Abstract

The widely acclaimed components of the humanistic ethical program are to be found at present in personalism, universalism, and humanitarianism. The author unreservedly subscribes to this program and postulates that the value of every human individual be recognized irrespective of his individual characteristics, that all actions which affect any human being be performed only with due respect to the autonomous good of the human being, and that no man be ever treated only as an instrument in his existence. Trying to supply a justification for these postulates most authors point out that human dignity is presumably founded on such merits as reason and conscience. The author resolved to expose the weakness of this line of argument. A recourse to empirical features that allegedly distinguish human species from the others may not serve as a good reason in defense of those particular human individuals who clearly lack them. The author endavours to show that universalism which gives ~very man a minimum rights may justly be treated as unacceptable particularism, as typically ‚human speciesism’, indeed. It excludes from the regions of moral concern all animals, which like humans, are capable of suffering. Many authors take the sentience to be the single most important feature shared by animals and humans, which imposes on us the obligation to take care of animals as well as humans. The author contents that the delineation of the range of creatures with respect to whom we have moral obligation is one of the axioms which cannot be argued for or against. There are no logical reasons for drawing the boundaries here or there. We must rely on our ultimate moral convictions that we perceive as our feeling of being morally right. The delineation of the range of the creatures whose autonomous good we will take into account in our activity is a question of an axiomatic decision. We will not find any empirical features either in men or animals, which could impose a logical necessity for counting certain specimens in or others out. We must rely on the most elementary sense of solidarity which makes another creature our fellow-creature. The numerous controversies between different degrees and different kinds of particularism, or between particularism and universalism with respect to humans, or between universalism encompassing only humans and universalism extended to the whole reach of creatures capable of suffering has its source not so much in the differences in knowledge of facts but as in different emotional evaluative attitudes towards them.