Mironov: response to Moura

From:Vladimir Mironov
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 17:38:53 -0500

"The same antagonism that generates abuse, exploitation and slaughter of all non-human life forms.."

From biological point of view anthropocentrism is just "evolutional competitive advantage of human as biological species". From social perspective believe in equality of human and non-human life is basically return to oldest primitive forms of religion. I mean: believe in Mother Earth... sanctuary of animals... do not kill animals and better die from hunger... ants and insects are also must have public lawyers and so on...In Soviet Russia during NAZI occupation of Leningrad people eat not only all possible animals like dogs and cats but even people ... just to survive. So animal killing and eating is not so much question of phylosophy it is also sometimes question of species survival. I think from position of anthropocentrism (which is the essence of all modern dominated forms of religion) at first people must eliminate human hunger in whole planet and then and ... only then... start to talk about animal rights with reasonable sense of morality and social responsibility. Saving animal lives and ignoring demands of human life is probably most counter-productive idea both from scientific evolutional point of view and from position of most popular religions which is based on anthropocentrism. I assume that more advanced religion provides evolutional advantage to humans as species. Thus: going back to more primitive form of religion is regress and not a progress. Finally, many forms of animal right extreme activism are just illegal and un-civilized and unacceptable form of social behavior and activities. I think it is much more moral to help people in Africa who are dying from hunger and low protein diet by providing them with affordable animal meat... then teach then how to be vegetarians.

Vladimir

On Sunday, March 11, 2007 2:18 PM +0000 Leonel Moura wrote:

Mistreatment of non-human life forms is based on anthropocentrism and itsdiscourse of human superiority. And we don't need to go very far to learnthe reasoning of that kind of ìphilosophyî. For example Vladimir Mironov,a panelist of this debate, on an early post (08-03-07) stated that wehumans are the ìmost sophisticated species on this planetî. Conclusionthat he delivers in his paperhttp://www.musc.edu/bioprinting/html/bioprinting_art.htmlwhere among other things we can read:" What makes us humans? Humans, according to definition, are not animals.One can call humans bio-social creatures, but what makes us reallydifferent from animals? The answer is very simple: humans have somethingthat animals do not. Animals do not have religion, art, science andtechnology. Shortly speaking, animals do not have culture. "Humans are not animals? Curious... Bio-social? What about ants? Althoughit is not clear if (non-human) animals have religion, which to be truewould be very fortunate for them, or science which would be a temporarysetback in evolution, it is evident that many of them have behaviors andskills that easily can be consider as art and technology. Anyway the factthat some people, and a lot of them, need to demonstrate that we areunique and superior just reveals a profound and dangerous antagonism inregard to life in general. The same antagonism that generates abuse,exploitation and slaughter of all non-human life forms. Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, just to mention a well known few, explain brilliantly the process.

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