Animal Slavery

[Angrboda]

Another way of saying, "You stubbornly refuse to disagree with my position." Here, I'll help you: replace "real" with "objective." When you keep talking about things being intrinsically special, this cannot include subjective or arbitrary evaluations of worth.

At best, you can say that common evalutions are rooted in instinct. However, so are the desire to rape, the instinct to murder and maim, tendencies toward selfishness, shortsighted misuse of resources, and every other thing we consider bad or wrong about humanity. This is still not a good basis on which to form a moral code.

I would suggest that species-centrism and evolutionary psychology are the proper backbone for a generic, scientific concept of ethics. Obviously, more goes into it than this, and at present, we can't reductively explain all our moral judgements and in what way they differ from our other instincts, for that we'll have to rely on intuition and philosophy for some time to come. You can't simply derive ethics from biology at this time. However, to my mind, it seems to form a reasonable "guard rail" explanation for why we have moral intuitions, and thus can provide a way of excluding certain explanations of morals as rational and correct. Saying, I feel empathy towards animals, therefore I'm going to base my ethics on that feeling, while admirable, does not provide a rational foundation for those desires. (I'd argue that "empathy" is a crude guide to moral behavior among humans and that extending it to animals is a misapplication of it, and my evolutionary rationale justifies this interpretation, but that's another discussion.) Placing ethics on the back of evolutionary biology, a) provides a rational basis for our species-centrism, b) explains the origin of "moral behaviors," and c) is extensible to behaviors of other species (it's biologically a sound framework). As noted, we can't reason from "it evolved" directly to "it's moral," but we can backstop in the other direction, that, if it is counter-productive to our species survival, nature will select against it. (And so should we.)