An Attempt At Rational Discussion

[vgnwtch]

'You won't find chimps having this debate'
After the demonstrations and court battles, isn't it time to talk calmly about animal testing? We ask two leading philosophers to debate the rights and wrongs

Comments

[friend_of_tofu]

Thanks for posting that! Would you mind if I used the link as well? I'd like to mention it in my journal.

Frustrating in a lot of ways, not least because Malik keeps asserting things which he has no way of knowing. "There isn't a group of chimps sitting around having this debate about the relationships between chimps and humans.", "Non-human animals have an evolutionary past, they don't have a history." and so on. He still seems to believe in human superiority, and that's more of a religious belief than a scientific one (thank you, John Gray!). We've clearly got a long way to go.

[vgnwtch]

That was my thought. The link is to a Guardian article - feel free to use it.

I don't know the wider context for the discussion: was it wider ranging, but edited down for space? Was it very brief? Did the participants get the opportunity to discuss in greater depth, and did they have any say over how the discussion was represented?

[friend_of_tofu]

Ah yes, the last was my thought - did they have any say over editing?

I know it's a freely available article but I did think it might be a bit, well, rude if I just nabbed it without acknowledging that you'd actually got there first! Non-face-to-face etiquette is so tricky.

[vgnwtch]

:)

[the_dilettante]

i'm afraid i couldn't get past a preliminary skim.
there was this line, early on:
So-called speciesists assert something that is factually true: that there is a fundamental moral distinction between humans and other animals
and, err... "morals" aren't "factual".
they're moral.
evaluative.
it might be reasonable to say "it is factually true that there are fundamental differences between humans and other animals that lead to the drawing of moral distinctions", but it's completely illogical to claim a moral distinction as a "fundamental" "factual truth".
or this one:
Had you lived 100 years ago presumably your argument would have been to stop animal experimentation, and all the advances of the last century would not have happened.and he knows what would or would not have happened.... how

[vgnwtch]

As I say above, I'm not certain whether it was edited down, and how much say the participants had over that, but I was struck by how unreasonable Malik sounded.

[turil]

Yeah, I gave up right at the beginning when the animal rights guy lets his opponent set the frame of the argument, rather than setting it himself. If you try to argue a wholistic point in a frame smaller than the whole, you are guaranteed to lose the argument, at least in the minds of those who live in that frame

Reich?

[turil]

In the 80's one of the most influential things I read about animal rights was a book I got out of my local library. All I remember about it was that it was by a guy named Reich, I think... I would love to find this book again, since it was so completely convincing of an argument. Anyone know what book I'm talking about?

[66sect]

I'm a little disappointed the Guardian should print such somewhat recycled philosophical babble; there isn't much new here... Maybe Malik wants to promote his book (which doesn't appear to have anything directly to do with animal rights from the synopsis) - it's disturbingly odd that the Guardian should mention his book and *not* Ryder's just-as-recent "Animal Revolution".

The point at which Malik lost this argument was, for me, the point at which he completely changes the subject when Ryder claims that being born human or animal is entirely down to "accident of nature."

[vgnwtch]

I had been hoping for something more substantial myself. It's a start, though.