All Animals are Equal

Core claim

The basic principle of equality is not a description of factual equality but a prescription of equal consideration of interests. Since the capacity to suffer and enjoy is the prerequisite for having interests at all, sentience — not intelligence, rationality or species membership — is the only defensible boundary of moral concern. Applying this consistently condemns speciesism on exactly the grounds that condemn racism and sexism.

Publication

Reprinted in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, 2nd edition (New Jersey, 1989). Originally published in the 1970s and closely related to Animal Liberation (1975).

Liberation movements and the extension of moral horizons

• Recent decades saw campaigns by Black Americans, Spanish-Americans, gay people and women; sex discrimination was often called “the last universally accepted form of discrimination.”
• One should always be wary of talk of “the last remaining form of discrimination” — the lesson of liberation movements is how difficult it is to notice latent prejudice until it is forcefully pointed out.
• A liberation movement demands an expansion of moral horizons and a reinterpretation of the principle of equality: practices previously seen as natural and inevitable come to be seen as unjustifiable prejudice.
• Singer’s aim: make this mental switch with respect to members of species other than our own.

The Thomas Taylor parody

• When Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), an anonymous satire — A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, actually by the Cambridge philosopher Thomas Taylor — tried to refute her by extending her arguments to dogs, cats and horses.
• The satire’s logic: if the arguments hold for brutes, and brutes manifestly have no rights, then the arguments must be unsound for women too.
• Singer’s reply: don’t deny the differences between humans and nonhumans; instead go deeper into what equality means.
  • Different beings may warrant different rights. A man cannot have an abortion, so talk of his right to one is meaningless; a pig cannot vote, so talk of its right to vote is meaningless.
  • Extending the principle of equality from one group to another does not require identical treatment or identical rights.
  • Equality of consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment.

Equality cannot rest on factual equality

• Humans differ in moral capacities, intellectual abilities, benevolence, sensitivity, communicative ability, and capacity to experience pleasure and pain. If equality were based on actual equality, the demand would be unjustifiable.
• The fallback claim — that individuals differ but races and sexes do not — is inadequate for two reasons:
  1. It gives no defence against a more sophisticated inegalitarian, e.g. someone proposing that the interests of people with IQ above 100 be preferred to those below. A hierarchy of that kind is no better than one based on race or sex.
  2. We have no guarantee that abilities really are distributed evenly across groups, and it would be folly to stake the whole case against racism on a contested empirical question. Anyone who does so must concede that if genetic differences were found, racism would be somewhat defensible.
• Therefore: the claim to equality does not depend on intelligence, moral capacity, physical strength or similar matters of fact. Equality is a moral ideal, not a simple assertion of fact — a prescription about how we ought to treat others.

The utilitarian formulation

• Bentham: “Each to count for one and none for more than one” — the interests of every being affected by an action are taken into account and given the same weight as the like interests of any other being.
• Sidgwick: “The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view of the Universe, than the good of any other.”
• Contemporary moral philosophers (Hare, Rawls and others) largely agree on some such requirement of equal consideration, while disagreeing on its formulation.
• Implication: our concern for others ought not to depend on what they are like or what abilities they possess — though what that concern requires may vary with their characteristics.
• If a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans?

Sentience as the boundary

• Bentham’s forward-looking passage, written when black slaves in British dominions were treated much as animals are now: the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are insufficient reasons for abandoning a sensitive being. “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
• The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is not just another characteristic like language or higher mathematics — it is the prerequisite for having interests at all.
  • It would be nonsense to say it was not in a stone’s interests to be kicked along the road; a stone cannot suffer, so nothing we do can affect its welfare.
  • A mouse does have an interest in not being tormented, because it will suffer if it is.
• If a being suffers, there is no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration; the principle of equality requires counting it equally with like suffering of any other being.
• Marking the boundary by intelligence or rationality would be arbitrary — why not choose skin colour instead?
• Speciesism (the term is owed to Richard Ryder) parallels racism: the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species.

Speciesism in practice

Eating animals

• For most people in urban industrialised societies, the most direct contact with other species is at mealtimes — we treat them purely as means to our ends, subordinating their life and well-being to our taste for a particular dish.
• Singer says taste deliberately: there is no defence in terms of nutritional need, since protein and other nutrients can be obtained far more efficiently from soy and other high-protein vegetable products.
  • Producing 1 lb of beef or veal protein requires feeding the animal 21 lbs of protein; the US average across livestock is about 1:8. The protein lost this way has been estimated as equivalent to ~90% of the annual world protein deficit.
• The suffering inflicted while animals are alive may indicate speciesism even more clearly than the killing: to keep meat affordable, society tolerates confining sentient animals in cramped, unsuitable conditions for their entire lives, treating them as machines converting fodder into flesh, with any innovation raising the “conversion ratio” liable to be adopted. As one authority put it, “cruelty is acknowledged only when profitability ceases.”
• Since these practices serve nothing more than pleasures of taste, they sacrifice the most important interests of other beings for trivial interests of our own. Each of us has an obligation to withdraw support — our custom is all the support the meat industry needs.
• The analogy: the decision may be difficult, but no more so than for a white Southerner going against his society’s traditions to free his slaves. “If we do not change our dietary habits, how can we censure those slaveholders who would not change their own way of living?”

