Essay:Speciesism Explained

The fight to end speciesism is central to the entire Animal Rights movement and philosophy. Unfortunately, it is by far one of the cause’s most misunderstood concepts leading to many strawmen arguments against it and resulting in the masses not taking it seriously. I'm writing this essay to discuss the concept, clear up some misconceptions and respond to some opposition.

NOTE: Many of the excerpts in this essay are from Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. I highly recommend checking out the first chapter of this book here, it is only 20 pages long and caused the entire animal rights movement and existence of PETA. If you’re going to try fault a philosophy, at least be familiar with its source arguments.

What Speciesism Is
Speciesism is the concept of discriminating against other beings based on their species. It’s primarily meant to apply to humans, and how we discriminate against other animals, as well as our tendency to put some species above others. we love dogs, but we will eat cows, etc.

As Peter Singer writes in Animal Liberation:

He explains it further when he explains the term is defined analogously to racism and sexism:

It is clear that animals and humans do not always share the same interests - humans often have an interest in being able to vote, owning property, getting an education etc. These interests are not shared by nonhuman animals. However, humans and animals do share some similar interests, such as an interest in food, water, shelter, companionship, freedom of movement, not being killed and avoidance of pain. Speciesists, however, are content in the belief that human interests should always be given more weight than animal interests in the absence of morally relevant differences. For example, a speciesist would see no ethical problem slaughtering a pig so a human can eat it for convenience or pleasure (that is, when it is not necessary for the human’s health or survival). In this case, the pig’s interest in living has been traded in favor of the human’s interest in indulging in a particular taste. Another example would be to compare a human and a dog being experimented on. Although dogs and humans feel pain the same way and would suffer equally, speciesist beliefs assert that it is inherently worse for this to happen to the human.

What Speciesism is Not (The Burning Building)
It's not long into a discussion about the ethics of speciesism when the famous "burning building" scenario comes up. The situation is that you are in a burning building and you can only save one - a human or a dog. In this scenario, Speciesism would be choosing to save the human solely because it’s a human.

Pretty simple, but where people mess up is in their understanding of anti-speciesism. Most people take anti-speciesism to mean “all species are equal in regard to moral relevance”. So, ethically, “there’s no difference” between choosing the dog or the human.

This is false, this is not what anti-speciesism is. To quote Singer again:

Anti-speciesism is not the position that “all animals have equal worth”, it is that ‘’species membership’’ is irrelevant in deciding the moral worth of a being’s life or suffering.

The taking of life is a very specific case, and has different considerations to bear in mind than when comparing animal and human suffering (which is equal). There may very well be reasons to save the human's life over the dog's, but this choice has nothing to do with species. As Singer writes:

and then in his essay "Speciesism and Moral Status":

This is a “graduated view” of moral status, as Singer puts it, that’s based on cognitive ability and therefore, degree of suffering.

So, in the burning building, it’s rational to save the human over the dog because the average human is more sentient than the average dog, and thus would likely experience more anguish. Similarly, it would be rational to choose the dog over a fish, or a fish over a beetle.

However, this does NOT mean that it is always rational to choose the human over the dog (or fish over the beetle).

In such a case, where the choice is between saving a severely cognitively disabled human or a fully sentient dog, the rational moral choice would be to save the dog. A choice between a fully aware chimp or a person in a state of advanced senility would demand rational people to save the chimp instead for similar reasons. A speciesist would always save the human. There would never be a case where they would value the animal over the human. The sole fact that “they are human” takes precedence over everything else. This is the same as when whites regarded whites as more important than blacks "just because they are white".

Real World Consequences
"If the speciesist and non-speciesist will make the same decision 99% of the time, what’s the problem?"

The problem, unfortunately, is enormous. When we accept that speciesism is “at least theoretically” wrong, we run into massive problems with how we currently treat other non-human animals. Our entire societies and cultures are built on the idea that humans are infinitely more important than other animals, but realizing that speciesism is an indefensible philosophy destroys this.

Consider animal testing. We view it justified to experiment on mice, but not on humans, because the mice are less sentient than we are. Fine. But would you agree with experimentation on severely-cognitively-disabled humans whose sentience was less then that of the mice? If you would not (which most people wouldn’t) you are committing speciesism.

Consider every widespread practice that we currently condone with animals: raising them in overcrowded cages in factory farms, killing their kids so we can have their milk, grinding newborn baby chicks alive in the egg industry, killing them for their skins, locking them in cages in zoos, abusing them to perform tricks for us in the circus, racing them for gambling purposes, and sacrificing them for medical experiments for “the greater good”. We would NEVER consider it OK to do these things to other humans, but we think nothing of doing it to other animals because “they are less intelligent” or “less aware”. However, many humans are less sentient than these animals, like the senile, the comatose, very young babies, people with advanced dementia, and the otherwise mentally-impaired. But it’s not considered OK to exploit these people. Why? Well, because they are human.

When PETA made their infamous “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign, comparing concentration camps to modern factory farms and slaughterhouses, this was branded a disgrace and received overwhelming backlash. Why? Because human lives are more important. OK fine, that’s not inconsistent with being anti-speciesist as we’ve discussed. Now imagine there was a massive genocide of people that are so medically mentally-impaired they have less intelligence than chickens. Would their lives matter? If you think saving these hypothetical human’s lives would be a moral necessity but killing animals in a slaughterhouse is fine, you are committing speciesism.

If we accept speciesism is irrational, the entire animal industrial complex must be ceased for us to be morally consistent.

'''The bottom line is this: Look at any practice we condone with animals, now replace the animals with humans at comparable mental levels. If you think it's morally OK to do it to the animals but you would not consider it morally OK to do to these humans you are committing speciesism.'''

Discrimination in its Purest Form
From Gary Yourofsky:

From Pythagoras:

From Leo Tolstoy:

Finally, from Peter Singer:

Make the connection.