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Philosophy 110A

Notes from Eighth Lecture

All Animals Are Equal, Peter Singer

 General Comments

• Thesis: All species that are sentient should be extended the basic equality that humans enjoy.
• Singer provides a technical definition of sentience on page 20. For his purposes, sentience is the capacity to suffer or experience enjoyment or happiness.
• The argument that Singer uses to support his point is twofold:
  1. The only coherent way to extend basic equality is through a prescription that ignores differences.
  2. The characteristics that might separate humans from other sentient animals are unacceptable as morally important differences.
• Remember the distinction in moral philosophy:
  • Descriptive – describes a moral system
  • Conceptual – investigates the meaning of key terms
  • Prescriptive/normative – recommends a system of morality
• Remember also the naturalistic fallacy:
  • Naturalistic fallacy – arguing from only the facts of a situation to the way things ought to be in a situation
  • The naturalistic fallacy is avoided if one provides some account of values or morality that validates the connection between states of affairs and moral judgments.
• Singer is presenting the extension of rights to animals as a part of the general fight for equal rights that have occurred throughout human history.
• To justify this presentation, Singer must meet objections to this characterization.
• The prima facie objection to Singer’s project is that the project is simply absurd.
• This absurdity is seen in the way that Thomas Taylor parodied Mary Wollenstonecroft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women.
• The parody that Taylor wrote served to offer a reductio ad absurdum argument against Wollenstonecroft’s position.
  • A reductio argument takes the premises or conclusion of another argument to a conclusion that is false or absurd.
  • Reductio arguments are at their most powerful if they lead to a conclusion that is inconsistent.
  • Sometimes, people offer a reductio argument that lead to a position that they believe is false, yet others may hold that the position is acceptable. This is the approach that Singer takes to Taylor’s argument.
• Singer holds that arguing for equality in the manner of Wollenstonecroft and others should lead to the conclusion that other animals have the same basic rights.
• Singer believes that there are a number of rights that it is absurd to extend beyond a certain domain:
  • It is absurd to extend the right to abortion upon request to men.
    • The reason for this is that men cannot become pregnant.
  • It is absurd to extend the right to vote to pigs.
    • The reason for this is that pigs cannot vote.
• Singer consents that there are important differences between humans and other animals and that this means that certain rights cannot be granted to these other animals. However, the Singer draws a distinction between specific rights of equality and the basic right of equality.

Equality and Difference

• All humans are different from every other human.
  • Thus moral equality cannot be based on the absolute equality of characteristics of all humans.
• Categories of human beings often do not differ in terms of important characteristics.
  • E.g., we cannot know the characteristics of a person just from knowing that that person is black or that that person is a woman
• Thus it may be possible to make claims of moral equality between certain categories of humans on this basis. That is, if a category of human beings is not effectively different from the other categories of the same type, then that category is not a basis upon which to assign moral inequality.
• However, to take this position leads one open to accepting inequalities of a different sort:
  • E.g., if we categorize people based on IQ, we are identifying a characteristic of individuals.
• Additionally, we run into the problem that the differences upon which we may distinguish people are not themselves equally distributed to human beings.
  • Differences may not be genetic, they may be due to environmental influences.
  • We can mean that differences are genetic in two ways: 1) the differences arise out of the nature of the genetic material in one’s cells; 2) the differences arise out of the nature of one’s character.
  • In either case, genetic differences can be enhanced, mitigated or thwarted by environmental factors.
  • Singer does not want to discount differences that arise from human characteristics because they are of uncertain scientific foundation. Rather, he wants us to discount these differences because basic equality is a prescriptive ideal based on concern for interests, not a reflection of capacities.

More about Genetic Differences

• Looking to genetic differences to justify differences in moral concern is something that defies the information available to us about the influence of genetics on human societies.
• There is no evidence that there has been significant change in the human genome in the last 40,000 years (or even much longer).
• As Diamond points out, there is no scientific evidence, genetic or otherwise, available to support the claim that humans of any race or location are more intelligent than those of any other race or location.
• Yet there are differences in the intellectual feats that people of different places and eras can achieve.
• Humans have a great benefit available to them through their societies.
• The Hindu-Arabic numerical system is definitely a social construction. This numerical system allows children to do feats of mathematical calculation that are equal to those of the greatest accountants who used Roman numerals. Grade schoolers using calculators can perform mathematical feats that would stun the mathematicians of the Renaissance.
• People can fly, as long as they use the technology that is available to them through their society.
• These societal factors may be considered environmental factors.
• For our discussion, we should consider that what counts as a difference or the extent and meaning of a difference is dependant upon the environment in which that difference plays a role. Those differences in human genes that we might call a genetic defect may result in no important effect on the life of a person with that genetic difference, due to the technology and social structures that surround that person.
• When we consider the arguments of Singer, we should remember that differences are often what we make of them. If some difference is to be important when making moral judgments, we should provide a good reason to consider the difference in this way.

