ANIMALISTI ALLO SPECCHIO

Riccardo Mariani

Adesso · 

ANIMALISTI ALLO SPECCHIO

=> Molti insetti, tra cui le formiche, superano il “mirror test” (auto-riconoscimento allo specchio) dimostrando di avere buone capacità cognitive…

=> chi ha capacità cognitive ha anche capacità di soffrire…

=> la sofferenza va sempre minimizzata…

=> eppure salvaguardare gli insetti ripugna al nostro buon senso…

=> gli animalisti stessi non sembrano preoccuparsi della loro sorte…

=> con il loro comportamento verso gli insetti sono i primi a dimostrare di non credere a cio’ che dicono…

=> la visione degli animalisti è falsa.

Non si tratta di un argomento logico, se fosse presentato come tale conterrebbe un’evidente fallacia ad hominem. E’ però un buon argomento pratico: quando una questione è controversa la parte che non si attiene a quanto dice probabilmente ha torto.

ANIMALCOGNITION.ORG

List of Animals That Have Passed the Mirror Test - Animal Cognition

A comprehensive list of animals that have passed the mirror test, plus information about the mirror test and its significance in animal cognition research.

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Le vittime del vegetariano

Riccardo Mariani

Adesso · 

Quanti animali ammazza il "vegetariano"? Spesso più del "carnivoro". Alimentare il vegetariano non è uno scherzo, esempio: bisogna adibire a campo il bosco, spiazzare i corvi che se ne vanno in città facendo strage di passeri. Se solo sapeste quanto sangue grondano le carote!

Vegans and vegetarians think they don't kill animals but they do

If you are a vegetarian, you are not responsible for the death of animals, right? Think again. Eating a plant-based diet doesn’t prevent the death of animals. Claudio…

IDEAPOD.COM

Tutti i guai del consumo etico

Tutti i guai del consumo etico

THE MORAL CASE FOR SWEATSHOP GOODS – Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference by William MacAskill

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Argomento: lo sfruttamento dei lavoratori poveri, il consumo verde, il fair trade, il vegetarianesimo, il chilometro-zero, eccetera.

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How can consumers make the most difference?

The clothing retailer American Apparel, known for selling ‘fashionable basics’ like solid-colour T-shirts, proudly claims to be ‘sweatshop free’.

Note:SWEATSHOP FREE

The popularity of American Apparel is just one example of a trend towards ‘ethical consumerism’, where people spend a little more money on goods that are produced by workers who are treated well,

Note:CONSUMO ETICO

Sweatshops are factories in poor countries, typically in Asia or South America, that produce goods like textiles, toys, or electronics for rich countries under pretty horrific working conditions.

Note:DEFINIZIONE

Because conditions in sweatshops are so bad, many people have pledged to boycott goods produced in them, and a number of organisations devoted to ending the use of sweatshop labour, such as United Students Against Sweatshops, National Mobilisation Against Sweatshops, SweatFree Communities and the ingeniously named No Sweat Apparel, have proliferated in service to the cause. For this reason, there’s significant public animosity towards big companies such as Nike, Apple and Disney

Note:BOICOTTAGGIO

In developing countries, sweatshop jobs are the good jobs. The alternatives are typically worse, such as backbreaking, low-paid farm labour, scavenging, or unemployment. The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof illustrated this well when he presented an interview with Pim Srey Rath, a Cambodian woman who scavenges plastic from dumps in order to sell it as recycling.

Note:ROVISTARE IN DISCARICA

A clear indicator that sweatshops provide comparatively good jobs is the great demand for them among people in developing countries. Almost all workers in sweatshops choose to work there,

Note:DOMANDE DI ASSUNZIONE

The average earnings of a sweatshop worker in Brazil are $2,000 per year: not very much, but $600 a year more than the average earnings in Bolivia, where people generally work in agriculture or mining. Similarly, the average daily earnings among sweatshop workers are: $2 in Bangladesh, $5.50 in Cambodia, $7 in Haiti and $8 in India. These wages are tiny, of course, but when compared to the $1.25 a day many citizens of those countries live on, the demand for these jobs seems more understandable.

