents, so therefore, I’m but a worthless object, go ahead and set me on fire all you want!”
As if the whether or not an experience is bad is dependent on how someone else (in this case parents) feel about it, so if the parents think that the child feeling bad is good, then the negative sensation the child experiences is somehow simultaneously positive (a direct contradiction).
The experience generated by an orphan child about which no one cares being burned alive is bad regardless of whether or not some nepotistic bigot thinks it is bad, if someone tried to set you on fire when you were 5 years old, you would have still tried to run away, even if you didn’t have any parents that cared about you.
You should ideally care about your child only because it is a sentient organism capable of suffering, not because it crawled out of your vagina in particular – caring about it only because it crawled out of your vagina is bigotry just like speciesism, which is bigotry, just like racism.
And if you were faced with the meatgrinder scenario again, and your child or 50 other children would have to be thrown into it, then it would be more rational to throw your child into the meatgrinder, because harm to your child is bad because it is harm itself that is bad, not because it is your child, but if 50 were thrown in a meatgrinder instead, it would generate more harm, so if you throw your child in there, it’s less harm, less bad, it would be less bad in that scenario if one of the two things had to happen either way, no matter how offensive to common human intuition that is.
Ultimately any kind of narrow focus on the rights of a subset of sentient organisms is delusional – black, white, men, women, human, animal, etc rights, what makes it an important priority to have rights to be protected from suffering is never being part of those particular ingroups, it’s the capacity to experience suffering itself, once you make it about the group in particular, it becomes non-sensical.
All that matters is that you’re part of the sentient group so to speak, if you’re not, we can’t possibly even harm ”you” by treating ”you” a certain way, you wouldn’t want to face the discrimination farm animals face unless the trait sentience/consciousness/suffering-capacity would be absent in you, it’s not about being human or not human or how attached others are to you.
Counterintuitive conclusions 