If Penicillin Had Been Judged

The Belief That The Animals Exist Because God Created Them - And That He Created Them So We Can Better Meet Our Needs - Is Contrary To Our Scientific Understanding Of Evolution And, Of Course, To The Fossil Record, Which Shows The Existence Of Non-human Primates And Other Animals Millions Of Years Before There Were Any Human Beings At All.

It Is Now Generally Accepted That The Roots Of Our Ethics Lie In Patterns Of Behavior That Evolved Among Our Pre-human Ancestors, The Social Mammals And That We Retain Within Our Biological Nature Elements Of These Evolved Responses. We Have Learned Considerably More About This Responses, And We Are Beginning To To Understand How They Interact With Our Capacity To Reason.

What Is There About The Notion Of A Person, At Law, That Makes Every Living Member Of The Species Homo Sapiens A Person, Irrespective Of Their Mental Capacities, But Excludes Every Nonhuman Animal - Again, Irrespective Of Their Mental Capacities?

I'm Not Overly Alarmist About It, But I Do Think There Are Some Worrying Signs, Like The Growing Accumulation Of Wealth By A Very Small Proportion Of The Population, Plus Elections In The Us Are Much More Dominated By Money Than Anywhere Else Calling Itself A Democracy.

Ethics Seems A Morass Which We Have To Cross, But Get Hopelessly Bogged In When We Make The Attempt.