Note:PAGA DELLO SFRUTTATO

Nobel Laureate and left-wing economist Paul Krugman has stated, ‘The overwhelming mainstream view among economists is that the growth of this kind of employment is tremendous good news for the world’s poor.’ Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economist and one of the foremost proponents of increased efforts to help those in extreme poverty, has said, ‘My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few.’

Note:PERSINO A SINISTRA SI AMMETTE A DENTI STRETTI

The four East Asian ‘Tiger economies’ – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan – exemplify speedy development, having evolved from very poor, agrarian societies in the early twentieth century to manufacturing-oriented ‘sweatshop’ countries mid-century and finally emerging as industrialised economic powerhouses in recent decades.

Note:TIGRI ASIATICHE

Bangladesh had a large number of children employed in ready-to-wear garment sweatshops at the time. Out of fear that this act would pass, factories quickly laid off 50,000 child workers. According to the US Department of Labor, rather than going to school or even finding better jobs, ‘it is widely thought that most of them have found employment in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered, subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors’. Considering that transnational corporations typically pay much higher wages than domestic sweatshops, the lives of these youths likely became worse. Indeed, an investigation by UNICEF found that many of these laid-off underage garment workers had resorted to even more desperate measures to survive, including street hustling and prostitution.

Note:BANDO AL LAVORO MINORILE IN BANGLADESH

The correct response is to try to end the extreme poverty that makes sweatshops desirable places to work in the first place.

Note:LA RISPOSTA CORRETTA

Fairtrade certification is an attempt to give higher pay to workers in poor countries. It’s commonly used for consumables grown in developing countries, such as bananas, chocolate, coffee, sugar and tea.

Note:DEFINIZIONE FAIRTRADE

First, when you buy Fairtrade, you usually aren’t giving money to the poorest people in the world. Fairtrade standards are difficult to meet, which means that those in the poorest countries typically can’t afford to get Fairtrade certification. For example the majority of Fairtrade coffee production comes from comparatively rich countries like Mexico and Costa Rica,

Note:IL FAIRTRADE NON AIUTA GLI ULTIMI

Second, of the additional money that is spent on Fairtrade, only a very small portion ends up in the hands of the farmers who earn that money. Middlemen take the rest. The Fairtrade Foundation does not provide figures on how much of the additional price reaches coffee produces, but independent researchers have provided some estimates. Dr Peter Griffiths, an economic consultant for the World Bank, worked out that for one British café chain… less than 1% of the additional price of their Fairtrade coffee reached coffee exporters in poor countries. Finnish Professors Joni Valkila, Pertti Haaparanta and Niina Niemi found out that, of Fairtrade coffee sold in Finland, only 11% of the additional price reached the coffee-producing countries….

Note:GLI INTERMEDIARI SI ACCAPARRANO IL GROSSO

Finally, even the small fraction that ultimately reaches the producers does not necessarily translate into higher wages. It guarantees a higher price for goods from Fairtrade-certified organisations, but that higher price doesn’t guarantee a higher price… for the farmers who work for those organisations….

Note:NON TUTTO VA AI SALARI

Given this, there is little altruistic reason to buy Fairtrade products. In buying Fairtrade products, you’re at best giving very small amounts of money to people in comparatively well-off countries.

Note:CONCLUSIONE

Another major area of ethical consumerism is ‘green living’. Per person, UK citizens emit nine metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every year. (Recall that carbon dioxide equivalent, or ‘CO2eq’, is a way of measuring your carbon footprint that includes greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, like methane and nitrous oxide. For example one metric ton of methane produces as much warming as twenty-one metric tons of carbon dioxide, so one metric ton of methane is twenty-one metric tons of CO2eq.) As we’ve seen, climate change is a big deal. It’s therefore natural to want to do something about it, and the obvious way is to move to a lower-carbon lifestyle.

Note:GREEN LIVING

One common recommendation… is to turn off or shut down electronic devices when you’re not using them, rather than keeping them on standby. However, this achieves very little compared to other things you could do: one hot bath adds more to your carbon footprint than leaving your phone charger plugged in for a whole year;…

Note:STAND BY

hours. Another common recommendation is to turn lights off when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3% of household energy use, so even if you used no lighting at all in your house you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions.

Note:SPEGNERE LE LUCI?

Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely you’d cut out 100kg CO2eq per year, which is only 0.4% of… your total emissions….

