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14, 2004, break-in at animal research laboratories in the U of I’s Spence Laboratories and Seashore Hall cost about $425,000 and temporarily stalled some research. The AnimalLiberation Front claimed responsibility for the attack, in which masked intruders trashed computers and other equipment and stole hundreds of laboratory animals.
If there has been progress in ethics recently it has been through the realization of some ethicists that animal happiness and suffering has to be considered equally with that of human beings. I should draw attention here to the remarkable book AnimalLiberation by Professor Peter Singer of Monash University.
From this perspective, the animal-rights debate seems considerably less urgent and a relatively "safe" area of controversy. One wonders why here (as elsewhere) there is so much concern for the plight of animals and evidently so little for that of humans.
One of the more distressing aspects of the animalliberation movement is the failure of almost all its exponents to draw a sharp distinction between the very different plights (and rights) of wild and domestic animals. Domestic animals are creations of man. But that's not what animal liberationists want.
In setting out to write this paper, my intention was to fill a gap in my book AnimalLiberation. There I argued that the interests of animals ought to be considered equally with our own interests and that from this equality it follows that we ought to become vegetarian.
A third of a century ago, when the modern animal-liberation movement was in its infancy, Martin published an essay entitled “A Critique of Moral Vegetarianism,” Reason Papers (fall 1976): 13-43. On the traditional position, justification of vegetarianism was in terms of animal welfare, happiness, rights, and so on.
The reason that the industry is losing the argument is quite simple: There is no ethical justification for causing an animal to suffer unnecessarily. There is no ethical justification for treating an animal inhumanely for no good reason. There is no ethical justification for killing an animal for no good reason.
From the perspective of the land ethic, the immoral aspect of the factory farm has to do far less with the suffering and killing of nonhuman animals than with the monstrous transformation of living things from an organic to a mechanical mode of being.
In fact, animals used for food do suffer a great deal. Now there is no doubt that the actual treatment of animals used for food is immoral, that animals are made to suffer needlessly. One argument is this: The present practice of treating animals used for food is immoral and should be changed.
KBJ: Nobody in the animal-rights or animal-liberation movement views intelligence as a morally significant property, at least intrinsically. If they have a right to life because they have a self-concept, they surely also have a right to die and the right to suffer pain in the process if they desire. KBJ: Ditto.
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