Clarifications on “What Is Speciesism?”

[Oscar Horta]

In a recent post, Paul Hansen has presented several objections to the account of speciesism I present in my paper “What Is Speciesism?” (which can be found in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 23 (3), 243-266 and can be read and downloaded here). [*]

I am honored by the attention that Hansen has given to my paper, and want to thank him for his challenging criticisms, which provides me the opportunity of further clarifying the views expressed in the paper. I am also very thankful to Animal Rights Zone for providing a forum in which these issues can be discussed.

Hansen’s interesting  objections cover several issues, which I will examine and respond to in turn. First, I will examine those objections that are related to my examination of different moral positions. Second, I will examine the objections that have to do with definitions of the concepts I use.

You can also download these clarifications as a pdf file here.

 

Different speciesist positions

Hansen says that in “What Is Speciesism?” I fail “to accommodate the wide spectrum of behavioral responses (from mild to moderate to radical) in defense of animals”.

This is a good opportunity to clarify an important point made in the paper. In it, there’s a section called “Simple and Combined Speciesist Positions” (pp. 254-57 in the published version of the paper), which actually has the purpose of explaining this. Let me explain my theory regarding this, as I present it in the paper.

Speciesism distinguishes between two different kinds of individuals: (1) those who belong to a certain species, who are morally considered; and (2) those who do not, who aren’t morally considered. So, if the only criterion for respecting individuals were speciesism, those who would be discriminated against by it would receive no consideration whatsoever. They wouldn’t count at all. Hence, those who maintain a simple speciesist position have no respect at all for those they discriminate against. So they accept whatever is done to them. They not only oppose animal equality, they even oppose animal welfare.

Some people have simple speciesist views. However, most people don’t. Most people combine such speciesist views with other reasons, according to which those who are discriminated against by speciesism can nevertheless be respected to some extent. This is what happens in an example Hansen presents. Hansen says that “many might be appalled at the cruelty in CAFOs, but not object to harvesting honey even though it ‘belongs to the bees’ or using oxen or horses as ‘work animals’ ”.

Exactly! This happens very often. These people hold what I’ve called a combined speciesist position. They accept using nonhumans for purposes for which they would never use human beings (unless they accepted human slavery, of course). So they clearly discriminate against those who aren’t members of the human species. That is, they are speciesist. However, they also defend that nonhuman animals should be respected to some extent. This is the reason why they reject factory farming. So speciesism is not the only view they hold. Their position is a combination of speciesism and another view, that is, one which allows for respect for nonhuman animals.

So there are basically two simple views we may hold: simple speciesism and nonspeciesism. Apart from these views, we may also hold a combination of speciesism with other views. Among animal defenders, some of them defend a fully nonspeciesist view, actually an antispeciesist view. Others don’t do this: they defend nonhuman animals to some extent, in fact some of them do so to the extent that they reject their exploitation, but still discriminate against them.

 

Antispeciesism and animal rights

In relation to the question of the different speciesist positions that may be, there’s something else I need to point out. Hansen points out: “Horta defines ‘speciesism’ so broadly that even Tom Regan’s position (though admittedly problematic) turns out to be speciesist, because Regan’s criteria favor mammals or ‘higher’ animals. Yet, as most everyone knows, Regan has been a staunch defender of animal rights since his seminal work was published in 1983”.

I certainly agree that Regan is a staunch defender of animal rights (and not only since the publication of The Case in 1983, he had already published “The Moral Status of Animals” in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy in 1975). However, I also think that, unfortunately, his position regarding the lifeboat scenariot is speciesist. In my view, his claim that a million dogs should be sent to death to save one human life is untenable unless we defend a speciesist position.

But there is no contradiction here. As I pointed out once at the Live Chat at ARZone, we must distinguish clearly between what ‘animal rights’ and ‘antispeciesism’ mean. Let me copy here what I said then (with some added comments):

The term ‘animal rights’ is sometimes used in philosophical debates to name the view that moral rights exist and that all sentient animals have them. It’s been mainly used, though, to mean all sentient animals should have legal rights. So you can perfectly defend animal rights, that is, legal animal rights even if you don’t believe that moral rights exist.

