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Some Animals are More Equal Than Others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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It is a welcome development when academic philosophy starts to concern itself with practical issues, in such a way as to influence people's lives. Recently this has happened with one moral issue in particular—but infortunately it is the wrong issue, and people's actions have been influenced in the wrong way. The issue is that of the moral status and treatment of animals. A number of philosophers have argued for what they call ‘animal liberation’, comparing it directly with egalitarian causes such as women's liberation and racial equality and suggesting that, if racism and sexism are rationally indefensible, so is ‘speciesism’. If one ought to give equal consideration to the interests of all human beings, then, so they daim, one must on the same grounds and in the same way recognize that ‘all animals are equal’, be they human or non-human. We believe that this assimilation of ‘animal liberation’ to human liberation movements is mistaken.
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References
1 We shall refer to Singer, 's book Animal Liberation (New York: Avon Books, 1977)Google Scholar and to his paper ‘All Animals are Equal’ in Regan, T. and Singer, P. (eds), Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1976)Google Scholar. Further page references to these two works, abbreviated as A.L. and as R.S. respectively, occur parenthetically in the text. Arguments similar to the ones we discuss in this paper can be found in other papers in the Regan and Singer anthology, notably those by Feinberg, Regan and Rachels. Although we criticize Singer in this paper, we should like to acknowledge that his work has substantially affected our thinking on the issue.
2 See Wilson, Edward O., Sociobiology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), especially Ch. 26.Google Scholar
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8 See for example Kempe, C. Henry, Silver, Henry K., and O'Brien, Donough et al. , Current Pediatric Diagnosis and Treatment (Los Angeles: Lange Medical Publications, 1978), pp. 942 ff.Google Scholar; and Forfar, and Arneil, , eds, Textbook of Paediatrics (Edinburgh and London: Churchill Livingstone, 1973), pp. 880 ff.Google Scholar
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11 A stronger requirement—too strong, in our view—would be that, for a creature's continued life to be morally significant, that creature must possess the concepts of a continuing self and/or of life and death. See for example Tooley, Michael, ‘Abortion and Infanticide’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 2, no. 1 (1972)Google Scholar, and Glover, Jonathan, op. cit., pp. 157–158.Google Scholar
12 See for example Bray, P. F., Neurology in Pediatrics (Chicago: Year Book Medical Publishers, 1969), pp. 135 ff.Google Scholar
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14 See the literature cited in note 5.
15 Regan, and Singer, , op. cit., pp. 85 ff.Google Scholar
18 Regan, and Singer, , op. cit., pp. 215 ff.Google Scholar
17 Wilson, , op. cit., p. 191.Google Scholar
18 Ibid., p. 190.
19 Regan, and Singer, , op. cit., pp. 202–203.Google Scholar
20 A crucial question here would be how general or specific a sense should be attached to ‘obligation’. If ‘A has an obligation to do X’ means simply ‘A ought to do X’, then we would certainly assert that human beings have obligations towards animals, and that these obligations do not depend for their existence on characteristically human relations.
21 Wilson, , op. cit., p. 10.Google Scholar
22 Wilson, , op. cit., p. 182.Google Scholar
23 See note 3.
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25 Bernstein, Basil, Class, Codes and Control (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 For a wealth of material, see Sebeok, Thomas, ed., How Animals Communicate (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
27 According to Wilson, none of the non-human species can be said to have an economy, even among themselves (op. cit., p. 557).
28 Wilson claims that there is little interspecies communication among the it non-human animals, mainly for reproductive reasons (op. cit., p. 183).
29 We should like to thank Virgil Aldrich, M. P. Battin, Mendel Cohen, Peter Windt, Tom Harrison, and Stewart Richards for their advice and comments, and Carolann McClure for her typing (and appropriate non-philosophical comments).
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