Note:SACCHETTI DI PLASTICA

Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation whereas 80% comes from production, so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally produced food.

Note:KM0

However, there is an even more effective way to reduce your emissions. It’s called offsetting: rather than reducing your own greenhouse gas emissions, you pay for projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.

Note:OFFSETTING

While the carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and verifiable, the carbon absorbed by offset projects is less attestable.

Note:LA TIPICA CRITICA ALL’OFFSETTING

Monbiot’s concern doesn’t… provide a good argument against carbon offsetting in general. It just shows we’ve got to do some research in order to find a way of offsetting that’s genuinely effective. That’s what we did at my organisation Giving What We Can….

Note:MA MONBIOT ESAGERA

The charity we ultimately decided was best is called Cool Earth. Cool Earth was founded in 2007 in the United Kingdom by businessman Johan Eliasch and MP Frank Field, who were concerned with protecting the rainforest and the impact that deforestation might have on the environment. The charity aims to fight global warming by preventing deforestation, primarily in the Amazon.

Note:PER IL TUO OFFSETTING DONA A COOL EARTH

It uses donated money to help develop… rainforest communities economically to a point where they do better by not selling their land to loggers….

Note:COSA FA

Cool Earth claims it costs them about $100 to prevent an acre of rainforest from being cut down, and that each acre locks in 260 metric tons of CO2. This would mean that it costs just about 38¢ to prevent one metric ton of CO2 from being emitted.

Note:CALCOLARE L’OFFSETTING

Using this figure, the average American adult would have to spend $105 per year in order to offset all their carbon emissions.

Note:105 DOLLARI OGNI ANNO. STIMA MOOLTO CONSERVATIVA

George Monbiot claimed that carbon offsetting is a way of ‘selling indulgences’, in reference to the medieval practice in which Christians would pay the Church in exchange for forgiveness for their sins. On a similar theme, a satirical website, CheatNeutral.com, offers the following service: ‘When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.

Note:ALTRE OBIEZIONI POCO SIGNIFICATIVE

the animal welfare argument is much stronger for some animals than for… others, because some sorts of animal produce involve a lot more suffering on the part of the animals than others. In fact, eliminating chicken and eggs removes the large majority of animal suffering from your diet. This is because of the conditions those animals are kept in, and the number of animals needed to provide a given number of calories….

Note:VEGETARIANI: CONCENTRARSI SUI POLLI

The only quantitative estimates of farmed animal welfare I’ve been able to find come from Bailey Norwood, an economist and agricultural expert. He rated the welfare of different animals on a scale of –10 to 10, where negative numbers indicate that it would be better, from the animal’s perspective, to be dead rather than alive. He rates beef cattle at 6 and dairy cows at 4. In contrast his average rating for broiler… chickens is –1, and for pigs and caged hens is –5. In other words, cows raised for food live better lives than chicken, hens, or pigs, which suffer terribly…. The second consideration is the number of animals it takes to make a meal. In a year, the average American will consume the following: 28.5 broiler chickens, 0.8 layer hens, 0.8 turkeys, 0.37 pigs, 0.1 beef cows, and 0.007 dairy cows; in the UK people eat less meat on average but, like Americans, consume far more chickens and hens than cows. These numbers might suggest that cutting out chicken has a far bigger impact than any other dietary change. However, most broiler chickens live for only six… weeks, so insofar as we care about how long the animal spends in unpleasant conditions on factory farms, it’s more appropriate to think about animal years rather than animal lives. In a year, the number of animal years that go into the average American’s diet are as follows: 3.3 from broiler chickens (28.5 chickens consumed, each of which lives six weeks = 3.3 animal years), 1 from layer hens, 0.3 from turkeys, 0.2 from pigs, 0.1 from beef cows, and 0.03 from dairy cows. Combining these two considerations, we arrive at the conclusion that the most effective way to cut animal suffering out of your diet is to stop eating chicken, then eggs, then pork: by doing so, you’re taking out the worst suffering for the most animals for the longest time….

