Why "mysterious ways" don't matter.

[Jenny A]

Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! ... The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism#...us_mind.22

It is true that if all the different species ranging from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees were still extant, that we would have a hard time defining where humanity ends and the next species of apes begins. Any point we chose would be arbitrary. But I don't agree with Dawkins that this necessarily means we should treat apes like humans. This is because I'm quite sure that wherever we drew that arbitrary line, it would be somewhere this side of the chimpanzee.

Dawkins admits that his argument is really (like many moral arguments) emotional and not scientific. If you're are interested, here's his explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQv19SWl_SA

What I do agree is that gratuitous cruelty to animals is wrong and that the degree of wrongness increases with the ability of the animal to think and feel emotion. If you ask me why I'll give you two explanations. The first is emotional. The more like me an animal is the more it elicits my empathy. It is empathy that drives much of human morality including mine. Second, it is dangerous to blunt human empathy, because empathy is what underpins our morality. Start torturing feeling thinking beings and you numb your empathy. People with blunted empathy are dangerous to other people.