“So the difference isn’t really between animals and plants, Liberal, but between mammals and birds and everything else”.

Not really. Experiential welfare is not limited to mammals and birds.

“Do oysters have a brain? I eat them raw, washed down with Veuve Clicquot. Harry, being of the transatlantic persuasion, prefers Rockefeller”.

Good question. I think that they probably do not, but they do have some system for stimulus response. Remember that evolutionary change is incremental, in the sense that change happens in small doses over a long time-span. So sentience and consciousness (and brains and nervous systems) had to develop in small steps through mutations that were adaptive to a favourable environment.

However, evolution does not happen throughout all species in equal doses (otherwise there would be no different species at all), and some species thrived without the “need” to develop a brain. Other species developed kinds of brains capable of mental experience to different degrees.

So where does one draw the line on the question of having an experiential welfare? Clearly humans do have it. Clearly grass doesn’t. Then you get millions of species having it in different doses. There probably isn’t a point along the line where experiential welfare stops or starts, but we have to draw the line somewhere (for practical reasons), just like there isn’t a precise second when a person becomes an adult, so we set an age ourselves after considering the probabilities regarding when adulthood is reached.

So do clams have an experiential welfare? Again, most probably not (in which case I would group them with plants). But most other animal species clearly do.

Baxxter, you haven’t lived until you have consumed a couple dozen Gulf Coast oysters.

What an interesting discussion.

My take on it, to take up the thread from another post, is that ultimately “value” is a human concept and it is humans who put value on anything, be it an inanimate object, and animate object or a concept in general, such as love, justice of indeed human life itself, and the truth is that very often people put value on things that don’t seem to merit it and omit to value others that would be far more useful.

It is true that the chain of life is what it is. The big fish eats the little fish. There’s no way around that. Even if we manage to synthesize macro-nutrients, I doubt very much that most people will be happy to have a bowl of artificial protein-goo for dinner.

But, and this is a big but, that basic fact does not justify the stance that since animals are animals they might as well be killed willy-nilly for no reason at all. We can still put value on life – any life that can be spared, should be.

In the case of comatose humans, that kind of situation is never an easy one to assess and in fact often gives rise to controversy. Just look at the Terri Schiavo case.

My personal opinion? If the person inside is irretrievably gone, then I do not think it makes sense to accord the empty shell any kind of human rights, beyond the usual forms of respect paid to a corpse.

On another note, I must admit I did not understand the comment regarding cannibalism as it relates to Darwin and humanists. I think of myself as a humanist and the fact that Man is an animal is not in question, be it in scientific, philosophical or medical circles.

Darwin’s great achievement, besides positing a simple mechanism for the emergence of the incredible diversity of lifeforms that does not require any kind of guiding principle or intelligent design, also made clear the link between man and nature – a link which Christianity, with its philosophy of man’s special creation in God’s image tended to frown down upon.

This had huge implications not only in understanding better man’s place in the world, but also contributed to the philosophical underpinning for the abolishment of slavery for example. Darwin had shown that the various races of men were essentially close brothers, and that the white anglo-saxon protestant was after all not the pinnacle of creation as he had previously liked to believe.

In my view, the ripples caused by this new Darwinian consciousness – the knowledge that everything alive is essentially our relative – have still not finished spreading and will still be the underpinning to more change in the way humans locate themselves and other living beings in the grand scheme of things.

Hopefully Darwinism can be an impetus, not to start treating other humans like animals, but to start according animals some of the respect they merit purely for what they are – our cousins.

So the difference isn’t really between animals and plants, Liberal, but between mammals and birds and everything else. Do oysters have a brain? I eat them raw, washed down with Veuve Clicquot. Harry, being of the transatlantic persuasion, prefers Rockefeller.

Yes it is. Absolute.

The most (ethically) significant difference between animals and plants is that the former have an experiential welfare, which means that they can be harmed. The latter, having no brain, do not.

Well then I would ask you where you draw the line. Chickens? Salmon? Lobster? Prawns? Oysters?

I’m not trying to be flippant here. Just pointing out that the value of the life of an organism of any species, and the moral argument against killing it, is hard to justify on the grounds of sentience.

In the end, it comes down to some very subjective value judgements – and there’s nothing wrong with that. I wouldn’t kill my Fido, but I’m quite happy to kill cockroaches or flies, for purposes other than food, or to eat a bit of cow that’s been killed by someone else.

I’m happy to eat a bit of anonymous rabbit in a restaurant, but I wouldn’t kill my own Snowy. They’re all sentient organisms, but I attach a different value to each, in a completely arbitrary and subjective manner. And that’s completely natural.

Ditto for human beings. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m not one to hold back, or I wouldn’t be writing here, so here it is. The value of human life is not universal or absolute, but subjective. I value the life of my relatives and friends above that of people at the Antipodes whom I’ve never met.

If I were on the Titanic and there was room in the lifeboat for one, I would save my Ritienne and leave DiCaprio to his own devices. Millions of human beings died today, through old age, disease, war, accidents, murder, abortion and natural disasters. I shall not mourn them. But if Ritienne died, it would be a tragedy.

Many people will vehemently deny this, claiming that they hold all human life dear in equal measure. Catholics are the most vociferous, but they are joined by all sorts, from Buddhists to secular atheists to Bob Geldof and Bono. I find it ever so slightly hypocritical.

No, Baxxter, I do NOT mean simplistically animal life (and by the way, humans, according to Darwin and humanists are another form of animal life that is why cannibals exist). What I mean is any life that has the ability to feel – animals, just like humans, feel pain and this is a known fact but vegetation does not. I still have to hear a cabbage squeak and shrill just like animals (including humans) do.

[Daphne – Where does that leave comatose human beings? It is not the ability to feel pain that differentiates animals from plants.]

You probably mean animal life. All food comes from life, in one form or another. We have yet to synthesise macronutrients.

He’s on your rolodex. Give him a tinkle.