Note:STIMA SOFFERENZA/CALORIE

Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon that they call ‘moral licensing’ that describes how people who perform one good action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future… Amazingly, even just saying you’d do something good can cause the moral licensing effect. In another study, half the participants were asked to imagine helping a foreign student who had asked for assistance in understanding a lecture. They subsequently gave significantly less to charity when given the chance to do so than the other half of the participants, who had not been asked to imagine helping another student….

Note:PERICOLI DEL CONSUMO ETICO: CI FA DIVENTARE CATTIVI

Insetti vs Animalisti SAGGIO

Chi sono i peggiori nemici degli animalisti?

Secondo Bryan Caplan gli insetti…

… The most compelling objection to animal rights, to my mind, has long been... bugs. Bugs are animals. Every human being directly kills bugs just by walking… Yet I've never heard even a strict vegan express a word of moral condemnation…

Io, agnostico, osservo l’animalista che, mentre espone la sua dottrina, ne ammazza in gran quantità senza curarsene.

Ma la cosa è davvero irrilevante per il suo discorso?

Probabilmente no. Almeno se diamo credito all’ “argomento della coscienza”…

… 1. If even morally scrupulous advocates of view X don't live in accordance with X, the best explanation is that they don't really believe X. 2. If even the dedicated advocates of X don't really believe X, X is probably false…

Il PETA sugli insetti…

… All animals have feelings and have a right to live free from unnecessary suffering--regardless of whether they are considered "pests" or "ugly." As with our dealings with our fellow humans, the determination of when lethal defense against insects and animals is acceptable must be judged on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the level of the threat and the alternatives that are available…

Giudicare caso per caso?

Un bizzarro parallelo se consideriamo l’uomo…

… A bizarre juxtaposition. No one would say that humans have a "right to live free from unnecessary suffering," then immediately talk about killing them on a "case-by-case basis." And if someone killed hundreds of humans with his car on a cross-country trip, no one would accept the excuse, "It was necessary to cross the country."…

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Ecco i criteri di Peter Singer secondo i quali un essere vivente merita rispetto…

… Singer quotes three criteria for deciding if an organism has the capacity to suffer from pain: 1) there are behavioral indications, 2) there is an appropriate nervous system, and 3) there is an evolutionary usefulness for the experience of pain…

Gli insetti sembrerebbero passare alla grande il test dell’animale potenzialmente sofferente.

Come se non bastasse fioriscono intere industrie sullo sfruttamento degli insetti, eppure verso di loro non ci sono contestazioni…

… large industries are built around honey production, silk production, and cochineal/ carmine production, and, of course, mass insect death results from our use of insecticides…

Bisognerebbe anche aggiungere che il mondo animalista ammette la difficoltà…

… Insects are a part of the Animal Kingdom and some special arguments would be required to exclude them from the general AR argument…

Ma come si tampona l’inconveniente? Istituendo una scala di capacità nel sentire dolore…

… Some may postulate a scale of life with an ascending capacity to feel pain and suffer. They might also mark a cut-off on the scale, below which rights are not actively asserted…

Il problema di questa soluzione sta nel fatto che verso gli insetti si giustifica il trattamento totalmente differenziato sulla base di differenze  totalmente discutibili…

… The overarching problem with these "exclusion" arguments: They try to justify a massive difference in treatment with a totally debatable difference in capacity for pain. It's easy to show that some creatures are much smarter than others; but how on earth could we ever convincingly show that some feel much less pain than others?…

Ma se un simile “salto” è tollerato allora, a maggior ragione, andrebbe tollerato il “salto” che distingue uomini e altri animali.

Ma c’è di più. In una logica animalista, se c’è la possibilità che gli insetti soffrano dovremmo tenerne conto.

E in caso di dubbio? Attenersi al principio di precauzione. O no?

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Chi obbietta a queste considerazioni sostiene che l’ “argomento di coscienza” non è poi così impellente.

Risposta…

… I never claimed it was the best way. But I do claim that the Argument from Hypocrisy and the Argument from Conscience provide us with additional moral insight…

Ancora l’obbiettore: Thomas Jefferson possedeva schiavi, questo significa forse che era schiavista? No, fu un grande oppositore dello schiavismo!

