The Speciesism Debate: Intuition, Method, and Empirical Advances (original) (raw)
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Journal of Value Inquiry
The prevalent view in animal ethics is that speciesism is wrong: we should weigh the interests of humans and non-humans equally. Shelly Kagan has recently questioned this claim, defending speciesism against Peter Singer’s seminal argument based on the principle of equal consideration of interests. This critique is most charitably construed as a dilemma. The principle of equal consideration can be interpreted in either of two ways. While it faces counterexamples on the first reading, it makes Singer’s argument question-begging on the second. In response, Singer has grasped the first horn of this dilemma and tried to accommodate Kagan’s apparent counterexamples. In my opinion, this attempt is unpersuasive: the principle of equal consideration is inconsistent with common-sense intuitions on Kagan’s cases. Worse, Singer’s argument begs the question anyway. It therefore faces two serious objections. This is not to say that there is nothing wrong with speciesism, however. In the second half of the paper, I propose another, better argument against speciesism, which I argue is immune to both objections. According to this other argument, speciesism is wrong because it involves discriminating on the basis of a merely biological property.
Does Being Human Matter Morally? Five Correctives to the Speciesism Debate
This article argues for five correctives to the current ethical debate about speciesism, and proposes normative, conceptual, methodological and experimental avenues to move this debate forward. Firstly, it clarifies the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests and points out limitations of its scope. Secondly, it disambiguates between ‘favouritist’ and ‘species-relative’ views about moral treatment. Thirdly, it argues that not all moral intuitions about speciesism should be given equal weight. Fourthly, it emphasizes the importance of empirical research to corroborate statements about ‘folk speciesism’. Fifthly, it disambiguates between the moral significance of species and the moral status of their individual members. For each of these issues, it is shown that they have either been overlooked, or been given inapt treatment, in recent contributions to the debate. Building on the correctives, new directions are proposed for ethical inquiry into the moral relevance of species and...
Routledge Handbook of American Science, 2022
This chapter introduces topical issues in the ethical debate on speciesism. It does so against a background of the history of the debate and with an emphasis on concerns that arise at the intersection of speciesism and science. The term speciesism was coined in the 1970s by Richard Rider and popularized by Peter Singer, who defined speciesism as “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species.” Critiques of speciesism are undergirded by the principle that comparable interests should be given equal consideration, regardless of species-membership. To what extent the interests of humans and non-humans are comparable, however, has been a matter of contention and is partly beholden to empirical findings. Diverging opinions on this matter have given rise to a variety of more and less species-egalitarian views, often paired with rivalling accounts of “moral status”. A minority of ethicists have explicitly defended speciesism or some version thereof, including Bernard Williams and, more recently, Shelly Kagan. Apart from the back-and-forths between critics and defenders, the speciesism debate has transformed over the last decade, in three respects. First, discourse on animal ethics has witnessed a “political turn”, moving away from analyses of moral status and towards discussions of human-animal relations in interspecies societies. Secondly, apart from anthropocentric speciesism, i.e., privileging humans over non-humans, there has been an increasing interest in non-anthropocentric speciesism, i.e., privileging some non-human species over others. Thirdly, speciesism has been endorsed as a prominent topic in the new, activist-leaning research field of Critical Animal Studies, and has recently garnered substantial attention from psychologists. As these disciplinary changes and conceptual refinements suggest, half a century after its coinage, speciesism continues to be an important scholarly and ethical concept whose history is still in the making.
The Scope of the Argument from Species Overlap
The argument from species overlap has been widely used in the literature on animal ethics and speciesism. However, there has been much confusion regarding what the argument proves and what it does not prove, and regarding the views it challenges. This paper intends to clarify these confusions, and to show that the name most often used for this argument (“the argument from marginal cases”) reflects and reinforces these misunderstandings. The paper claims that the argument questions not only those defenses of anthropocentrism that appeal to capacities believed to be typically human, but also those that appeal to special relations between humans. This means the scope of the argument is far wider than has been thought thus far. Finally, the paper claims that, even if the argument cannot prove by itself that we should not disregard the interests of nonhuman animals, it provides us with strong reasons to do so, since the argument does prove that no defense of anthropocentrism appealing to non-definitional and testable criteria succeeds.
Speciesism like racism and sexism: A faulty analogy?
2023
This essay is the first assignment for the "Applied Ethics" course of the "Philosophy and Religion" master programme at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. In this assignment, I discuss the claim: "Speciesism is morally wrong in the same way that racism and sexism is morally wrong".