Experimenting on animals

• Debate has often missed the point by being framed in absolutist terms — would an abolitionist let thousands die rather than experiment on one animal?
• Singer’s counter-question: would the experimenter perform the experiment on an orphaned human infant, if that were the only way to save many lives?
  • “Orphan” is specified to remove parental feelings — and is in fact over-fair to the experimenter, since nonhuman subjects are not orphans.
  • If not, the readiness to use nonhumans is simple discrimination: adult apes, cats, mice and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing, and at least as sensitive to pain as any human infant.
• Anticipated reply — the infant will develop into more than the nonhuman — fails: consistency would then require opposing abortion (the fetus has the same potential), and even contraception and abstinence. In any case, the potential argument gives no reason to select a nonhuman rather than a human with severe and irreversible brain damage.
• The experimenter shows species bias whenever he performs on a nonhuman an experiment he would not think justified on a human at an equal or lower level of sentience, awareness and self-direction. Eliminate that bias and the number of experiments would fall to a minute fraction of today’s.

Speciesism in contemporary philosophy

• Philosophy’s chief task is to question the basic assumptions of the age — but philosophers are subject to their society’s preconceptions and often become the prevailing ideology’s most sophisticated defenders.
• The problem of equality is invariably formulated as human equality, so the question of other animals never confronts the student as an issue in itself.
• The dilemma for the egalitarian philosopher: equality among humans requires a sense of “equal” that doesn’t rest on descriptive equality of capacities. Any lowest-common-denominator characteristic low enough that no human lacks it will also be possessed by some nonhumans. So in the only factual sense in which all humans are equal, some members of other species are equal too — and reading the claim prescriptively makes excluding nonhumans even harder.
• Rather than accept this outcome, most philosophers reconcile human equality with animal inequality by arguments Singer describes as devious.

Frankena

• In “The Concept of Social Justice,” William Frankena holds that all men are to be treated as equals “simply because they are human… because they have emotions and desires, and are able to think, and hence are capable of enjoying a good life in a sense in which other animals are not.”
• Objections: other animals have emotions and desires and appear capable of enjoying a good life. Frankena admits “the good life” means the happy or satisfactory life rather than the morally good one — so thought is unnecessary, and emphasising thought would anyway create problems for the egalitarian, since only some people can lead intellectually satisfying lives.
• Every sentient being is capable of a life happier or less miserable than some alternative, and so has a claim to be taken into account. The human/nonhuman distinction is a continuum with overlaps, not a sharp division.

The appeal to “intrinsic dignity”

• Faced with the gap, philosophers resort to high-sounding phrases: “the intrinsic dignity of the human individual,” “the intrinsic worth of all men,” humans as “ends in themselves.”
• The idea traces back through Renaissance humanists (Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man) and the “Great Chain of Being” to classical and Judeo-Christian doctrine; contemporary philosophers invoke it having discarded the metaphysics that supported it.
• It is convenient because fellow humans won’t reject the accolade and those denied it can’t object. Thinking only of humans, it sounds liberal and progressive; seeing humans as a small subgroup of the planet’s beings reveals that elevating our species simultaneously lowers all others.
• Asking why all humans — including infants, psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin — have a dignity no elephant, pig or chimpanzee can attain simply pushes the problem back a step: any satisfactory defence would need to cite capacities that all and only humans possess. “Fine phrases are the last resource of those who have run out of arguments.”

Benn

• Stanley Benn’s “Egalitarianism and Equal Consideration of Interests” is singled out as clear and honest — it argues correctly for equality of consideration, but restricts it to human interests, and faces the case of cognitively impaired humans directly.
• Benn holds that lacking human shape is a disqualifying condition, and that anyone who fed a hungry dog rather than a hungry baby would be “reckoned morally defective.”
• Benn distinguishes animals from cognitively impaired humans on the grounds that irrationality in a human is a deficiency or handicap relative to the norm of the species, whereas in a dog it is simply the species norm — and that it is unfair to exploit a fellow human’s shortfall from the norm.
• Singer’s rebuttal: Benn concedes the impaired human may have no characteristics superior to a dog’s. Neither is responsible for their mental level; if it is unfair to take advantage of an isolated defect, why is it fair to take advantage of a more general limitation?
• The substitution test: assume a difference in average IQ between two races; in Benn’s passage replace “men” with “white,” “dog” with “black,” “rationality” with “high IQ,” “imbeciles” with “dumb whites,” and “species” with “race.” The result is a defence of a rigid no-exceptions division based on IQ notwithstanding admitted overlap — and is plainly outrageous.
• If the original didn’t read as outrageous, it is largely because most of us, while not racists, are speciesists. Benn’s article “stands as a warning of the ease with which the best minds can fall victim to a prevailing ideology.”