It’s often a good idea to adopt the practices and beliefs of the people around you. For one thing, the people around you aren’t dead. If you do what … - Steve Stewart-Williams

The idea that the Biblical stories are symbolic is charitable to the point of absurdity. What would we think of a university professor who, happening upon unambiguous errors in a favourite student’s work, concluded that the student was speaking symbolically and awarded top marks?

Why should we put a statistical, collective goal – i.e., more equal sex ratios in STEM – above the happiness and autonomy of the flesh-and-blood individuals who constitute those collectives? Why should policy makers’ preference for gender parity take precedence over individual men and women’s preferences regarding their own careers and lives?

Several years ago, the Foundation for Biomedical Research ran an ad campaign in support of medical experimentation on nonhuman animals. The ad featured a photograph of a group of animal rights protestors under the caption: ‘Thanks to animal research, they’ll be able to protest 20.8 years longer.’ But imagine a parallel universe in which medical research is conducted on black people, and in which an equivalent foundation employs an equivalent argument: ‘Thanks to research on black people, these white protesters will be able to protest against experimentation on black people 20.8 years longer’! Would this justify experimentation on black people? Obviously not! We would immediately reject the argument as founded on a deeply racist assumption, namely, that the costs inflicted on ‘mere’ black people are justified by the benefits produced for whites. But the original argument is founded on an equivalently speciesist assumption: that the costs inflicted on ‘mere’ animals are justified by the benefits produced for us.