QuestionsDo animals matter as much as we do?Speciesism: counting everyone's interests, whatever the species
Do animals matter as much as we do?Their suffering counts equally

Speciesism: counting everyone's interests, whatever the species

Speciesism; equal consideration of interests; the argument from marginal cases

Peter Singer born 1946If we can prevent something very bad without sacrificing anything of comparable importance, we ought to, even for a distant stranger.
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What it claims

Giving less weight to a being's interests only because it is not of our species is speciesism: a prejudice of the same kind as racism and sexism. Equal suffering must count equally, whatever the species.

Why

Only the capacity to suffer matters, not the species: otherwise some humans would be less protected than animals.

The same idea through history
Richard D. Ryder1970The psychologist Richard Ryder coins the word "speciesism" in Oxford, in 1970, to denounce a prejudice he considers of the same order as racism. Singer himself says he owes the term to him.
Jeremy Bentham1789"Can they suffer?": Bentham, one of the few philosophers to see it, makes suffering, not reason or speech, the test. Singer takes up the question and ties it to equality.Peter Singer1972Same principle, another circle: in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", Singer holds that distance makes no difference to the duty to help. Two years later he holds that species makes no difference either.
Peter Singer1974"All Animals Are Equal" (Philosophic Exchange, open access): the basic equality is equality of consideration, not of treatment. He adds the argument from marginal cases.
Peter Singer1975Animal Liberation, a book for the general public, reprints the article as its first chapter and adds the investigation of factory farming and experimentation. The book became a founding text of the animal movement.
In short

"Speciesism: counting everyone's interests, whatever the species" is an argument by Peter Singer (Singer, "All Animals Are Equal", 1974; Animal Liberation, 1975, 1972) on the question "Do animals matter as much as we do?" (answer: their suffering counts equally). Its claim: Giving less weight to a being's interests only because it is not of our species is speciesism: a prejudice of the same kind as racism and sexism. Equal suffering must count equally, whatever the species. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4, P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Singer, "All Animals Are Equal", 1974; Animal Liberation, 1975
Valid with an implicit premise

If someone ignored a person's pain because she is black, we would call him racist. If he ignored it because she is a woman, we would call him sexist. Peter Singer asks: and if it is because it is not a human? He calls this speciesism, a word from Richard Ryder. His starting point is modest: equality does not mean treating everyone alike, but giving the same weight to everyone's interests. A pig and a child do not have the same interests (one has no need to go to school), but if they have the same interest in not suffering, they count the same. To those who say "humans have reason, animals do not", he points to humans who lack it, such as babies.

P1The basic principle of equality is equal consideration of interests: our concern for others should not depend on what they are like or what they can do. It may lead to different treatment, but never to counting an interest of the same kind for less.
P2Belonging to a species does not count in itself. Only sentience (the capacity to suffer or to enjoy) is a defensible boundary; choosing intelligence or reason would be arbitrary, like choosing skin colour.
P3If reason or intelligence were the test, some humans would be less well protected than animals: an infant or a person with severe brain damage has no capacity that an adult mammal lacks to the same or a higher degree (this is the argument from marginal cases).
P4 · implicit premiseWe refuse to treat those humans as animals are treated (for example to experiment on them or to raise them for food). It would therefore be inconsistent to keep two weights and two measures.
P5 · implicit premiseThe animals in question (vertebrates at least) are sentient: they have interests, at least the interest in not suffering.
So giving less weight to a being's interests only because it is not of our species is speciesism: a prejudice of the same kind as racism and sexism. Equal suffering must count equally, whatever the species.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where one accepts excluding humans without reason: reason can then be kept as the test, and animals do not count as much.
Valid with P4 and P5. P1 says a sentient being whose species difference does not count has its interests count equally. P2 says the species difference would count only through reason. P3 says that, if it were reason, some humans would be excluded; P4 refuses that exclusion; P5 says animals are sentient.
Analogy.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

C
Carl Cohen 1986 · attacks the conclusion

Cohen takes on the word: "I am a speciesist." For him, humans form a moral community: they judge, impose rules on themselves, recognise rights. Animals cannot enter that game. Comparing speciesism to racism is "insidious": every sensitive moral judgement must take account of the differing natures of the beings to whom something is owed. Not making the relevant distinctions between species, he holds, leads one to misjudge one's obligations.

a defender replies
Singer did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
James Rachels defender of the argument · 1990
Summary: Rachels defends "moral individualism". How a being should be treated depends on its own traits (its abilities, its interests), not on the group it belongs to. Belonging to a species is therefore not a reason, and a sentence true of the species on average says nothing about a particular individual. The same conclusion follows for animals as for disabled humans.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: the basic disagreement is about what grounds moral value, a being's kind (Cohen) or its own abilities (Singer, Rachels). Each camp finds the other inconsistent: one because of humans without reason, the other because of a test that varies between individuals.
Bernard Williams 2006 · attacks the conclusion

Summary: in "The Human Prejudice", Williams disputes that preferring humans is a prejudice like racism. For him the comparison fails, because morality cannot be judged from a point of view outside humanity. Our reasons for acting take shape inside our lives as humans, and the question "which side are we on?" has a sense that the question of race does not. Racism cannot be defended in this way.

no reply
Singer did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: the debate goes on. Cora Diamond (2018) argues that Williams's critics, Singer among them, misread him. The basic disagreement remains: can we judge from a point of view that is nobody's, or are our human values our only foothold?
Tom Regan 2004 · attacks premise 1

Regan charges Singer's utilitarianism with failing to protect individuals: if the benefits to several are added up, harming one can be justified. For him an individual with a life of its own must never be treated as a resource, whatever the total of advantages. Equal consideration would therefore still allow sacrificing an animal when the calculation favours it.

a defender replies
see the argument
Singer did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
Peter Singer defender of the argument · 1980
Summary: in "Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism", Singer holds that weighing interests is enough to condemn factory farming: it makes billions of animals suffer for pleasures of the table that are easy to replace. No need for rights to reach this conclusion. Sacrificing an animal would only be justified if the gain were enormous and certain, which is almost never the case.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: the two authors want the same thing in practice (an end to factory farming) but not for the same reason. The disagreement is about the rare cases where the calculation would gain by sacrificing an individual: Singer accepts it, Regan refuses it on principle.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Yuval Noah HarariHe backs Singer's case against the way animals are treated and wrote an introduction to Animal Liberation.
Alex O'ConnorHe tests humane animal farming with the thought experiment of humans raised and killed humanely, to see whether the intuition holds.
Peter SingerHis own argument: species alone is not a reason to count someone's suffering for less.
Martha NussbaumShe agrees with Singer that the capacity to feel pain and pleasure decides who belongs in the moral community, but argues justice needs more than reducing suffering. She stresses each animal's active life. She says utilitarianism sees pain but flattens the world.
Criticize it
Roger ScrutonHe rejected Peter Singer's utilitarian case for animal equality, saying it lacks real philosophical argument.