Animal Liberation.
by Peter Singer.
New York Review-Random House. 301 pp. $10.00.
This book begins with philosophy and ends with cookery. Peter Singer, a young, Oxford-educated professor of philosophy, attempts to convince his readers to abandon the eating of animals, and then obligingly provides them with an appendix of vegetarian recipes.
More than half of Animal Liberation is devoted to a compilation of “horror stories” about useless experimentation on animals and harsh conditions on “factory farms”—an exercise in muckraking that contributes nothing to establishing the soundness of the author’s philosophical doctrine. But then Singer is less concerned with passing the critical scrutiny of his fellow professors of philosophy than with gaining converts to “an ethical and political movement.”
As the title Animal Liberation indicates, Singer borrows freely from the rhetoric of contemporary radical movements. He coins the infelicitous term “speciesism”—an analogue to sexism and racism—to describe the attitudes that make possible the “oppression” of animals. His opening chapter is subtitled, “Why Supporters of Liberation for Blacks and Women should Support Animal Liberation Too.” Yet it is clear that Singer is not primarily addressing blacks and women concerned with winning their own liberation. His real audience is those who unselfishly support the liberation of others.
If Singer’s rhetoric is contemporary, his outlook belongs not to present-day radicalism but to the reformist tradition spawned by the philosophic radicalism of 19th-century Britain. His heroes are not revolutionaries like Malcolm X or Ho Chi Minh, but British humanitarians who campaigned against the slave trade and child labor. Similarly, the philosophic underpinnings of Singer’s case derive not from Marxism or more recent revolutionary doctrines, but from the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham.
Like Bentham, Singer starts from simple and abstract moral principles and reasons unswervingly toward a series of practical conclusions. His abstract principles are essentially two. The first is equality, which for him is a “moral idea, not an assertion of fact.” This principle demands that equal consideration be given to every being whose interests are affected by any action. Singer’s second principle, which is derived explicitly from Bentham, identifies “the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration.” Therefore, to apply the principle of equality to humans alone, and thus to give less weight to the suffering of other beings, is to commit the sin of “speciesism.”
Singer supplements this direct argument with an expose of the “obsolete” religious, moral, and metaphysical ideas that have been used in the West to “mask the naked self-interest of human dealings with other animals.” The view—common to Judaism, Aristotelian philosophy, and Christianity—that man occupies a special place in the universe, and has a right to dominion over the other animals, is no longer tenable. It has been finally and decisively refuted by the Darwinian theory of evolution. Hence there no longer remains any plausible justification for the refusal of humans to grant equal consideration to the interests of other animals.
Here the contradiction at the heart of Singer’s argument becomes especially glaring. For the Darwinian theory portrays a world whose essence is an unrelenting competition for survival among the various species—a competition that routinely involves the eating of one animal species by another. The suggestion that, in such a world, any species should forsake its own “naked self-interest” to give equal consideration to the interests of other species is preposterous. In short, Darwinism may undermine the notion of a morally relevant inequality between man and animal, but in so doing it also renders absurd the notion that man has any moral duties toward other species.
A similar contradiction inheres in Singer’s appeal to Benthamism. For once the moral sphere is reduced—as Bentham reduces it—to calculations of suffering (or pain) and enjoyment (or pleasure), what reason is there for men to diminish the sum of their own enjoyment in order to lessen the sufferings of other beings? Singer’s simplistic invocation of equality is hardly an adequate answer. If the principle of equal consideration is to be more than merely an abstract “moral idea” without any force, it must be based on an “assertion of fact”—i.e., on some actual equality that makes possible a genuine community of interests among the beings concerned. Such a community clearly can exist among men, who are capable of acting morally toward one another. But there is no possibility of moral reciprocity—and hence no genuine equality—between men and animals.
Singer would undoubtedly respond to this argument with a tactic he employs throughout his book against all claims that there is a morally decisive inequality between man and animals. He poses the following dilemma: if we are justified in using animals for food (or for medical experimentation) because they are incapable of acting rationally or morally, aren’t we equally justified in using irreparably brain-damaged, abandoned infants in the same way? To continue eating animals, while opposing the eating of defective humans, is in his view to be guilty of blatant “speciesism.”
But let us suppose Singer is right in contending that, without recourse to religious conceptions, moral philosophy cannot demonstrate that we have more stringent duties toward severely brain-damaged infants than we have toward animals. This would merely mean that by refusing to eat or experiment upon defective humans—perhaps from sentimental or instinctual motives—we are acting more generously toward them than strict obligation would require. Such generosity may be labeled “speciesist,” but how can it possibly be considered reprehensible?
Singer’s aim in likening the moral status of animals to that of severely retarded humans is obviously to encourage gentler treatment for the former, not harsher treatment for the latter. No doubt with equally benevolent intentions. he compares the situation of animals on factory farms to that of black slaves on Southern plantations, and the work of medical researchers who experiment upon animals to the horrors perpetrated by Nazi doctors in concentration camps. Yet these kinds of comparisons are not only morally repugnant, but also dangerously irresponsible. They are less likely to extend men’s moral sympathies to pigs or rats than to weaken the inhibitions that restrain their behavior toward other human beings.
Indeed, it is rather remarkable that thinkers like Singer are themselves such ardent altruists, so great is the delight they take in debunking all those religious and metaphysical assumptions that grant human beings a special moral dignity—assumptions that have served most men as the very basis of their duties toward others. Why they should then expect men, now presumably stripped of moral illusions, to extend their moral obligations to a hitherto unheard-of degree, is a fascinating question for psychologists.
