a question for lots of animal rights people.

Tonight at my Starbucks the following exchange took place between myself and a coworker who prides herself on being vegetarian for reasons related to animal rights.

Amber: Hey, do you have any chicken left for me? (I had just eaten some lemon chicken from pick-up-sticks)

Me: No! Sorry, I ate every last bit of my chicken.

Amber: I’m just kidding silly! Don’t you remember I’m a vegetarian?

Me: Oh yeah. (fake laugh)

And then I got to thinking.

In my experience, by and large, those who are animal rights advocates (and not just people who happen to think animals should be treated fairly, but people who are nearly militant about the subject), also happen to support abortion rights. So would they have a problem with eating veal (or any other organism in its fetal state) if we were able to harvest them without doing harm to any other animals in the process? For the person who thinks human organisms have no rights when in the fetal stage, what would be the consistency in thinking non-human organism do?

Or better yet. Peter Singer (bioethics chair at Princeton, author of Animal Liberation) has argued that it’s completely arbitrary to define life in terms of the born/unborn distinction since the born and unborn organism, biologically speaking, is still one and the same organism. In fact he thinks the only non-arbitrary demarcation between life and no-life (when it comes to the endowment of rights) is consciousness; if an organism is conscious it is an organism which has rights. Part of such reasoning is that an unconscious biological entity can hardly be thought of a thing deserving of rights (think of flagellum and tangerines), and furthermore a biologically unconscious entity cannot be self-conscious and hence cannot even value or reckon its own existence, much less feel pain and experience the world. Such entities, Singer thinks, are not the sort of things which we think have rights. A curious implication of this idea is that the right to abortion currently tolerated to various degrees in nearly the entire western world, and almost the whole world, would also include infanticide, since, as empirical psychology has shown, infants are typically not conscious (or at least exhibit no signs of self-consciousness anyway) until the age of two or so.* In such cases Peter Singer thinks that the reasoning (correct, in his view) concerning the right to abortion combined with the only non-arbitrary criteria of life (with respect to rights) justifies the killing of human organisms before they reach the age of two (or whenever they exhibit self-consciousness). God bless empiricism.

So what if scientists were able to clone zygotes (which already exist in laboratory freezers throughout the world) of all the animals humans eat; then harvest them through the fetal stage and through the early stages of infancy; and then replace their brains with a synthetic silicon one that, unlike the brain, does not produce consciousness; and then have them wirelessly hooked up to computers which neurologically get the animals to do all the things animals usually do (but be not conscious, they would be zombie animals); and then when all is ready and plump we stop their biological life (we would kill them), and then we eat them. Assuming that this is all technologically and economically feasible, would the eating of animals be justified? It seems that on Singer’s terms such animals would be in nothing more than fantastic vegetables and vegetarians are okay with eating vegetables. It seems in such a scenario there would be clearly nothing wrong with eating meat.

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Tangent note:

* I think it’s impossible, on principle, to know whether something is conscious or not from any point of view other than the point of view of the subject whose consciousness is in question (that is, an objective point of view) which would include any and all sciences. To be conscious is never identical to exhibiting conscious behavior, and if something is conscious the only thing that could ever know it is the one who is conscious, or perhaps a mind vicarious enough for such a feat (God’s mind).