Tomorrow: Animal Rights and the Left

[Guest guest]

**please forward widely**

Animal Rights and the Left

 

 

A talk by Professor Steven Best

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso

Friday, April 28, 2006

Stanford University

12:00PM, Room 303, Building 200 (Lane History Corner)

map: http://campus-map.stanford.edu/index.cfm?ID=01-200

 

" Western society has made rapid moral progress since the 1960s. The

student, black, brown, feminist, and gay and lesbian movements advanced

the universalization of rights process, overcame major barriers of

prejudice, and deepened human freedom.

 

During this turbulent period of social strife, riots, mass

demonstrations against the U.S. war in Vietnam, and worsening problems

with poverty, homelessness, and class inequality, Martin Luther King

formulated a vision of a “world house.” In this cosmopolitan utopia,

all peoples around the globe would live in peace and harmony, with both

their spiritual and material needs met by the fecundity of the modern

world.

 

But to whatever degree this dream might be realized, King’s world house

is still a damn slaughterhouse, because humanism doesn’t challenge the

needless confinement, torture, and killing of billions of animals. The

humanist non-violent utopia will always remain a hypocritical lie until

so-called “enlightened” and “progressive” human beings extend

nonviolence, equality, and rights to the animals with whom we share

this planet.

 

The next logical step in human moral evolution is to embrace animal

rights and accept its profound implications. Animal rights builds on

the most progressive ethical and political advances human beings have

made in the last two hundred years. "

 

--Steven Best, " Animal Rights and the New Enlightenment, "

available at

http://www.drstevebest.org/papers/vegenvani/challenge_of_AR.php

 

Sponsored by

Animal Rights on the Farm and

the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund