But a political philosopher, back in another lifetime.

Of course, Utilitarianism as a philosophy (and most of the other schools of political philosophy that are still framing our political debates and ideas) developed before the current understanding of an organism’s genetic interests — no “selfish gene” ideas were current, even in the age of Social Darwinism. It’s tricky for even a clear thinker to keep a handle on the slippery line between an individual’s self-identified interests, wants, desires and his or her genetic or biological interest in passing on his or her genes. So-called “AR’s” don’t seem to acknowledge the latter.

A radical Utilitarian will pose the issue purely in terms of the being’s cognitive capability as it relates to his capacity for suffering. (A really pure Utilitarian factors both suffering and pleasure into his calculus — “AR” Utilitarians seem to fixate only on pain/suffering, which is why Vicki Hearne titled one of her books Animal Happiness.

So a radical “AR” Utilitarian (in America) denies that a dog, say, or a turkey, has any interests in reproducing per se, since a dog can’t, according to the “AR” form an intention to become a parent and feel emotional pain on being denied that desire.

Further, since there are no individual rights, the “AR” will perform a calculus that “proves” that the life of a domestic animal is so painful and distressing that the best thing of all for a dog, cat, cow, chicken is to never be born. Second best — “euthanasia.” (Argument being that an animal that can’t form a conception of its own mortality cannot “suffer” by being killed, as long as the killing is “painless.”) A poor third, sterilization so that at least no other poor suffering debased creatures come into the world. The pain/distress of the sterilization is more than counterbalanced by the pain/distress spared the never-born descendants.

I won’t go into the kajillion ways to call bullshit on these arguments — just laying them out as best I can without caricaturing them, which is hard for me to do with my teeth gritted.

Hope that helps. I’m always sending people to Bentham for background, but the fact is, it is difficult reading, and especially hard to follow if you don’t have a background in Natural Rights theory, which is what Bentham was arguing against, or any background in the history of the period.

Of course, the AR’s, with the exception of Peter Singer, are mostly unconscious of the pedigree of their philosophy, and not well-educated or bright enough to grok it in context, which is why they so often are incoherent in both words and actions.

Thanks for the clarification and you’re right, of course.

AR is different from AL in many ways.

I wonder how those who follow Utilitarian school of thought reconcile sterilization with that philosophy? Obviously, the preference of an organism (and a species) is to pass its genetic material on to the next generation.

Got confused and thought I was posting on the Rabies Challenge Fund thread!

Well *hopefully* no more feed trial cats will have to die in order for the pet food companies to clean up their act. I’m not of the mind that it was “ok” for Menu Foods to produce poisoned food and feed it to their feed trial cats, even if they didn’t know it was poisoned at the time. But if those cats hadn’t died, the FDA may have been even slower or possibly never gotten on the ball about the problems because they never did take pet owners’ reports into account. We would have then been left with whatever actions each company chose to take on its own, with no pressure from the FDA or Congress. If you want an example of that, take a look at Nutro’s “everything’s fine, move along” denials.
Feed trial cats and dogs are supposed to be there to test palatability and nutrition of the products. But potentially, they *could* serve as the canary in the coalmine if they died from toxic food and therefore alert the companies NOT to put the product on the market. Again, that *could* happen - although it didn’t happen in 2007. But if that ever DID happen, I’d be most grateful, even while I felt sad for the loss of life.

2) What do you propose as the alternative?

Finally, it could be argued that in this case, we are potentially killing dogs and cats every day through overvaccination. So which killing do you think is “better”?

Read Peter Singer (Animal Liberation), and for background, Jeremy Bentham. No “rights” for anybody, any time. Just a calculus of suffering, no boundaries around an individual where others Shall Not Pass no matter what their need or desire.

A Utilitarian philosopher who is a bit easier to live with is John Stuart Mill.

On an entire other note — I once had a bottle of pet shampoo whose label proudly proclaimed that it was “Not Tested on Animals”

Errrr….?

I wanted to take a picture of that label and send it to Consumer Reports for their “Selling It” back page, never got around to it.

‘Leaving animals alone’ is what AR is all about.

And I’m with you on Prop 2 - if I lived in CA I’d be voting for it too.

And you’re right, why anybody interviews Newkirk or mentions Peta anymore in the mass media is completely beyond me.

Maybe you should have ended that sentence after the word “in”. I don’t know what to call what PeTA has there in Virginia, but I sure wouldn’t call it a “shelter”!