Ethics Chapter 16 Quiz

Every year, snake charmers in India used reptiles to make money during the Hindu snake festival. But animal welfare activists protested that the snakes were being injured during the process and later killed. In this conflict, who would be likely to side with the snake charmers?

Rene Descartes

The traditional attitude toward animals is that:

an animal is merely a resource that humans may dispose of as they see fit; an animal has instrumental value only

Today almost no one believes, as Descartes did, that animals:

are equivalent to windup clocks, mechanisms without feelings

Mary Anne Warren says that human lives have greater intrinsic value than animal lives because human lives:

are worth more to their possessors

Both Peter Singer and Jeremy Bentham hold that utilitarian calculations must take into account the pleasure and pain of all:

sentient creatures

According to Peter Singer, those who do not give equal moral consideration to both human and nonhuman animals are guilty of:

speciesism

To say that an animal has moral status is to say that:

it is an object of direct moral consideration or concern

CONTRARY to Tom Regan's view, our moral common sense suggests that accidentally running over a man with our car is:

morally worse than doing the same to a rabbit

Animal rights activists waged a highly effective campaign against the practice of seal hunting, an activity that constituted the heart of Canadian Inuit culture and identity. The campaign devastated the Inuit economy and created a host of health, social, and cultural problems for them. Whose moral outlook would likely be kinder to the Inuit on this issue?

Aquinas's

Suppose you believe, with Peter Singer, that we should give equal consideration for comparable interests. And suppose you also know that currently the meat industry (which uses factory farming) causes immense suffering to millions of sentient creatures to produce only moderate pleasures for humans. What, then, follows from these statements?

the meat industry in its current form should be abolished, but if animals were treated more humanely, a new kind of meat industry might be morally permissible