Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It

Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It

Copyright © 2015, 2017 Magnus Vinding

Parts of this book have previously been published in other books by the author.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Why Speciesism Is Wrong

Why Speciesism Is Wrong

Part II: The Implications of Rejecting Speciesism

Embracing Veganism

Abolishing the Property Status of Non-Human Animals

Vivisection

Granting Proper Moral Consideration to Non-Human Animals in Nature

The Conservationist Delusion

Intervening in Nature — An Imperative

Intervene How?

A Short Note On Insects

Transcending Speciesist Language

Is Anti-Speciesism Anti-Human?

Epilogue: We Are All Speciesists

What You Can Do Now

Bibliography

Introduction

We are ethically deluded. There are thousands of billions of sentient beings on Earth who all experience, feel, enjoy, and suffer, yet our firmly established consensus is that only seven billion of these really matter — those who belong to the human species. We must do what is best for humanity! our collective moral tune goes, and in almost all we say and do, we chant and promulgate this anthem of moral confusion. This cannot be defended. We must include all sentient beings in our sphere of moral concern, regardless of which species they belong to. We must go beyond speciesism.

What is speciesism?

Speciesism is discrimination against beings based on the species they belong to. To be more precise, speciesism is, as philosopher Oscar Horta writes, the unjustified disadvantageous consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to a certain species.¹ Hence, to reject speciesism is to reject the notion that beings matter less because they belong to a certain species, and to instead prioritize the well-being of sentient beings on the basis of their sentience alone.

There is a lot of confusion about the concept of speciesism, and the perhaps most common confused idea about it is that a rejection of speciesism implies that we must treat all beings the same, for example that we should give all animals, human as well as non-human, the right to vote. But this is silly. Prioritizing equal interests equally does not imply that we should treat beings in the exact same way, for the simple reason that different beings have different interests and needs. Therefore, different treatment does not necessarily amount to discrimination, i.e. unjustified disadvantageous treatment. Just as it is not sexist to treat men and women differently in certain regards — for instance, to only offer women screenings for cervical cancer, or to only offer men screenings for prostate cancer — it is not speciesist not to grant non-human animals the right to vote, since they, like human toddlers, cannot meaningfully do so.

In fact, if anything follows from the rejection of discrimination, including speciesism, it is exactly that we should treat different beings differently, since such a rejection indeed requires that our treatment of different beings be based upon their different individual abilities, interests, and needs. Only on a speciesist or otherwise discriminatory view could we ignore these.

The aim of this book is to examine our speciesism. This examination consists of two separate parts, where the first part shows why speciesism is unjustifiable, and hence why it must be rejected, while the second part examines the practical implications of this rejection. This latter examination is bound to be far from exhaustive, and bound to leave many important questions untouched, since there are both too many questions, and too many uncertainties related to these questions, for them to all fall within the scope of this short book. As we shall see, however, merely pointing out the most basic and most important implications of the rejection of speciesism reveals more than a few ways in which our behavior and attitudes, our worldview even, should change, and change profoundly.

Part I: Why Speciesism Is Wrong

Why Speciesism Is Wrong

One of the defining traits of the moral progress of humanity in the last few centuries is that we gradually have distanced ourselves from discrimination in its many forms. Where it was once the norm that the rich Caucasian man above a certain age had rights that nobody else had, while women and people of certain ethnicities had no rights at all, we have finally come to realize that such discrimination is deeply unethical. We have finally realized that racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination against human beings cannot be justified. Not that they do not exist anymore — they do indeed — but they are no longer as widespread as they were 200, 100, or even 50 years ago, and they are now widely regarded as indefensible. We have finally realized that women should not be given fewer rights because they are women, that people should not be discriminated against because of the color of their skin, and that people who have a disability should not be treated with less care and respect because they have a disability. When it comes to humans, we have finally realized that it is by virtue of sentience alone — the fact that we are conscious beings who can experience suffering and well-being — that we are inherently valuable in moral terms. When it comes to humans, we recognize that this and nothing else is the true basis of moral concern. Black, white, male, female, physically or cognitively impaired or not, it is all irrelevant for our status as beings of inherent moral value, beings who should be respected and treated as ends rather than means.

Having realized this much, the question that is now staring in the face of humanity is this: why have we confined this insight to humans only? Why, when it comes to non-human beings, is it suddenly as if we are back in time, failing to realize that sentience alone is what makes a being morally valuable? Why are we still defending diminished concern for non-human beings — even defending that we mutilate and kill them for frivolous reasons, such as palate pleasure — with reference to the very traits that we recognize to be morally irrelevant when it comes to humans? Indeed, why does speciesism still stand as strong and unchallenged as ever?

Whatever the reason may be, it is not a valid one. Speciesism is wrong, and it is so for the same simple reason that other forms of discrimination, such as racism, sexism, and heterosexism, are wrong: because it amounts to a diminished moral concern for beings based on a morally irrelevant criterion. Just as an individual’s race, sex, or sexual orientation is ethically irrelevant, it is not morally relevant which species a sentient being belongs to. As we realize when it comes to humans, we should always recognize that individuals have inherent moral value, and prioritize their lives and well-being on the basis of their sentience alone — not their race, gender, sexuality, intelligence or species. (And for this reason, what I refer to as non-human animals throughout this book is actually sentient non-human animals. Which beings are included in this category is an open question, but, as I have argued in A Copernican Revolution in Ethics, it only seems reasonable to maintain that all vertebrates and at least many invertebrates, such as cephalopods, are sentient. Beyond that, the question becomes harder, yet we should generally aim to err on the side of caution.) To do anything else is to engage in discrimination against certain beings — to give them unjustified disadvantageous consideration.

The wrongness of speciesism is really that simple, and actually requires no further elaboration. Nonetheless, the conclusion that speciesism is wrong clearly has a hard time gaining acceptance, and countless desperate attempts have been made to reject it so as to preserve the gap between human and non-human beings that presently exists in our moral perception. The remainder of this chapter is a refutation of the most common of these attempts.

"Discrimination against non-human animals is not ethically unjustifiable. Human beings and non-human animals are different. Humans have cognitive capacities that other animals don’t have. Humans are far more intelligent."

Human beings are surely different from non-human beings, but men are also different from women, and people who do not have certain mental abilities are