Time for Peaceful Animal Liberationists to Speak Up
El Paso professor Steven Best continues to urge animal liberationists to engage in lawlessness and intimidation on behalf of "animal liberation." Once again, he analogizes animal husbandry to human slavery: "We are abolitionists. We don't want to reform them [vivisectionist companies], we want to wipe them off the face of the earth. We will fight, and die if necessary, to free the slaves." If he succeeds and destroys medical researchers ability or willingness to conduct animal testing in medical research, it would cause untold human suffering by preventing the development of efficacious treatments.
The increasing radical nature of the animal liberation movement and its seeming inability to distinguish between truly evil acts perpetrated against humans and the humane and proper use of animals, betrays a woeful moral obtuseness that is truly disturbing. More on this soon in an extended article, with special attention once again having to be paid to the zealots at PETA.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 7:57 AM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
Peaceful animal liberationists speak up continually--but it is convenient for those who hold Mr. Smith's position to pretend that these people do not exist. So does the title of this blog entry reflect a sincere desire on Mr. Smith's part to interact with their views?
I would like to think that the title is an invitation to dialogue. However, I see Mr. Smith continually flailing away at PETA and episodic ALF acts while apparently never once engaging arguments put forward by philosophers and theologians who are peaceful abolitionists. Until that happens, the false dilemma in Mr. Smith's position remains to invalidate most of his statements about animal liberation.
It is simply not the case, as Mr. Smith implies in his writings, that the only options are support for ALF violence or support for ongoing animal experimentation. So why are the peaceful alternatives never explored?
Feel free to explore them as you condemn ALF and turn in any animal liberation terrorist you know about.
Rounding up "animal liberation terrorists" should be easy since there are so few. By contrast, scrutinizing one's own tradition by engaging scholarly works of moral philosophy is very demanding work. Not many critics of animal liberation are willing to do it.
No overthrow of the case for animal liberation is forthcoming from Mr. Smith's writings, especially if one inclines more toward deontology in ethics instead of teleology. we'll need to look elsewhere to find something to challenge our straightforward ethical stance of not experimenting on animals.
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