The Moral Prescription of Basic Equality

• A common feature of moral theories is the claim that the interests of every individual deserve equal consideration.
  • The question then becomes that of determining who or what are individuals.
• Moral concern for the interests of others cannot vary according to the characteristics or actions of particular individuals.
  • Of course, morality may still demand that we violate the interests of others. E.g., we may imprison someone in order to prevent greater harm or due to some other moral reason.
• Singer suggests that if characteristics cannot vitiate the concern for interests then characteristics between humans and animals cannot vitiate the concern for the interests of animals.
  • Consider as a thought experiment the scenario of a human astronaut encountering an alien on a faraway planet. The astronaut undoubtedly differs in many characteristics from the alien. Do these differences mean that the astronaut has no moral obligations to the alien? Does the alien have no rights?
• Jeremy Bentham on the rights of nonhuman animals:

  The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor.* It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? (Pg. 20)

• Singer uses this passage to point to a capacity that is required for a being to have interests. If a being is sentient, that is, if it can feel pain and pleasure, then it can have interests. Such a being will attempt to act in order to avoid pain and pursue pleasure, thus it can properly be said to have interests and goals.
• Singer states that there is no moral reason for refusing to take the suffering of another being into consideration.

Example of Speciesism

1. Eating Meat and the Methods of Meat Production

• Humans eat meat, yet they do not have to. Thus humans sacrifice animals on the basis of aesthetic choice. This is an example of disregarding the moral standing of animals.
• The methods of meat production often involve procedures that cause suffering to the animals involved that go beyond that which is needed to process their flesh.
  • E.g. cages for battery hens, the living conditions of calves raised for veal

2. Testing on Animals

• Experiments are performed on animals for little purpose. This can only be done if the scientists performing the experiments weigh the moral standing of animals as very little.
• Singer offers the following argument against to show that the position that sacrificing animals saves many lives is speciesist.
  • Experimenters are willing to sacrifice animal lives to save human lives.
  • Experimenters are not willing to sacrifice human life in order to save animal lives.
  • Many animal that are sacrificed are more capable of forming and maintaining interests than many human that could otherwise be sacrificed.
  • Thus the interests of these animals are more important than those of these particular humans.
  • Thus the interests of the animals are being sacrificed in order to serve human interests.
  • Thus these experiments are an example of speciesism.
• Singer’s formulation of this argument is much more dramatic:

  In the past, argument about vivisection has often missed the point, because it has been put in absolutist terms: Would the abolitionist be prepared to let thousands die if they could be saved by experimenting on a single animal? The way to reply to this purely hypothetical question is to pose another: Would the experimenter be prepared to perform his experiment on an orphaned human infant, if that were the only way to save many lives? (I say "orphan" to avoid the complication of parental feelings, although in doing so I am being overfair to the experimenter, since the non-human subjects of experiments are not orphans.) If the experimenter is not prepared to use an orphaned human infant, then his readiness to use nonhumans is simple discrimination, since adult apes, cats, mice, and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant. There seems to be no relevant characteristic that human infants possess that adult mammals do not have to the same or a higher degree. (Someone might try to argue that what makes it wrong to experiment on a human infant is that the infant will, in time and if left alone, develop into more than the nonhuman, but one would then, to be consistent, have to oppose abortion, since the fetus has the same potential as the infant—indeed, even contraception and abstinence might be wrong on this ground, since the egg and sperm, considered jointly, also have the same potential. In any case, this argument still gives us no reason for selecting a nonhuman, rather than a human with severe and irreversible brain damage, as the subject for our experiments). (Pg. 22-23)

3. Philosophical Writing

• One of the concerns of an activist philosophy is the subtle way that concepts can become related to aspects of oppression. This is a concern that Singer has for the way that philosophers discuss the concept of equality; he fears that philosophers discuss equality in ways that obfuscate the moral concerns of animals.
• By framing discussions of equality as discussions of the equality of humans, philosophers cut themselves off from considerations of the rights of animals.
• Singer suggests that without its innate prejudice against the equality of animals, philosophical considerations of equality naturally lead to the consideration of animals as equals.
  • If we attempt to define characteristics that cover all humans and grant them moral consideration, we have to set the bar extremely low if we wish to cover all humans. Such characteristics will fit other animals as well.
  • Philosophers that do face this conclusion add unjustified, ad hoc principles to justify the exclusion of animals from moral consideration.
    • E.g., William Frankena in, "The Concept of Social Justice," ascribes to humans the capacity, "to enjoy a good life in a sense in which other animals [cannot]." (Pg. 24) Frankena does not believe that the good life in this sense involves anything more than happiness and satisfaction. There is no reason to suppose that animals do not experience happiness and satisfaction, so Frankena’s principle doesn’t seem to be particularly human in any sense.
    • E.g., many philosophers speak of the essential human dignity. This idea seems to have its origin in theological philosophy, but is without foundation in other philosophical traditions. If one is to grant humans a special dignity, one must have some reason to grant this dignity. Attempts to provide a characteristic will fail to distinguish humans from animals as described above.
    • E.g., some philosophers say that to consider animals in the same way as we consider those with poor mental abilities would be to consider treating these humans as a food source. Singer does not really disagree on this point. It is his position that animals should not be consumed for the same reasons that humans with poor mental abilities should not be consumed.
  • Stanley Benn takes a direct approach to the issue, in, "Egalitarianism and Equal Consideration of Interests."
    • He argues that humans have a different status than animals because there is a different in the capacities of the normal human and the normal animal. Humans that deviate from the characteristics that we identify as normal still deserve the respect that we give humans. Animals, on the other hand, can never attain the human normal capacities.
    • Singer rejects this line of reasoning because it makes a distinction between two states of affairs that are equally the results of the state of affairs. That a particular human lacks intelligence is no more the fault of that human than it is the fault of a particular dog that he or she lacks intelligence.
    • We would not accept that moral differences between humans are justified by a similar discrepancy between humans. If men normally score better than women on IQ tests, this does not mean that we should refuse to grant basic equality to women.

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