Risposta: il possedere degli schiavi era certamente nocivo (non indifferente) alla sua battaglia…

… Jefferson's hypocrisy at least slightly undermined the credibility of the case against slavery…

Chi si oppone invita a giudicare gli argomenti, non i comportamenti…

… the best way to find out whether x is true is to just look at the arguments for and against x, especially if those arguments are simple and easy to find…

L’argomento animalista, si dice, è semplice e plausibile…

… It seems wrong to cause extreme amounts of pain and suffering for the sake of minor benefits to oneself….

Detto in altri termini: è ingiusto togliere la vita ad un coniglio (grave danno) per mangiarsi a mezzogiorno un piatto di coniglio in umido (piccolo beneficio).

Ma come ogni buon argomento anche questo è soggetto a devastanti eccezioni che lo fanno traballare, esempio i maledetti insetti…

… I agree this claim has great superficial appeal. But I think that like utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other grand moral theories, it's subject to devastating counter-examples. Like: "What if you have to painfully kill one bug to build a house rather live in a tent?"…

Altra obiezione: se guardiamo a quel che succede in una fattoria siamo orripilati.

Risposta: anche se guardiamo a quel che succede nelle sale operatorie…

… If you just look at some of the things that go on on factory farms, you're going to be horrified… I would also be horrified to watch life-saving surgery on humans. On reflection, both seem morally fine to me despite my squeamishness…

Altra obiezioni: la stupidità di un soggetto dà forse la  possibilità di torturarlo?…

… If you think it is not wrong to inflict severe suffering as long as the victim of the suffering is stupid, then you'd have to say that it is permissible to torture retarded people for fun…

E’ una questione di gradi…

… It depends on the degree of stupidity… Almost all humans classified as mentally retarded are far smarter than that, of course…

Sui “ritardati” va fatta una chiosa: oltre a cio’ che “sono” sembrerebbe contare anche cio’ che “avrebbero potuto essere”. Quasi che in questi giudizi l’intelligenza media della specie conti più di quella specifica del singolo.

E il problema dei bambini?…

… A stronger objection is that human babies are much stupider than adult humans, but everyone knows it's wrong to inflict pain on babies. The obvious amendment here, though, is that creatures that will normally develop human-level intelligence are also of great moral importance, though probably not as much as creatures that already possess such intelligence…

Quando mi chiedo perché mai la sofferenza dello “stupido” non rileva mi vengono in mente gli insetti e mi tranquillizzo: in effetti c’è unanimità di consenso che non rilevi…

… stupid as a bug? At minimum, it seems obvious that the pain of such a creature is extremely morally unimportant…

L’introspezione e l’argomento di coscienza sono una buona via, magari non in assoluto, bensì per cominciare una riflessione oppure per superare un’ impasse morale, come in questo caso…

… a good argument to me - good enough to break what otherwise looks like a moral impasse…

Sofferenza e intelligenza sono correlate, è vero, non ci sono argomenti decisivi sul punto ma basta fare esempi per coglierne la connessione…

… It seems obvious once you ponder basic counter-examples to your general principle. Do you really think painfully killing bugs to build a house is morally wrong?…

E poi c’è il problema della precauzione: perché chi crede realmente ai principi animalisti non adotta perlomeno un comportamento precauzionale nei confronti degli insetti? Evidentemente non ci credono nemmeno gli animalisti…

… But suppose we grant that bugs don't feel pain. Your position still implies that if bugs did feel pain, it would be morally impermissible to build a house. After all, you could just live in a tent and leave the bugs in peace…

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Come concludere? Proposta: se la sofferenza si riflette nell’intelligenza, e quindi nella responsabilità (come sembrerebbe dalla nostra relazione con gli insetti), la distanza tra uomo e animale in materia di dolore è la stessa che manteniamo in materia di giustizia.

Esistono cani cattivi, per esempio? Forse no, forse sì. Paradossalmente chi dice di no, chi afferma che “è tutta colpa del padrone”, toglie dignità all’animale e al suo presunto dolore.

Comunque sia, anche quando un cane parrebbe “cattivo”, non gli facciamo un processo in un’ aula giudiziaria, nemmeno un processo sui generis. Il che mette una distanza notevole tra l’intelligenza e la responsabilità umana e quella canina, di sicuro una distanza superiore a quella che gli animalisti rivendicano. E se concludiamo così è proprio perché osserviamo come si comportano gli animalisti con gli animali.