Euthanasia and Human Superiority

Whenever I'm in the process of writing a philosophy paper my mind is almost continually sorting and sifting through ideas. At times these ideas are easy to articulate. Other times, not so much.

One of the thoughts I've had lately is of the second variety. I'm going to try to sift through it here.

Human superiority is the underlying prejudice used to "justify" our exploiting and killing animals. Most of the time this prejudice is easily spotted. For example, my recent paper on John Rawls and Animals, Animals Behind the Veil exposes this prejudice in the form of "rationality." Rawls, and others like him, dismiss animals from the moral community based on the fact that most human animals are rational and at least most nonhuman animals are not. Ergo, humans are superior to animals by virtue of their ability to do calculus. Of course this is as morally arbitrary as asserting that white humans are superior to black humans by virtue of skin pigmentation or men are superior to women by virtue of their genitalia, but you get the idea. Other justifications used to exploit and kill animals include the idea that they don't have a soul (spiritual superiority) or that they don't feel pain (at least not in the same way that humans do.) The list goes on...

In all of this, human life is deemed more valuable than animal life, hands down, case closed. This is obviously expressed in action by our eating animals, enslaving them, torturing them etc. But one of the less obvious ways this prejudice is expressed is in the dominant view about euthanasia.

I remember a period when Dr. Jack Kevorkian was in the news daily. His view, and subsequent illegal activity, on human euthanasia was considered extreme and morally abhorrent. But why? When I stop to think about his view in relationship to the dominant view on animal euthanasia, I am left concluding that the prejudice of human superiority has once again reared its ugly head. But this seems counter intuitive at first glance.

How can I assert that allowing "merciful" euthanasia for animals is somehow speciesist and wrong. Well, I'm not settled on whether it's wrong or not (though my first instinct is that it is, but with qualification*) but I am sure that the fact that we are abhorred by human euthanasia and not animal euthanasia reveals just how much more human life is valued over animal life.

Tyrone Kamienski - My puppity-doo moments after his birth.

Most of us who have shared our lives with companion animals have made the decision to euthanize one or more of them. This is heart wrenching at best. What makes it even more difficult, at least for me, is the fact that I couldn't ask them if this is what they wanted? Dr. Kevorkian's patients were all of sound mind when making the decision to end their own lives. I believe they had every right to do this. But animals are incapable of letting us know if they would prefer to die. We are left with making an analogical inference based on our own experience with pain. This fact is, in itself, ironic since so many people assert that animal pain either doesn't exist at all, or is at least less relevant than human pain. But in any case, it is unclear whether a sick or infirm animal wants to die or not.*

The fact that we have a "right" to kill animals for any reason, but we don't have the right to kill humans (including a right to kill ourselves!) makes it clear how much more we value human life over animal life. This is true even if a human wants to die and an animal clearly does not, as in the case of slaughter houses. 

Tyrone was euthanized in 2012 - RIP Puppity-doo

I'm not sure I'm done with this idea yet, but this is a good start. In the end it's just more of our moral schizophrenia with regard to animals.