(March 26, 2014 at 2:28 pm)sven Wrote: I once ended up at a seminar about animal ethics, partly by chance. In the end one of the panelists expressed the view that we have the right to exploit animals, because we have assumed the right to do this. (Well, that was the gist of it. He had more explanations, but I won't tire you with them here)
Like I said, convenience. To the extent that humans can ease the suffering of animals, we do so... as long as it doesn't deprive us of something we want or need (food, clothes, entertainment, plowed fields, etc). I don't think of it as slavery because when I think of that term I think of people acting against people, not animals. But you could make a case that it comes down to us deciding that we're sufficiently above other creatures so as to treat them in such a manner.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
