"Conclusione ripugnante" e diritti degli animali.

Un utilitarista è spinto ad accettare la cosiddetta "conclusione ripugnante", quella tesi per cui il numero dei viventi giustifica la loro bassa qualità della vita. Poiché gli animali che vivono negli allevamenti intensivi non sarebbero mai vissuti, cio' giustifica moralmente le loro pessime condizioni di vita.

Mi sembra rilevante anche per i non-utilitaristi. Applicare la morale utilitarista (solo) agli animali mi sembra un buon compromesso per concedere loro dei diritti.

Decisioni morali complesse

Una prerogativa dell' uomo:

To understand the kind of scenario we might use to probe complex moral decision making in humans, imagine you are driving a rescue boat to save a drowning man but get a signal that there is a larger group drowning in the other direction. Changing course to save them would require allowing the one man to die. Is that morally acceptable?

Now your first response might be “yes,” “no,” or “that depends,” but your ability to engage with the question at all requires a number of capacities that are either unique to or, to the best of our knowledge, particularly well-developed in the human brain compared with nonhuman animals. In addition to these, one particular capacity that we highlight in our paper is our brain’s remarkable ability to engage with moral decisions as abstract as the one described earlier.

To emphasize what I mean by abstract in this context, it is important to note first that moral decision making of various sorts has been studied and observed in animals for many decades. While animals have exhibited behaviors that at least on the face of it appear “moral” (e.g., rewarding prosocial and punishing antisocial behavior), almost all displays of this behavior have arisen out of contexts in which the animal’s own self-interests, or those of its group or a close other, were somehow at stake.