Philosophy for Animals

The term speciesism was coined in 1970 by Richard D. Ryder, and gained wider popularity with the 1975 publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, widely referenced as a foundational text of the then-burgeoning animal rights movement.

Broadly, speciesism is differential treatment of beings solely based on species membership.

This manifests as the prevailing idea that humans should receive greater moral consideration from society purely because they are human. It also manifests in the different moral standings of different animal species; for example, in the dominant American culture, killing a dog would be widely frowned upon, but killing a pig is considered very normal. The reason for this differential treatment is because the two animals are different species, which is speciesist.

The Principle of Equal Consideration and Speciesism

Many critics of speciesism, including Peter Singer, view it as analogous to other forms of discrimination that are more commonly recognized, like racism or sexism. Singer uses his principle of equal consideration to make this argument.

The Principle of Equal Consideration states that people’s interests should be considered equally, regardless of morally irrelevant characteristics like race, sex, ability, etc. It reflects the belief in human equality that most people already hold. Anti-speciesists only take it a step further, to include species as one of those morally-irrelevant characteristics that should not be used to discriminate.

Like humans, animals have interests, such as avoiding pain, and species membership should not be a reason to weigh one being’s interests over another’s, or to deny moral consideration of interests to whole groups of beings.

This of course does not mean that humans and animals have the same interests all the time. For example, while a human may want to read this philosophy blog, a pig would not be able to comprehend it (probably) and so it wouldn’t make sense to say that it’s speciesist to not send pigs to university.