On the prevailing conception of what having rights means, a rights holder can’t be used as property. So if you’re for animal rights then you must defend that the use of animals has to be abolished, although you won’t stop here, because if animals have rights, then they should also be protected against other things apart from their exploitation by humans. Human rights not only protect you against slavery. The same happens with animal rights.

However, you can respect someone’s rights yet discriminate against her.

A racist individual doesn’t violate the rights of black people if he tries to convince his daughter not to marry black men. But that’s racist and morally unacceptable. Equally, you can respect animal rights yet discriminate against nonhuman animals.

For instance, a vegan speciesist wouldn’t violate the rights of animals by deciding to donate to charities that help humans rather than helping animals because he thinks that humans count for more due to his speciesist attitude. [This is something very common, there are many vegans who do much more to help humans than to help nonhuman animals.]

Antispeciesism is the opposition (or the struggle against) the discrimination of those who don’t belong to a certain species. Antispeciesism opposes all discrimination of nonhuman animals, even if it’s carried out while respecting their rights.

I think we should reject speciesism, and I think speciesism is the key term to understand the current relation between humans and other animals.

So being for animal rights is perfectly compatible with accepting some combined speciesist position. In my view, we should oppose any such view and defend antispeciesism, which in practice means defending that nonhuman animals be protected by legal rights, but also that they shouldn’t be discriminated against in any way. The abolition of slavery didn’t mean the end of racism. There’s been two hundred years since Haiti and Mexico led the way to such abolition, yet racism is still very much alive all around the world. This is a lesson antispeciesists must learn.

 

Conflicts of interests: Is there such thing as “moral subjecthood”?

Hansen also points out, in passing, that “our reflective moral intuitions generally lead us to believe “that ‘moral subjecthood’ is almost certainly a matter of degree—corresponding roughly to a hierarchy of conscious self-awareness in the animal kingdom”.

I disagree with this view. I think we should respect everyone who has interests, and that the attention that we should give to them must depend on the weight of those interests, rather than with any hierarchy. So if one animal is in terrible pain and another one is suffering some mild pain, and I can help one of them but not both, I think I should help the first one, regardless of anything else. In making this decision I don’t need to know the species to which these two animals belong.

What if the question is not about relieving the suffering of some animals, but about saving their lives? There are two possible views about this that are both compatible with a nonspeciesist position. Some people think anyone who is alive loses the same by dying, so we should toss a coin. That’s a noncomparative view regarding the interest in living. But you can also hold a nonspeciesist comparative view regarding the interest in living. Suppose you have to decide whether to save the life of an old man, who is, say, 90, and of a child who is 10. You may think that the old man has lived so far much more than the child, and that he’s likely to live less than the child in the future. Given this, according to a comparative view, you should save the child. And this is so regardless of the species. This view entails also that if you should choose between saving this 90 year old human or, say, a 10 year old elephant, you should save the elephant.

But note that none of this has to do with anything such as different “moral status” or “moral subjecthood”. It just has to do with weighing the interests of those involved in the decision we must make. Suppose that in the example, the question were not about saving the life of the young elephant and the old man, but about relieving one of them from some pain. Suppose we can just help one of them, and the elephant is about to suffer some minor injury which would cause her some mild pain and the old man is about to suffer a serious injury which would cause him terrible pain. In that case, you should help the old man. (If the situation were the opposite one, and the elephant were to suffer the serious injury and the man were to suffer the minor one, we should help the elephant).

At any rate, let me state clearly that the question of “who should be saved” in cases such as these has in itself nothing to do with the question of speciesism. I’ve presented two views (a noncomparative one and a comparative one) that are both compatible with a nonspeciesist position. In fact, there are many views regarding what to do in these cases that are perfectly compatible with speciesism and with nonspeciesism. The purpose of the paper “What Is Speciesism?” is not, in any way, to deal with those views, but, simply, to explain what speciesism is. (This is the reason why I will not address here other points that Hansen makes in his post, such as those having to do with religion, since they don’t deal with the content of the paper).

In light of this, we may see the response I can give to Hansen when he points out this: “Horta fails to address the ‘priority problem’—that is, the necessity of favoring one individual over another when conflicts of interest arise, or so-called ‘lifeboat crises’ ”.

