Animal Slavery

[Angrboda]

As indicated in my last post, that it is pro-survival is a necessary but not sufficient condition to make something moral.

If biological factors are not sufficient to justify an action as moral, then they're not necessary for this discussion, which regards justifications.

Actually, you haven't gotten to justifications yet. You need to show first that animal suffering and animals generally have moral significance. If they don't, no justification is necessary. That's where the evolutionary argument comes from, from arguments with vegetarians and animal rights advocates who mount an argument from ignorance that a moral division between how we treat animals and how we treat humans cannot be made. My argument shows that it can be made, so the advocate is put in the position of bearing the burden of proving that the lives of animals has moral significance. So far, I haven't seen anyone adequately shoulder that burden. Until they do, the default assumption is that a thing, a rock, a stick, or a chicken, does not have moral significance, and so no justification is needed.

(ETA: This can be made even stronger. The advocates often bring up marginal cases — brain damaged persons and not yet mature children — as examples of beings similar to animals in mental ability, and asks us to explain why we don't treat them, morally, the same as we do animals who are possessed of similar mental abilities. Under my evolutionary foundation, the reason we treat them different is because they are human; no additional rationalization is necessary and the problem of marginal cases disappears. This seems to indicate that we naturally, via intuition, make a distinction between the moral significance of the experiences of animals, and that of humans. This seems to show that "humanness" is the default moral boundary, even if it's not fully clear why and how this is.)