To assign a being moral standing is to relinquish upon that living creature the ability to have rights, insofar that said being might have “interests and welfare”. To base such an important aspect of character and existence just based upon debatable characteristics of self is a slippery slope, and to specifically define one’s right to moral standing to the degree and level of intelligence a being might possess is a self-defeating concept.
Many would base the ability to treat a living thing inhumanely upon the presence of moral standing, in the sense that to mutilate with the intention to harvest and sell the body parts of a young male human is extremely morally wrong, but to commit this same act with a young male deer is looked upon as “normal”.
But who are we to define normal when everything in this morally grey world is subjective? It is the nature of life, of the greater world around us to be interpretable and to try and force great moral quandaries such as the ability to possess moral standing into realms of what qualities one might possess is a highly controversial space to explore.
By the understanding of most, the possession of moral standing is not as simple as humans and then everything other living being. The average individual assign’s different levels of moral standing to different animals, in the sense that a human would sooner senselessly butcher a cow than a kitten.
We are inclined as a species to possess certain moral biases that cloud our judgment of what might be our right as humans to pursue the inhumane treatment of creatures just based on our own opinions while losing sight of the very fact of why we might be allowed to possess this opinion at all.
Who are we, despite our intelligence, to deem what species might be butchered and harvested to extinction, whereas others might be protected? In the realm of intelligence, there is far less line of delineation between the level of intelligence between a companion dog and a domesticated cow than between human and dog, and yet we would sooner consume the cow while the very idea of butchering the dog disgusts us.
If an animal is only allowed to be farmed and treated inhumanely insofar as they lack the proper intellect, what might prevent us from butchering the mentally handicapped human youth that otherwise serves no purpose?
The young humans that are so scarred by their flawed genetics that they never will be able to experience existence as a human, in that their level of intellect will forever remain at the level of what we might call an “animal”. What is protecting these human individuals other than the social stigma against what otherwise might be known as cannibalism?
If we are to judge what is morally right based only upon foundations of knowledge, in that the possession of adequate knowledge prevents a living thing from inhumane treatment, then how can we look forward and earnestly push for the mass extermination of farm animals while giving a blind eye to the low intellect beings that inhabit the wider world.
How might we protect certain species of animal and assign moral standing to said animals despite their low capacity for intelligence, while we continue to contribute to the mass killing of farm animals?
We stand here as if we are adequate judges of what is right and wrong, and yet we judge what animals we might kill only on the basis of such animalistic urges and tendencies such as the pleasure we derive from certain meats, kill only due to our own propensity to desire what might taste the best.
To try and base whether it is morally permissible to kill a living thing cannot be based upon any simple concept such as a creature’s capacity for intellect. In the eternal words of Jeremy Bentham on the debate of when inhumane treatment of any living thing is morally wrong, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”
It is human nature to get wrapped up in moral quandaries which we can scarcely fathom, and yet we tend to try and present simple answers which truly do not answer anything at all. These greater debates that ravage on a cosmological scale are unanswerable to an extent, in that they are defined by their wholly subjective nature.
The only thing that is truly clear is that we cannot attempt to ascertain the moral standing of a creature based upon solely such simple qualities as the possession of intellect, in that this is an empty answer by how it presents more moral quandaries than it answers.
If we might decide to kill a pig raises no moral issue due to its absence of intellect, then we must as contemporary philosophers apply this same logic to the case of a human who possesses the same level of intellect (or none). To ask these greater questions might seem pointless, but to question, the very ideals and thought processes upon which humanity is built is the very process by which we as a species evolve.
A belief system can not only apply in certain situations with exceptions. To be undebatable it must be universal in its appliance, and there are very few undebatable aspects of existence. We as humans often view ourselves as gods, insofar as it is human nature to view oneself as the sun by which the greater universe revolves.
We are a species that would be fast to debate the metrics by which we can judge a creature’s moral standing, or how we might ascertain said creature’s right to free will. But we would rarely step back and question IF we should be making these decisions in the first place. We are not gods, but a species playing at god, quick to decimate animal populations for pleasure but blind to the very animalistic qualities that drive us to make these decisions.