As I said, the purpose of the paper is to clarify the concept of speciesism. In the paper I also deal with some related issues, but just to the extent that they are closely related to what speciesism is. So the paper doesn’t attempt to be an account of all the different practical problems we may find. In the paper I certainly didn’t address the question Hansen mentions here, just as I didn’t address many other problems in the paper. But that was not a mistake. Simply, those issues are not what the paper was intended to deal with. Anyway, I have explained above some ways in which we may think we should act when we face conflicts of interests. As I said, there isn’t a single response we may give from a nonspeciesist viewpoint. Rather, we may hold different views regarding this which are perfectly compatible with a nonspeciesist position.

Hansen also points out: “[e]ven the most ardent AR defender will save his mother before his dog from a fire, or favor his dog over the ants or worms in his back yard. If this is ‘relational speciesism’, then everyone is guilty”.

First of all, I’d say that it’s never clear what all AR defenders would do. We never know. Having said this, I’d point out that if someone would always save a human (any human) over a nonhuman animal (any nonhuman animal), then that person would be speciesist. As I said above, this doesn’t mean that in order to avoid being speciesist in such cases one should toss a coin. One may well engage in a comparison of who we think would be more affected by death (that is, by her or his own death), but that comparison may imply that we should save some nonhumans over some humans. Now, Hansen is presenting a different criterion here, according to which, we should save the lives of those we have special relations with (or, at least, we would be justified in doing so). This idea, in itself, it’s not speciesist. Note that many people have close relationships with some nonhuman animals. If the criterion Hansen is presenting here is right, all these people would be fully justified in saving the nonhuman animals whom they love, rather than a human being they don’t know. If someone says they would be doing something wrong, because they should save the human first, then that person would be speciesist. Moreover, that person would be rejecting the very idea Hansen seems to be defending here (that we are justified in saving those we love), because that person would be denying that those who save the animals they love would be justified in doing so.

 

What is anthropocentrism?

Hansen argues that my definition of anthropocentrism is too restricted. He says that I define anthropocentrism as speciesism against nonhuman animals. He, however, thinks we can use the term ‘anthropocentrism’ in a different way. He says anthropocentrism “represents a mere point of view—that of the human agent—in the same benign sense that ‘felinism’ may be said to represent a cat’s point of view”.

This needs some clarifications. I basically agree that we can use the term anthropocentrism to name views that aren’t moral ones. In fact, I had this in mind when I wrote this in the paper (in p. 258):

“Anthropocentrism” denotes, in general, the view that considers humans as central. Given this, it can be used in the moral arena to indicate the view that considers the satisfaction of human interests as central.

My intention here was to draw a distinction between anthropocentrism “in general” and anthropocentrism in the moral arena. Since the paper deals with moral concepts, I assumed that it would be understood that in the paper I just referred to moral anthropocentrism, and not to other fields in which the term anthropocentrism is used (moreover, as I mention in note 19 in the paper, the paper deals with the concept of anthropocentrism as it is used when it comes to the problem of which beings are morally considerable; there are other moral problems with regards to which the term ‘anthropocentrism’ has been used that the paper doesn’t examine). Hansen’s critique has shown to me that I should have made this much clearer in the paper.

So yes, when we don’t talk about moral questions, but about the way we see things, there’s a certain concept of anthropocentrism we may use. Such concept, which we may call ‘epistemic anthropocentrism’, would denote the idea that we can only see things from a human view point and thus can’t properly understand the viewpoint other animals may have. This appears to be Hansen’s view. I don’t claim this idea is right, neither do I claim it’s wrong, I just want to point out here that it’s different from moral anthropocentrism. Whether you are an epistemic anthropocentrist or not is irrelevant for whether you defend moral anthropocentrism. Although I think that having a speciesist attitude may drive one to have a certain epistemic anthropocentrist position, the two views do not necessarily come together. Accepting Hansen’s view as regards the way we can see things is perfectly compatible with both the defense and the rejection of discrimination against nonhuman animals. Just as it is rejecting Hansen’s view. “What Is Speciesism?” deals with moral concepts, so it tackles moral anthropocentrism.

Incidentally, note also that the paper doesn’t assume from the beginning that anthropocentrism is a form of speciesism. Part of it examines the question of whether this is so or not (pages 261-64 in the published version of the paper). Only after an examination of the arguments that can be presented in defense of anthropocentrism the paper concludes that none of them is successful, which means that anthropocentrism is unjustified, and thus, is a form of speciesism. I say more on why the lack of justification is key for this in the next section.

