As we recognize more and more the similarities rather than the differences between humans and animals, the idea of a dividing line between the two becomes more and more obscure and difficult to draw. The difference between humans and animals is not at all clear.

Halo thoughtful viewers, and welcome to Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants. On today's program, we meet Dr. Gary Steiner, a John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University, USA and author who strongly believes that animals merit a moral status comparable to that of human beings.

He has written several books including “Descartes as a Moral Thinker,” “Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents” and his most recent work, “Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship.” Dr. Steiner considers himself an “ethical vegan” and now describes what is meant by this term.

People come to veganism for different reasons. Some people do it because of health concerns, some people do it for environmental concerns, and some people do it, because they feel that we have specific moral obligations toward animals. People who are ethical vegans believe that we have the obligation not to eat animals, not to use them.

Depending upon how strict a vegan a person is, they might decide not to wear leather, not to wear silk, not to wear wool. Then of course this opens up the door to all sorts of other sorts of products, like medications and cosmetics that might involve animals in their production or in the composition. So to be an ethical vegan is to recognize, as a specific direct duty to animals, to treat them with kindness and to employ the principle of ahimsa or non-violence toward them.

For Dr. Steiner, becoming an ethical vegan was a gradual evolution, with refinement coming over the course of many years.

What led me to ethical veganism was a long process in my life. It started from a very early age with simply loving animals, having a real feeling of kinship with animals. And as I got older and went into my adolescence, and into my 20s, I started thinking more seriously about the contradiction between loving animals on the one hand, and eating them and wearing them and so forth. And so I stopped eating meat one day, and I just never ate it again. So I went vegetarian first of all.

But I was still thinking about other things like eggs and dairy products and the fact that the production and consumption of those sorts of substances requires viewing animals and using animals in certain ways. I decided that it was something I couldn’t participate in any longer. I stopped eating all animal products at that point.

And then over a period of years I started thinking more and more about the fact if I am not going to eat animal products, I have to start thinking about wearing them, and doing other things that involve the uses of animals as basically objects for the satisfaction of human needs. More recently it has moved on to things like cosmetics, medications and other things.

After a period of time, Dr. Steiner felt it was not enough for him to simply live an ethically vegan lifestyle. He decided get his students at Bucknell University thinking about society’s views of animals and how animals see the world.

I teach a variety of different types of philosophy courses, and starting about 10 years ago, I started to teach some courses specifically on, or related to, questions about animals and the relationship between human beings and animals, questions about the nature of animal cognition or the mental or subjective experience of animals, and, how those types of experiences are related to the moral status of animals.

Dr. Steiner now shares how the students have responded to these courses.

When students are college age, and when they’re in college, they’re probably at the most curious they’re going to be in their adult lives, before they start formulating and establishing certain sorts of convictions and ways of looking at the world. They are relatively open-minded when they’re in college.

And I’ve had a surprising number of students who’ve responded in a very positive and curious and concerned way about the work that I do on animals. I have heard from present and former students as well as a lot of other people. And, some students remain fast in their convictions.

In response to the growing interest, Dr. Steiner began offering even more courses about the relationship between humans and animals, and our moral obligation towards animals.

I taught an introduction to philosophy course, just this past semester, under the title “Gods, Humans and Animals.” And this is something I I just thought would be an interesting thing to do, partly because that would have me addressing primarily not college seniors but brand new college students, first-semester college students.

And I wasn’t really sure how they would react, and this is what happened. I thought they would be taking the course because they wanted to spend time learning about the western conceptions of God, particularly in the Christian tradition, and also about western conceptions of humans. What ended up happening was that the students seemed the most intellectually engaged by the last part of the course, which was on views about animals.

And I was fascinated to find that these students have been very curious. The discussions have been extremely lively.

I’ve always been a little bit inhibited about sharing my views about animals. I never thought about myself as an activist or anything like that. I think of myself as a philosophy professor who writes books for other philosophers about animals.