Speciesism and Tribalism: Embarrassing Origins
Philosophical Studies
Animal ethicists have been debating the morality of speciesism for over forty years. Despite rather persuasive arguments against this form of discrimination, many philosophers continue to assign humans a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. The primary source of evidence for this position is our intuition that humans’ interests matter more than the similar interests of other animals. And it must be acknowledged that this intuition is both powerful and widespread. But should we trust it for all that? The present paper defends a negative answer to that question, based on a debunking argument. The intuitive belief that humans matter more than other animals is unjustified because it results from an epistemically defective process. It is largely shaped by tribalism, our tendency to favor ingroup members as opposed to outgroup members. And this influence is distortive for two reasons. First, tribalism evolved for reasons unrelated to moral truths; hence, it would at best produce true moral beliefs accidentally. Second, tribalism generates a vast quantity of false moral beliefs, starting with racist beliefs. Once this intuition is discarded, little evidence remains that speciesism is morally acceptable.
Only All Naturalists Should Worry about Only One Evolutionary Debunking Argument - Ethics 2016
Ethics
Do the facts of evolution generate an epistemic challenge to moral realism? Some think so, and many “evolutionary debunking arguments” have been discussed in the recent literature. But they are all murky right where it counts most: exactly which epistemic principle is meant to take us from evolutionary considerations to the skeptical conclusion? Here, I will identify several distinct species of evolutionary debunking argument in the literature, each one of which relies on a distinct epistemic principle. Drawing on recent work in epistemology, I will show that most of these initially plausible principles are false, collapsing the arguments that rely on them. And we will see that each argument threatens only one popular view of moral psychology: a “Representationalist” view on which our moral judgments rely crucially on a mental intermediary—e.g. a sentiment, gut feeling, or affect-laden intuition—delivered by our evolved moral faculty. In the end, only one evolutionary debunking argument remains potent: an “Argument from Symmetry” that I will introduce to the literature. But we will see that it should worry only all naturalists, pressuring them into a trilemma: give up moral realism, accept a rationalism that is incongruous with naturalism, or give up naturalism. Non-naturalists are free and clear.
Speciesism as a Variety of Anthropocentrism
In what follows I shall argue that speciesism is in fact a variety of anthropocentric prejudice. But appeals to the important bond that we share with other humans ('our shared humanity' in terms familiar from Raimond Gaita) need not always involve such prejudice. Such appeals can function as part of a rejection of practices such as intrusive animal experimentation on the grounds that we humans have (in all sorts of ways) misused and mistreated non-humans to such an extent that we have now lost any moral authority to sacrifice their interests in the name of some greater overall good. And what is appealed to here, as well as our shared humanity, is a history of our human mistreatment and its connection to the moral authority to harm for a reason. An argument constructed along these lines might not work if we regard our connection to a shared and abusive human history as an insufficiently weighty consideration when set against the utilitarian advantages of the experimental system. I do not happen to think that it is insufficiently weighty, but others might disagree. Either way, the more importance that we accord to a connection to harm that is established through our shared humanity, the weightier a consideration this connection will become.
Anthropocentrism and speciesism: conceptual and normative issues
Revista de Bioética y Derecho 32, 2014: 82-90
In this article, we will challenge two common assumptions regarding the relation between anthropocentrism and speciesism. The first assumption is that anthropocentrism and speciesism are equivalent concepts. However, there are clear counterexamples of non-anthropocentric speciesism, that is, cases in which there is a preferential consideration of members of a certain nonhuman species over the members of other nonhuman species. The second assumption is the inevitability of anthropocentrism, which would supposedly justify speciesism. Nevertheless, this justificatory attempt is based on a fatal ambiguity between epistemic and moral anthropocentrism. Once this ambiguity is dissolved we will show how moral anthropocentrism does not follow from epistemic anthropocentrism and that any attempt to justify speciesism from epistemic anthropocentrism is deeply unwarranted. Finally, we will conclude that both anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric forms of speciesism are unjustified.
Intuitions Gone Astray: between Implausibility and Speciesism.
Relations, vol. 3 (1), 2015
Reply to Stijn Bruers' ‘The Predation and Procreation Problems: Persistent Intuitions Gone Wild’ [2015. Relations, vol. 3 (1)]. There he presents an axiology which includes well-being and biodiversity. On his account, however, the latter has much more importance than the former. Tremendous gains in well-being are proscribed when they can only be obtained through a great loss in biodiversity. That is why we should not phase out predation by genetically reprogramming predators. I argue that, even if we value biodiversity, it cannot be that important. This is shown, first, by considering the results of Bruers’ account regarding the sacrifice of both nonhuman and human interests. Second, I suggest how rejecting Bruers’ view on biodiversity has acceptable implications regarding his two other worries, r-selection and the inadvertent killing of sentient invertebrates.