 

Discrimination and justification

Hansen also points out this: “Horta claims that anthropocentrism, like speciesism, engages in ‘unjustified discrimination’. My brief reply is that discrimination based on harmability (not species membership) is routinely and necessarily done: e.g., we favor people and mammals over spiders and mosquitos. Discrimination is not always a pejorative term. Nobody accuses predatory animals of ‘speciesism’ when they kill their prey; neither do we hold them morally praiseworthy or blameworthy for their actions”.

I disagree with this criticism on the basis of the definition of discrimination on which my conception of speciesism is based, which is explicitly defended in the paper. It’s this one:

 x discriminated against = df x is treated or considered in a way that is unjustifiably disadvantageous with respect to some y

In other words:

To be discriminated against is to be treated or considered in a way that is unjustifiably disadvantageous with respect to someone else.

Treating or considering someone in a disadvantageous way is discrimination if and only if it is unjustified. If it’s justified, it’s not discrimination. So, if a man and a woman are paid differently for the same job because of their sex, that’s discriminatory. If they are paid differently because the man is working 40 hours and the woman is working 30 hours, then that’s not discriminatory.

This is the reason why in order to be a form of discrimination, any position which treats in a disadvantageous way those who do not belong to a certain species must be unjustified.

Moreover, it’s not discriminatory to not consider the interests of entities that aren’t sentient. The reason is that those entities simply have no interests to take into account.

 

The definition of speciesism

In the previous section I’ve mentioned the definition of speciesism I defend. In my view, speciesism, as a moral position, is the discrimination of nonhuman animals. More technically, in the paper I said (p. 247) that  “[s]peciesism is the unjustified disadvantageous consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to one or more particular species”. Hansen is not satisfied with my definition of speciesism. He proposes an alternative definition of this concept. He says that what we should label as speciesist are “clear cases of harm and oppression based on [biological] class differences that are morally irrelevant”.

I see two problems with this definition.

First, there are [biological] classes which are morally irrelevant and are different from species. Sex, for instance, is one. So, according to this definition, sexist discrimination would be an instance of speciesism, which is obviously not the case.

Second, harmful discrimination is just an instance of discrimination. Let me explain this. Suppose someone donates to children charities but donates less to those charities which take care of black children because he dislikes black people. That person would be racist, even though by acting in this way he wouldn’t be harming anyone, but actually benefiting both black and white children (he’d just benefit black children less). So there are many instances of discrimination (and, in particular, of speciesism) that aren’t instances of harm or oppression. Suppose someone who always stops if she sees a human being who has been injured in a car crash and needs help. Suppose, though, that he never stops when he finds nonhuman animals in those situations, because they aren’t human. Suppose she’s vegan. She wouldn’t be oppressing nonhumans. However, that person would be speciesist, because she’d be discriminating against those who don’t belong to the human species.

So that’s basically all I’d say as regards the objections presented by Paul Hansen, I think. Let me express again my gratitude again to him for his very interesting notes and challenging objections to the paper, as well as to Animal Rights Zone. I hope Hansen’s critique and my response may have helped the readers to understand better the points made in “What Is Speciesism?”

[Oscar Horta]

Hi Roger!

Thanks for your comment. Yes, I see your point, it’s a very reasonable one. Your claim is that it may be that Regan actually rejects a speciesist viewpoint but he just avoids saying explicitly what his view is in order not to look too radical, the result being that his views appear to be speciesist while they aren’t. Fair enough, I agree this may be a possibility, and it would be great if this were so! I’d obviously prefer if he said explicitly so there’s no confusion regarding his view. But, of course, I’ll be happy anyway if I learned that Regan’s view isn’t speciesist at all, and that I’ve been misled by his cautiousness. If this were so, I’ll still reject completely the view that we may sacrifize millions to save one, but will find an advantage the fact that he isn’t speciesist regarding the application of this principle.

 

Anyway, for now we just have what he has actually written, which appears to entail a distinction regarding how humans and nonhumans should be treated. As a matter of fact, regarding your question, Regan wrote again on this two decades after the initial publication of The Case. He came back to this issue in the new preface of the 2nd ed. of The Case, in 2004. He claimed then that despite all the criticism he still thinks we should sacrifize any number of dogs for the sake of just one human (p. xxix).

