A political system that sees human suffering and takes action is more likely to be one that sees animal suffering and takes action, and vice versa. Compassion begets compassion.
EZRA KLEIN: ‘If you care about animal rights, you’ll inevitably run into a wall of whataboutism. What about homelessness? Or racism? Or sexism? Why are you wasting your time on chickens when so many human beings are suffering?…. That’s the point of many moral and political philosophies. But animal suffering is a different category: to fret over animals, given the anguish experienced by so many people, can seem like misplaced priorities at best, and a callous insult to the needs of the human community at worst.
Whataboutism is a rhetorical strategy meant to paralyze, not persuade. But it works because it plays on a real fear: that compassion is a zero-sum resource, and political capital even more so. The energy we spend on chickens is energy stolen from the opioid epidemic.
New research from Harvard’s Yon Soo Park and Dartmouth’s Benjamin Valentino tested these concerns directly. In one half of the study, they used General Social Survey data to see whether people who supported animal rights were likelier to support a variety of human rights, a test of whether abstract compassion is zero-sum. Then they compared how strong animal treatment laws were in individual states to how strong laws were protecting human beings, a test of whether political activism is zero-sum.
The answer, in both cases, is that compassion seems to beget compassion. People who strongly favored government help for the sick “were over 80 percent more likely to support animal rights than those who strongly opposed it,” the authors write. The finding held even after controlling for factors like political ideology…
In other words, concern for human suffering seemed to feed concern for animal suffering, and vice versa. It’s the suffering, not the species, that matters to many… A political system that sees human suffering and takes action is more likely to be one that sees animal suffering and takes action, and vice versa… Compassion begets compassion’. SOURCE…
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