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One of the most counter-intuitive and abhorrent, yet strangely logically airtight arguments in modern-day ethics is Peter Singer\u2019s argument for why, if we are okay with killing and experimenting with animals, we should then be okay with experimenting on mentally handicapped humans and killing babies.<\/span><\/p>\n Of course killing and experimenting on infants and the disabled are absolute atrocities and I reject them out of hand, as I do their analog to slaughtering cattle, but his fleshed out argument is actually pretty solid if you accept the premises.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Conclusion: It is no more unethical to torture or kill a human being than an animal.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Some people might be tempted to agree offhand, fair enough, but to be clear that would require you biting the bullet of very literally equating, say, animal farms to Auschwitz (and there are some people that do indeed do that).<\/p>\n Some try to point to self-awareness as being the defining characteristic that makes hurting humans worse, but in response Singer points out that newborns and some cognitively disabled adults are not self-aware, so if we are okay, say, testing makeup safety by smearing it on the eyeballs of chimps we should be okay doing so with newborns and cognitively disabled humans. <\/span>His arguments (which he fully develops in book-length works), basically forces us into a corner where we have to engage in \u201cspecial pleading\u201d to make the case that humans are special without recourse to some objective standard for why we are.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And from a secular perspective I think he\u2019s basically right. From a Judeo-Christian perspective we can always pull out an appeal to the Bible that humans are explicitly given dominion over all the other animals, and there\u2019s something to that even if that’s not enough substance to quite get us there. However, Latter-day Saint theology has a more interwoven <\/span>deus ex machina<\/span><\/i> that gets us out of that corner\u2013humans are special because we are God-creatures. In a way that is more literal and concrete than it is in other Judeo-Christian traditions, God is a literal <\/span>Homo sapiens<\/span><\/i>. That is not to say that other animals have their own versions of exaltation, and I think the speculative theology in that direction has something to it, but we are the only ones that are the children of Gods and can ourselves become Gods. We are, in fact, fundamentally superior, even though some chimps are smarter than some humans. And ultimately that is what justifies our own speciesism.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the most counter-intuitive and abhorrent, yet strangely logically airtight arguments in modern-day ethics is Peter Singer\u2019s argument for why, if we are okay with killing and experimenting with animals, we should then be okay with experimenting on mentally handicapped humans and killing babies. Of course killing and experimenting on infants and the disabled are absolute atrocities and I reject them out of hand, as I do their analog to slaughtering cattle, but his fleshed out argument is actually pretty solid if you accept the premises.\u00a0 We don\u2019t consider it any less atrocious to torture a dumber human being than a smarter one. What makes it atrocious is that we are applying pain to a conscious being that can feel it.\u00a0 The thing that separates us from animals is our intelligence.\u00a0 Conclusion: It is no more unethical to torture or kill a human being than an animal.\u00a0 Some people might be tempted to agree offhand, fair enough, but to be clear that would require you biting the bullet of very literally equating, say, animal farms to Auschwitz (and there are some people that do indeed do that). Some try to point to self-awareness as being the defining characteristic that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":49520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/b6f58495-4e59-4197-ba30-dfe182953566.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49518"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49557,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49518\/revisions\/49557"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n