 

In the same text, in p. xxxiii he claims that he rejects speciesism and accepts that death may be more harmful for some humans than for some nonhumans. But the example he uses to explain this is that of a comatose human (it seems we have to assume he’s someone who has lost consciousness irreversible). That is, he has in mind an individual who has already lost anything that death could have taken out from her or his life. So, although the example shows he doesn’t support the “sanctity of human life” view, it doesn’t show clearly way if he’s prepared to go as far as he goes in the case of nonhumans when humans are involved.

 

I don’t remember having read any other text from Regan in which he addresses this issue apart from this one. If someone has some quotation from him in which he tackles this an presents clearly an antiespeciesist viewpoint, please share it! I’d love to see that Regan has said something more explicit about this elsewhere.

 

I’d understand he has pragmatic reasons not to say explicitly that he’s prepared to sacrifize, say, millions of very sick humans to save one dog. That is, may people would find that totally unacceptable.

 

But I also think that if that’s so, there are also pragmatic reasons for him not to say he’s willing to sacrifize millions of dogs for the sake of a human being. That is, that reinforces the view that animals don’t count for much (even if that’s not Regan’s view).

 

Maybe it would be a good idea to ask Regan himself about this?

 

Thanks again! 

[Oscar Horta]

Hi Tim, thanks for your new comment!

Regan claims that there are two principles which we must take into account when there’s a conflict between the satisfaction of the interests of different individuals (I disagree with him on this, but that’s besides the point here). To put it simply, these principles are:

-The miniride principle (The Case for Animal Rights, pp. 305-7), which claims we should give preference to the interests of the many.

-The worse-off principle (The Case, 307-12), which claims we should give preference to the interests of the ones who are worse off.

The miniride principle is the one we should apply when different individuals face a comparable harm.

Now, what examples does Regan use when he wants to show what these principles entail?

To illustrate what the miniride principle entails, he presents a case in which we have to decide whether to save one miner or a group of miners. He assumes humans will be affected in a prima facie comparable way, and claims that the miniride principle should apply. In The Case, p. 301 he says: “What each of the miners is entitled to is the same respect due to each as a possessor of inherent value. And this is something we succeed in doing... by saving the fifty at the expense of the one”.

To illustrate the worse-off principle, he presents the lifeboat case involving humans and dogs.  

It is true that this view is still compatible with the idea that the harm humans suffer by dying may vary. In fact, when he examines the concept of comparable harm (The Case, pp. 303-4) he says this. However, he never mentions the possibility that his worse-off principle be applied to humans as he wants to apply it to nonhumans. He never claims that it may be preferable to save a youngster over millions of older people. In fact, when he examines an example concerning humans, he doesn’t consider this possibility at all, he actually says numbers should count. So, inasmuch as he doesn’t claim explicitly that he’s preparing to sacrifize millions of humans for the sake of one younger or healthier human, it seems we have to assume he’s not willing to do it. Therefore, all appears to show he’s drawing a speciesist difference here between humans and nonhumans.
Thanks again! 

 

 

[Tim Gier]

Hi Oscar, 

 

In the interest of saving time, I'll re-post here the substantive portion of a comment I wrote the other day on my blog. (http://timgier.com/2011/05/20/on-a-lifeboat-with-an-outrageous-numb...) It was what prompted my question. This is what I wrote:

What Regan is saying about lifeboats and dogs is that, if four humans and one dog (all ‘normal adults’) were faced with some exceptional circumstance in which one of the five would have to die, the rights-view as he has developed it comports with most people’s prereflective intuition that it should not be one of the humans. On Regan’s view, death is a loss as a function of opportunities for satisfaction, and he takes it at face value that the loss that death represents to a human would be greater than the loss that death represents to a dog. What follows from this is that it would not matter how many dogs or how many humans would be involved. That is, if the loss to an individual human being would be greater than the loss to an individual dog, then it wouldn’t matter how many individual dogs there were harmed; we couldn’t aggregate the lesser harms in order to override the greater harm. A utilitarian might suggest that we should do so, but the rights-based view could not sanction it.

