Big Think Interview With Dale Jamieson | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Dale Jamieson

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A conversation with the NYU Professor of Environmental Studies, Philosophy and Law.

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Dale Jamieson:

Dale Jamieson joined the NYU faculty in Spring, 2004, from Carleton rnCollege, where he was Henry R. Luce Professor in Human Dimensions of rnGlobal Change. Previously he was Professor of Philosophy at the rnUniversity of Colorado, Boulder, where he was the only faculty member torn have won both the Dean's award for research in the social sciences and rnthe Chancellor's award for research in the humanities. He has also heldrn visiting positions at Cornell, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford and Monash. rn

rnProfessor Jamieson's most recent book is Morality’s Progress: Essays rnon Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford, 2002). Hern is also the editor or co-editor of seven books, most recently A rnCompanion to Environmental Philosophy (Blackwell, 2001), and Singerrn and his Critics (Blackwell, 1999), named by Choice as one ofrn the outstanding academic books of 1999. He has also published more thanrn eighty articles and book chapters. His research has been funded by thern Ethics and Values Studies Program of the National Science Foundation, rnthe US Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the rnHumanities, and the Office of Global Programs in the National rnAtmospheric and Aeronautics Administration. He is on the editorial boardrn of such journals as Environmental Ethics; Environmental rnValues; Science, Techology and Human Values; Science and rnEngineering Ethics; the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare; rnand The Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. rnrn

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TRANSCRIPT:

Dale Jamieson: My name is Dale Jamieson, I’m Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at New York University and affiliated Professor of Law in the New York University Law School.

Question: Why should we care about animals?

Dale Jamieson:I think in a way, the main argument for why we should have moral concern for animals really comes from the failure of other arguments that are supposed to show that we should only be concerned about human beings. And the problem is that for almost any feature of humanity that you can name, whether it’s the ability to suffer, whether it’s the capacity to reason, whether it’s having lives that can go better or worse, there are at least some other non-human animals that have all of these features as well. So to exclude non-human animals from the range of moral concern but to include all humans, just seems morally arbitrary. And it was really that recognition that started to come to prominence with the publication of Peter Singer’s book, “Animal Liberation” but in fact had been in the literature really for centuries before that in the works of fairly obscure philosophers and people who are advocating social change but when the insight became prominent then really the field of animal ethics began to take off

Question: What are some arguments against animal rights?

Dale Jamieson: That’s a really difficult question because an enormous body of literature has been produced since the publication of Singer’s book, “Animal Liberation” back in 1975 and most of the responses to this literature have been remarkably weak-kneed I must say. For example, people talk about the idea of special relationships, that is, the morality only really binds people who stand in some kind of contractual relationship with each other but in fact if you take that seriously as a criteria of when we have a moral relationship then it’s hard to see why we would have moral obligations to strangers for example or people who live across the sea from us but yet, every decent person believes that we do.

And in fact most of us do have special relationships with non-human animals. New Yorkers love their dogs and people who live in other places tend to have relationships with other kinds of animals as well. That’s just one example but I have to say that it’s really been a great failure that more compelling counter-arguments have been raised to the animal liberationist views. In fact, most of the interesting arguments that go on philosophically go on among people,

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