JustASC

Over at Cross Currents, Rabbi Avi Shafran laments Leona Helmsley’s bequest of billions to canine charities and the Spanish parliament’s vote to comply with the Great Apes Project, which argues that “non-human hominids” should enjoy the right to life. Each development, writes Shafran:

dovetails diabolically with larger societal changes taking place all around us. Unborn human life is terminated for reasons of convenience, patients in extremis are considered unworthy of care, any and all means of behavior are endorsed as nothing more than “personal lifestyles.” We are, the thinking goes, mere physical creatures, not different in any meaningful way from the rest of the animal world.

The result, he suggests, may well be a world which will condone murder, and society will be rendered “soulless.”

But I have to ask: What makes Shafran so sure of the direction of the slippery slope?  

I agree the Great Ape folks have overstepped philosophically  (although not in their goals, which are to keep some pretty magnificent creatures from being killed, penned, and tortured).  But isn’t there also a slippery slope when we treat all creatures as mere human property, when nature is viewed as mere expediency for human ends? If humans ignore the obvious pain of a fellow creature – creatures with complex social communities, creatures who suckle their young and protect them from danger – might not that lead to a general coarsening of our attitudes toward human life as well?

Besides, just whom is he arguing against? Leona Helmsley is a target of ridicule because she gave her fortune to dogdom – it’s not as if there was a fervent “Amen” when the news was announced. That being said, the ASPCA and similar groups are slavering over the possibilities of Helmsley’s money, not because they degrade human life, but because they are right that humans often treat their animals cruelly and organizations like theirs have an important role to play.

The irony here is that the Agriprocessors  kosher slaughterhouse scandal more than suggests that the slippery slope is actually slick with the blood of slaughtered cows. The owners’ indifference to animal life seems indistinguishable from their indifference to their workers’ rights and well-being.

It would be an interesting bit of halachic sociology to ask if what Shafran calls the “affirmation of the singularity of the human soul” extends in the mind of Agriprocessors Chabad owners to their non-Jewish workers and if they resist making the distinctions, heard in their teachings (go here, and scroll down to “What is a Jew?”), between Jewish and non-Jewish souls.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 10:38 am and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.