To speak of animals as "meat" is to reduce them to objects and deny them their subjectivity. Some philosophers argue that since (nonhuman) animals lack language, they lack subjectivity (in the sense of personhood), because without language they have no conception of pronouns, and hence no idea of self or other. Thus self-consciousness is taken as the criterion of personhood, and only persons, so the argument goes, are deserving of rights. However, where does this leave infants and the severely retarded who also lack language and self-consciousness, but who are not denied rights? This appears to be another major self-contradiction within the human supremacist ideology. What matters is that nonhuman animals are conscious and sentient, even if most of them are not self-conscious. As Jeremy Bentham put it, "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"
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November 2017
AuthorI'm Alan (an anagram for "animal"), an ethical vegetarian. Our colour vision can be traced back to our distant relatives, the fruit-eating, tree-dwelling monkeys, who benefited from colour vision when looking for (ripe) fruit.
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