Not quite accurate. Although I hold that the principle of equal consideration of interests should apply to animals, I have not relied on it in most of my arguments. You have said so. Perhaps you need to clarify, then.
One could say the same thing about your beliefs; if we probe far enough, we’ll arrive at the same answer – you believe in God’s moral authority because you believe it. If you attempt to advance reasons for that, I can keep asking why for every reason you give, until you either run out of answers or start to repeat them. I believe in God’s moral authority because I believe in God. There’s a difference. I readily acknowledge that if a person wants to be purely skeptical about absolutely anything, nobody can persuade him like a child who asks “why” after everything an adult says, no matter how much the adult’s responses make sense. That’s well known. You can even end up denying your own existence, which some have, despite the obvious fact that you do exist. We’re not arguing here about whether God exists, but about whether there is any moral imperative to give the same value to animal life as to human life. Your position is subjective. You believe animals should be given equal weight with humans because you have decided to think it. While you can be skeptical about the religious foundations of my beliefs, you have to at least grant that it’s a standard outside myself. I didn’t simply spin it out of my own head.
Such as what? Animals can experience a wide range of feelings and emotions, such as pain, distress, anxiety, boredom, depression, grief, anger, and sadness. Do you deny any of this? I can tell you do not have a whole lot of experience of a wide range of animals. If you had, you would not believe this. While I would agree that some animals experience some of those emotional states in an analogous sort of way, I would most assuredly deny that most experience some of them at all, and certainly that they experience them in the same way we do. The one physiological state you mention, pain, is, indeed, experienced by most animals. But for the most part, they do not experience it in the same way we do. The pain thresholds of many are far different from our own. Some do not experience as painful things we experience as painful. Some experience as painful things we would not experience as painful. And they do not reflect on pain the way we do.
