Well, I don’t disagree! I tried to make up the distance in the parenthetical statement, but I didn’t mean to imply that treatment of humans & animals ought to be judged by the exact same standard. What I was getting at was more something like this, quoting Christine Korsgaard:
Then there is the disturbing use of the phrase “treated like an animal.” People whose rights are violated, people whose interests are ignored or overridden, people who are used, harmed, neglected, starved or unjustly imprisoned standardly complain that they are being treated like animals, or protest that after all they are not just animals. Of course, rhetorically, complaining that you are being treated like an animal is more effective than complaining that you are being treated like a thing or an object or a stone, for a thing or an object or a stone has no interests that can be ignored or overridden. In the sense intended, an object can’t be treated badly, while an animal can. But then the curious implication seems to be that animals are the beings that it’s all right to treat badly, and the complainant is saying that he is not one of those.
That is, there’s a kind of tension in that sort of complaint. It implies that animals are mistreated by some standard, but that, whereas humans can be mistreated in that way, animals can’t. So I meant to say that, if we do think that animals can be mistreated in that way (& many do, of course) then that sort of complaint is almost contradictory.
Well, I don’t disagree! I tried to make up the distance in the parenthetical statement, but I didn’t mean to imply that treatment of humans & animals ought to be judged by the exact same standard. What I was getting at was more something like this, quoting Christine Korsgaard:
That is, there’s a kind of tension in that sort of complaint. It implies that animals are mistreated by some standard, but that, whereas humans can be mistreated in that way, animals can’t. So I meant to say that, if we do think that animals can be mistreated in that way (& many do, of course) then that sort of complaint is almost contradictory.