Animal Liberation at 30

Monday, April 28th, 2003

In Animal Liberation at 30, Peter Singer reviews the state of animal rights 30 years after he first reviewed Animals, Men and Morals for The New York Review of Books. He presents the following argument:

If we ignore or discount their interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists or sexists who think that those who belong to their race or sex have superior moral status, simply in virtue of their race or sex, and irrespective of other characteristics or qualities. Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or in other intellectual capacities to nonhuman animals, that is not enough to justify the line we draw between humans and animals. Some humans — infants and those with severe intellectual disabilities — have intellectual capacities inferior to some animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to test the safety of household products. Nor, of course, would we tolerate confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them. The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is therefore a sign of “speciesism” — a prejudice that survives because it is convenient for the dominant group — in this case not whites or males, but all humans.

I guess he finds that convincing.

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