I suppose that if there were four dogs (all ‘normal’ adults) and one severely enfeebled 85 year old human who suffered from an incurable and soon to be fatal disease on board a lifeboat, Regan might say that the four ‘normal’ adults each had more opportunities for satisfaction than the 85 year old. So the 85 year old should be sacrificed and it wouldn’t matter whether there were a million similarly situated 85 year olds, they should all be sacrificed in order that the four might live. In fact, in an interview about a decade ago, Regan said as much:

You can either save a young child or a comatose human. You can either save a young child or a senile human. You can either save a normal adult human or an old, infirm dog. You can either save a profoundly retarded baby or a bright dog, etc. Throughout this exercise one asks whether some general principle can be applied in all the different cases so that one’s judgement in the different cases is not arbitrary or capricious.

The basis I use views the harm of death as variable. Everyone who dies loses everything in terms of the life they had before them, because everybody loses every way of relating to and being in the world. But some individuals who die lose more than others. For example, the young child loses more than the comatose or senile person. I believe the same would be true if we considered the deaths of a profoundly retarded child and a bright, healthy dog. In death, the latter loses more than the former. Of course some people might offer a different appraisal and use a different general principle. This is to be expected.

It’s also important to note that Regan’s view is not that we must sacrifice the one who stands to lose the least in death, only that we would be justified, according to the rights-view, in making that choice. (...) What we might be justified in doing while on a lifeboat cannot be used to justify what we routinely do in unexceptional circumstances.

 

[Oscar Horta]

You're welcome, Tim!

Regan claims that the interest in living of humans is higher than that of dogs, and that for this reason dogs lose less by dying. Because he defends his principle of overriding the less significant harm, he thus claims that just one human life override any number of dog lives.

 

In my view, this position is completely unacceptable, but it’s not necessarily speciesist. We may think he has some anthropocentric speciesist bias, but that’s not tantamount to saying the view is necessarily speciesist.

 

However, he also claims sentient humans have an equal interest in living. The combination of this idea with the former one is speciesist. The reason is that it’s speciesist not to apply when we are in a dilemma in which we may save different human lives the same procedure we defend in a dilemma in which we may save the lives of humans and nonhumans. Consider a situation in which we may save a human being who is 20 or a human being who is 80, or a perfectly healthy human and a terminally ill one. If we accept Regan’s view when humans and nonhumans are involved (which I reject) in both cases we should save the former. Actually, according to Regan’s view, we should save a healthy young human over any number of terminally ill humans. Yet he defends the equality of human lives.

 

This is why Regan’s view is speciesist. 

[Tim Gier]

Oscar, when you have the chance, I would appreciate it if you could explain why Regan's resolution of the lifeboat dilemma as he presents in The Case for Animal Rights is not a non-speciesist comparative one. As I read it, his resolution acknowledges and  respects the equal inherent value and the equal prima facie right not to be harmed of all 'subjects-of-a-life' and hinges instead on death as a harm to any individual insofar as it represents the foreclosure of opportunities for satisfaction, irrespective of species membership. Thanks.

[Tim Gier]

In his new book Deep Postmodernism, Peter H. Gill quotes Wittgenstein as having said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." Gill explains this to mean that "humans and other life forms, such as lions, have different ways of being in the world, different 'forms of life.' Why is this so, we might ask? Because lions and such do not inhabit the same kinds of bodies that humans do...[the] lion's form of life is not 'translatable' into the human form of life." (p. 115)

I think it's inescapable that humans have a view of the world determined by our biology, just as all other forms of life have views determined by theirs. In re-reading Oscar's paper, I didn't find his position on this unclear, and understood his analysis of anthropocentric speciesism as separate from the potentially benign anthropocentrism Paul talks about.

Thanks again for the discussion and for giving me the reason to re-engage with these important ideas!

[Oscar Horta]

Thanks a lot for your comments, you're all very kind. I'm grateful to ARZone for being a platform that allows us all to discuss these and other issues!

[Tim Gier]

Oscar, I agree with Carolyn. You've done ARZone and all it's members and viewers a great service in providing this thoughtful response to Hanson's post. Thank you.

[Carolyn Bailey]

You're very welcome, Oscar! Thank you for taking the time to write such a comprehensive reply to Paul's critique. We're very grateful! 

[Kate✯GO VEGAN+NOBODY GETS HURT Ⓥ]

Hola Oscar. You're welcome.
Thanks for this brilliant blog post and well....  everything else! :)