And what I’m just beginning to find out is there are people out there, including my students, who have a real fascination with this, that they’ve never thought about these questions before, and they realize that they’re very important questions, and they want to think about them.

When we return, we will hear more wise thoughts from Dr. Gary Steiner about the moral status of animals. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

The first thing one has to see is that sentient creatures and chickens are much more intelligent than we give them credit for. They have very elaborate social systems, social organization, they have a very good sense of what's going on. And we not only show them no respect but we're committing, I think, a real sin by killing them.

Welcome back to Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants, as we continue our interview with Dr. Gary Steiner, a John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University, USA and the author of several thoughtful books including his latest: “Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship.”

In your latest book, you argue that animals merit moral status comparable to that of human beings. Can you tell us more about that?

Yes. The idea is this: the Western philosophical tradition going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, has taken the view that human beings are fundamentally superior to animals. And they gave a variety of arguments or reasons for that.

One is the idea that God or the gods created nature to satisfy human beings, they created animals and plants and so forth for the sake of human beings, specifically for us, which means we can do anything we want with them, and we don’t have to worry about the moral implications.

Another traditional line or argumentation has been that animals are inferior to human beings in terms of their cognitive abilities. And that translates into the idea that human beings are morally superior and that we can use animals and that the animals… are not morally comparable to human beings.

Dr. Steiner is challenging this traditional belief system by asking society to look at our animal co-inhabitants from a different perspective.

What philosophers have traditionally argued is animals can't think of themselves as individual selves among other selves. They can't think about the idea that they have obligations or that they have rights, anything like that. And all of these things have led philosophers in the West traditionally to the conclusion that animals don't really have any kind of moral status, certainly nothing comparable to that of human beings.

And in my work on animals, what I started to recognize and what I’ve argued for is this: differences in intellectual ability and differences in cognitive ability don't have any moral significance whatsoever any more than they do among humans. So the fact that there are people out there who are smarter than me doesn't mean that they're morally superior to me.

And by the same token, the fact that or the supposed fact that I'm somehow smarter than my cat, Pindar, has nothing to do with whether I have a right to use him or treat him like a toy or own him as property or anything like that. What's important, moral status is not how smart you are or how sophisticated your cognitive abilities are but rather the notion of sentience, which is the ability to feel pleasure and pain, the capacity to suffer and so forth.

And these I think are, capacities that go together with consciousness. And that I think is what’s decisive morally. Pindar’s subjective life is really no different than mine. And I don't see how my ability to do math or write philosophy books or to employ language in the way in which human beings use it has any significance whatsoever for the relative moral status of myself versus, say, a cat or a dog or any other sentient creature.

Dr. Steiner says that by recognizing that sentience is paramount, we will always respect and protect all animal life.

So, if we could agree that sentience, rather than cognitive ability, is really what's important as a criterion and for moral status then I don't think there's any way that somebody could say that objectively my life matters more than Pindar’s. My life matters to me exactly as much as Pindar’s matters in the following sense. His life matters infinitely to him and mine matters infinitely to me.

So, from that standpoint, I don't think there's any way of saying that my life matters more than his. And so his (life) should be considered from a moral standpoint to be every bit as significant as mine. And I think that's true for any being that is sentient. My own view is, we, animals and humans are morally comparable to one another and, I should add, human beings are after all, animals.

How do we ethically justify keeping animal companions while consuming the flesh of other animals? How can we live and eat more consciously? Please join us again tomorrow for Part 2 of our program as the insightful Dr. Gary Steiner answers these and other important questions.

For more details on Dr. Steiner, please visit www.FacStaff.Bucknell.edu/GSteiner
Books by Dr. Steiner are available on Amazon.com

Thank you for joining us on today’s Animal World: Our Co-Inhabitants. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May we all grow each day in wisdom, grace, and compassion.

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Please watch Part 2 of “Stop Animal Cruelty: Fabrice Nicolino, Author of ‘The Meat Industry Threatens Our World’” today on Supreme Master Television.