The earlier post on “higher foolishness” [1] concluded with a question or conundrum or dilemma: Do contemporary humans owe land acknowledgment to earlier species of Homo, or to such other variants as “Neanderthals, Denisovans, and perhaps other not-yet-known precursors”?
That thought is itself, however, too limited, parochial, self-centered: it exemplifies speciesism.
That word and concept were quite prominent in public discourse in the 1970s after publication of Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals [2]. The book argued that many people would agree that “one should not favour the interests of whites or males over the like interests of blacks or females (and vice versa). Race and sex, in other words, are morally irrelevant” [3]. This view was said to exemplify “the principle of equal consideration of interests”; and since it was a general principle, it must apply to animals as well to humans, since animals obviously have their own “interests”. Not doing so would assert the superiority of humans over animals, which is speciesism, analogous to racism which asserts the superiority of some human races over others. Singer credited priority for all this to his Oxford mentor, Richard Ryder.
These views are less prominent nowadays in public discourse, but they have not gone away by any means. A new, revised edition of Singer’s book [4] was published in 2023; and a year earlier there had appeared Speciesism in Biology and Culture [5] bearing this message: “Speciesism places Homo sapiens at the top of a hierarchy that is often used to justify sacrificing other animals, plants, fungi and microbes for the benefit of humanity. A different perspective is needed to ensure the survival of Earth’s ecosystem and ultimately humans themselves” [6]. The book’s claims go far:
“The 21st-century western world is anthropocentric to an extreme; we adopt unreasonably self-centered and self-serving ideas and lifestyles. Americans consume more energy resources per person than most other nations on Earth and have little concept of how human ecology and population biology interface with global sustainability. We draw upon religion, popular culture, politics, and technology to justify our views and actions, yet remain self-centered because our considerations rarely extend beyond our immediate interests. Stepping upward on the hierarchy from “racism,” “speciesism” likewise refers to the view that unique natural kinds (species) exist and are an important structural element of biodiversity. This ideology manifests in the cultural idea that humans are distinct from and intrinsically superior to other forms of life. It further carries a plurality of implications for how we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, how we view Judeo-Christian religions and their tenets, how we respond to scientific data about social problems such as climate change, and how willing we are to change our actions in the face of evidence” (book’s back cover).
“Many environmental philosophers . . . go further, and argue that the sphere of moral considerability should be recognized to be even wider. . . . it is not only human beings and non-human animals who are the proper recipients of moral concern, but even non-sentient living beings such as trees and non-living entities such as mountains, rivers, and ecosystems deserve moral consideration” [7].
At the same time, some people and organizations talk not about moral consideration but about animal rights [8]. So long as “rights” are interpreted in terms of “ should” and not “must” or legal rights, this sentiment would find fairly widespread favor and agreement, given that many humans extend as much (or more!) love to their animal pets as they do to fellow human beings — pets that include not only the common cats, dogs, and horses, but sometimes also birds or reptiles.
Not so many people would, however, would extend the same consideration to plants. Some would, however. Barbara McClintock was impressed by the range of the behavior plants could exhibit [9]. Plants have even been suggested to possess some degree of sentient behavior [10], sentient feelings, and even possibly a degree of consciousness [11] though Cleve Backster’s claim that plants are capable of extrasensory perception [12] has not acquired supporters. Still, plants do emit biophotons (visible or ultraviolet light) as do animals, and serious physicists are seriously studying the possibility that plants might communicate via biophotons carrying quantum signals [13].
Even fewer people would follow Gary Steiner & Marc Lucht [7] in extending moral consideration to “non-living entities such as mountains, rivers, and ecosystems”; though adherents Buddhism or to animism (for example, Nepalese Sherpas [14]) might or would, since they believe that such “inanimate” objects as rivers and mountains are inhabited by spirits or deities.
Environmental activists have suggested a “rights of nature” (RoN) legal theory, and organized an international association to further their aims, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) which receives some support through the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) even though it is not formally part of the United Nations [16]. Like its cousin, Critical Race Theory (CRT), “rights of nature” legal theory is not based in actual law and illustrates purely virtue-signaling Sciosophy.
The argument that moral consideration is owed to animals as well as humans is clearly high-minded and well-intentioned, as is the associated criticism of speciesism. And yet that very proposition itself presupposes that humans are the highest species, capable of moral considerations that apply to other species which are implicitly less capable of generating such considerations.
An alternative viewpoint might regard humans as just the top predator on Earth, since humans use for their own benefit all available sorts of animal, plant, and inanimate natural resources. That makes obviously valid the principle, if not the details, of Ehrlich’s 1986 book, The Population Bomb [15]: obviously there must be a limit to the number of human beings supportable by the available inanimate as well as animate resources.
Australian Aborigines offer a tangible illustration of how humans can live in a completely sustainable way: they did so for at least 50,000 years. By contrast, it seems inconceivable that the nature and quality of human life attained nowadays by many people in the so-called “developed” or “First World” countries could be supported for every human being by the available resources, when the present global population numbers about 8 billion.
The profligate use of available resources becomes very obviously unsustainable as such innovations as cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence (AI) gobble up staggeringly huge amounts of electrical resources whose generation, and means of generation, could not possibly be met by sustainably renewable resources.
Land acknowledgments, as also arguments against speciesism, are undoubtedly well-intentioned, but they qualify as clear examples of Sciosophy: concepts not derived from tangible realities. As such, they do nothing to lessen the rate at which we approach an apocalypse.
The nature of that apocalypse may of course be different from that predicted by The Population Bomb, perhaps set in motion by the widespread availability of AI techniques that will make it almost impossible to know which voices, statements, videos, “documentaries”, are honest and which are fakes. As of this writing, the media are already able to cite an audio segment indistinguishable from President Biden’s voice saying things that could only benefit the ambitions of former president Trump.
A cynical optimist might respond, however, that the coming tsunami of AI-enabled disinformation and misinformation will not make much difference, given that facts of reality have never been particularly determinative of what humans believe or what they do or how they vote, even in that decreasing minority of countries where votes make a difference.
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[1] https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-higher-foolishness-virtue-signaling
[2] Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, Random House, 1975
[3] https://www.britannica.com/topic/speciesism
[4] Peter Singer, Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed, Harper, 2023
[5] Brian Swartz & Brent D. Mishler (eds.), Speciesism in Biology and Culture: How Human Exceptionalism is Pushing Planetary Boundaries, Springer, 2022;
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-99031-2
[6] Robert Sanders, “Speciesism, like racism, imperils humanity and the planet”;
https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/01/09/speciesism-like-racism-imperils-humanity-and-the-planet
[7] Gary Steiner & Marc Lucht, “Law and Nature: Human, Non-human, and Ecosystem Rights”, ch. 7 in [5], at p. 143
[8] People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), “Why Animal Rights?”; https://www.peta.org/about-peta/why-peta/why-animal-rights
[9] Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism, W. H. Freeman, 1983, pp. 199-200
[10] Paco Calvo, Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence, W. W. Norton,
2023
Miguel Segundo-Ortin & Paco Calvo, “Consciousness and cognition in plants”, WIREs Cognitive Science, 2021; e1578; https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1578
[11] Natalie Lawrence, “The radical new experiments that hint at plant consciousness”, New Scientist, 24 August 2022: “It’s a wild idea, but recent experiments suggest plants may have the ability to learn and make decisions. Are the claims true and if so, what does it mean for our understanding of consciousness and the human mind?”
John Gardiner, “Insights into plant consciousness from neuroscience, physics and mathematics: A role for quasicrystals?”, Plant Signaling & Behavior, 7 (2012) 1049-55
Jon Mallatt,, Michael R. Blatt, Andreas Draguhn, David G. Robinson, & Lincoln Taiz, “Debunking a myth: plant consciousness”, Protoplasma, 258 (2021) 459-7
[12] Cleve Backster, PSI Encyclopedia, https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/cleve-backster;
Peter Tompkins & Christopher Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, Harper & Row, 1973
[13] Thomas Lewton, “The mystery of the quantum lentils”, New Scientist, 16/23 December 2023
[14] Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air: A personal account of the Mount Everest disaster, Anchor (Random House), 1997
[15] Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, Sierra Club/Ballantine Books, 1968
Don’t miss
https://archive.org/details/rogan-experience-282-duesberg
Amazing!