Here's why I preferred the people in the mental health panel to those in the animal ethics groups: the mental health people can understand that consciousness, being, feeling, sensing and thinking come in different flavours.
They understand that agency, autonomy and selfhood will be different in different states. They are non fixated by making all creatures fit one stupid conception but instead see that the variety of how humans can be suggests that ethics needs to have various shapes to reflect that.
For the animal people, it's like all is on a one dimensional scale from the lights are off (and they don't matter - trees and bees) to the lights are human-like. And for all their talk about not being anthropocentric or speciesist, their style of morality is fixated on the human-thinking style of consciousness as not just normal but ideal.
So they're vegans, but what they talk about does not seem to me to be particularly useful. They need to get down from their conceptual, universalisable abstract tree and realise that what matters is what happens not what they fucking think about it.
Gosh.
The people who engage with differing ways of being in the world - whether psychosis or depression or bi polarity - broaden the conversation about what it means to experience life. Animals are another, further, expansion of that. For us, they are neuro-atypical and that means that their lived experience generates differences that we have to try to at least guess at rather than just assuming they are kinda-like a somewhat autistic are rather sanctimonious vegan philosopher.
I couldn't resist it. I am a bitch as well as a Cro(w)ne.
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