James McWilliams: Car Grill Carnage and Moral Consideration

[Spencer Lo]

"If you drive a car, or benefit from someone else’s driving, you tacitly accept the fact that you will kill untold numbers of insects as a matter of course. Car grill carnage, of course, is just one example among hundreds I might have chosen. We live with this reality not because we like it, but because we place the convenience of driving over the worth of insect life. By living as we do in the world, we accept insect death as collateral damage to human mobility in the twenty-first century. Proof that we do not apply equal moral consideration to all animals is that fact that we would never brook this trade-off if every time we drove untold numbers of people, or apes, or dogs were run over as collateral damage. Nor would we stop eating because farmers use pesticides, organic or otherwise, to grow our kale. And so on.

Making this distinction, of course, lands in me some roiling philosophical waters–ones that ethical vegans need to negotiate. After all, by admitting that I make changes in my behavior to respect the moral worth of farm and lab animals but do not make changes in my behavior to respect the supposed moral worth of insects forces me to explain why one animal deserves moral consideration and the other does not. This question, of course, is at the core of animal rights philosophy."

Full post here (along with Professor Gary Francione's comments): http://james-mcwilliams.com/?p=2194

I believe McWilliams raises important and difficult issues in his piece.