Always seems to end up justifying the dismissal of animal interests

In this post by Michael Berube over there at Crooked Timber, he is displeased with Peter Singer:

Anyway, I won’t post my entire text, not because it would break the Internets again (this post will do that handily enough on its own) but because the conference proceedings are going to be published someday, and I think I’m supposed to save the Whole Thing for the dead-tree edition. But I will put up one of the challenges I issued to one of the conference’s more controversial speakers, a guy named Peter Singer:

In his 1994 book, Rethinking Life and Death, Peter Singer famously claimed that “To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s ability. We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player” (213). Back in 1994, when Jamie was only three, I might have fallen for this; I once believed—and wrote—that Jamie would not be able to distinguish early Beatles from late Beatles or John’s songs from Paul’s, and now he knows more about the Beatles’ oeuvre than most of the people in this room. His interest in Star Wars and Galaxy Quest has given him an appreciation of science fiction, just as his fascination with Harry Potter has led him to ask questions about innocence and guilt. He is learning a foreign language, having mastered the “est-ce que tu” question form in French and being able to charm young women at the cheese counters of French supermarkets by saying “je voudrais du fromage de chèvre, s’il vous plait.” I confess that neither of us has the least interest in chatting about the latest Woody Allen movie; but perhaps Professor Singer will be interested to learn that Jamie and I have had a running conversation over the past five years about the film Babe, which introduced Jamie not only to the question of whether it is right to eat animals but also to the fact that there are various theories out there as to why humans eat some animals and not others.

Alas, I said all this on Thursday evening, and Professor Singer was not in the room at the time. But I have to give him his due for sticking around for all of the Friday and Saturday sessions in a largely hostile environment.

A commenter then writes:

now he knows more about the Beatles’ oeuvre than most of the people in this room. His interest in Star Wars and Galaxy Quest has given him an appreciation of science fiction, just as his fascination with Harry Potter has led him to ask questions about innocence and guilt. He is learning a foreign language, having mastered the “est-ce que tu” question form in French and being able to charm young women at the cheese counters of French supermarkets by saying “je voudrais du fromage de chèvre, s’il vous plait.” I confess that neither of us has the least interest in chatting about the latest Woody Allen movie; but perhaps Professor Singer will be interested to learn that Jamie and I have had a running conversation over the past five years about the film Babe, which introduced Jamie not only to the question of whether it is right to eat animals but also to the fact that there are various theories out there as to why humans eat some animals and not others.

Michael, it sounds as though you’re arguing here that not all people with Down’s Syndrome are what Singer (or most of us, anyway) would call severely cognitively impaired rather than against the claim that “it is less wrong, all other things being equal, to kill someone with severe cognitive impairments than to kill you or me.”

Also, what if Singer had set the bar lower and instead of “to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player” had said “to use language at all, to play a sport at any level, to watch a movie or distinguish between music and noise”?

I know you’ve written a lot about this, probably on CT as well, so feel free just to refer me somewhere else.

To which Michael responds:

I’m just not buying the utilitarian calculus at all, no matter where Singer sets the bar. The fact that he underestimated the potential of some people (and did so with considerable certainty, I might add, pointing to the “we cannot expect” line) is in itself, for me, reason enough to resist any moral calculus that involves a performance criterion for being human.

---

All this is quite fascinating but I never understand this criticism of Singer:

Singer is comparing babies, mentally deficient, the brain damaged with animals. He says they are similar in "personhood" so we can treat them alike. Fuck Singer! Killer!

Instead the much more obvious interpretation and certainly the more charitable one is:

Singer is comparing babies, mentally deficient, the brain damaged with animals. He says they are similar in "personhood" so we can treat them alike. Fuck me! Killer!

There are two ways of interpreting Singer when he says something like:

For on any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain, and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy -- which if we make the comparison with a fetus of less than three months, a fish, or even a prawn would show more signs of consciousness. (Practical Ethics, 118)

We can read him as saying:

• Hey! Babies are like pigs. We treat pigs like shit. Let's treat babies like shit.; OR
• Hey! Babies are like pigs. We treat babies nicely. Let's treat pigs nicely.
  

Why interpret Singer as encourage or advocating any sort of mistreatment of any organism? Even animals that he would consider much lower on the "personhood" scale he would never advocate mistreating.

So, returning to Michael Berube's quote of Singer: To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s ability. we ought not interpret Singer as suggesting mistreating these people, but as he advocates for animals, we should interpret him as advocating for taking their interests into consideration.

---

Then a commenter recommends this paper by Jeremy Waldron. This paper is quite interesting and here is its own summary:

The idea of basic equality connotes that, for normative purposes, the range of humans is not subject to any fundamental differentiation along the lines of the differentiation that some people maintain between humans and animals. We humans are all basically alike.

What is with the desire to separate humans and animals? It all really seems like a rationalization not for better treatment of different sorts of humans, but a defense of not taking animal's interests into consideration.