This will be short, sweet and teachable to primary school children. And it should be.
I do not recall being taught basic ethics at school. This is not to say I wasn’t taught the subject, I just can’t recall it. I have friends who are school teachers. I don’t think they teach it to their students either, so I suspect my memory is not failing me. Here’s what I should have been taught:
What is it that gives an Asian lady, a black man, a white teenager, a gay bloke, someone with a disability, a person with the intellectual capacity of Sarah Palin and someone who likes cross dressing, equal rights? In fact, what is it that gives them rights at all?
The answer is consciousness. Entirely consciousness.
Consciousness is a broad term, but at it’s core is the capacity to feel. More pertinently, it’s the ability to suffer – physically, mentally and emotionally. The aforementioned group of people have (or should have), the same basic rights not on the grounds of their race, colour, sexual orientation or intellect but on their shared consciousness. They can all feel pain, they can all suffer.
If the existence of rights is centred entirely on consciousness, then it follows that rights should be extended equally to all things conscious. This, of course, includes animals. As the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness states, ““non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.” [1] [2]
If the one prerequisite to suffering is consciousness, then it follows that rights must be apportioned when consciousness is present. This has to be true, or else consider the opposite; that non-conscious things would be entitled to rights, such as chairs, tarmac, the colour yellow, plastic cups and abstract concepts. Rights and ethics simply do not make sense in the absence of consciousness.
If I am as capable of suffering and feeling pain as a cow, a dog, a pig, a woman, a Syrian refugee, a homosexual male, and yes, Sarah Palin, then it is for that reason that anyone or anything with the intellectual capacity to understand all of the above should not intentionally or knowingly harm me. For the same reasons, I should not be permitted to harm anything or anyone capable of suffering.
Now go and teach that to children…
Words Beyond Meaning 