PS: Maybe I would go along with it. I mean, it's really grotesque, but it's consensual and it doesn't harm anyone else. If that's what he really wants, then maybe I'm not going to object.

NB: I do see reluctance on your part to affirm any kind of moral objectivity.

PS: I thought that I made it really clear at the conference in the last day or two that I have been influenced by Derek Parfit's arguments in On What Matters to think that maybe there is an objective basis for ethics so in that sense it's not inadvertent references, or some references that you think I make are inadvertent, but I am now prepared to say that some moral claims are objective truths in the same way that we think of mathematical truths as being so.

DJ: Could you please give an example of such a truth?

PS: Well, that agony is bad. That, other things being equal, it's bad for a being to be in agony. That would be an argument that is of course consistent with saying that you may have to endure agony for some greater good, but at least taken on its own the state of being in agony is something to be avoided.

DJ: Am I right in understanding it that you regard the state of being in agony for an animal, especially obviously one of the higher apes, or those that are closest to us in species, but actually of any sentient being as equally morally repugnant, and of it being equally true that agony is bad whatever kind of being it is?

PS: Yes, that is right.  In fact, the closeness to us in biological terms is not relevant. All that is relevant is whether it is agony and whether the agony is as severe as in one being. One might question, I suppose, whether some rather simpler beings with more limited  cognitive abilities can really feel in the same way as some beings with higher cognitive abilities — that is the question. If the degree of agony is the same, then I think it is equally bad that it should occur no matter what the being that is experiencing it.

DJ: What you are really doing here is upgrading the moral importance of, particularly, primates, but actually all animals, while downgrading the moral importance of, for example, the unborn or severely disabled child or the extremely ill, dying adult. I am only trying to get at why your views seem to excite such extraordinary controversy.

PS: Well, they do challenge the ideas that we hold very dear to us that somehow humans are special, that we are all up there on a higher pedestal than the other animals. I think that we like to keep this gulf between us and animals. You only have to look at the response to Darwin. He also excited this kind of outrage and I think on similar grounds.  You are right: I want to consider beings for what they are, that is what their capacities are — what they can feel and experience, and not for their species. That does actually have the effect that I am raising the level of many non-mammals, while some human beings who have had a high status just because they were member of our species, since they don't have capacities, feelings, cognitive abilities higher than those of some non-humans, do get a lower status on that basis.