Animal Liberation (book)
Encyclopedia
Animal Liberation is a book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne...

, published in 1975.
The book is widely considered within the animal liberation movement
Animal liberation movement
The animal-liberation movement, sometimes called the animal-rights movement, animal personhood, or animal-advocacy movement, is a social movement which seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and...

 to be the founding philosophical statement of its ideas. Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights
Rights
Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory...

 when it comes to human and nonhuman animals: he argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to feel suffering
Suffering
Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, is an individual's basic affective experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. Suffering may be qualified as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and...

 and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. He introduced and popularized the term "speciesism
Speciesism
Speciesism is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. The term was created by British psychologist Richard D...

" in the book, which was originally coined by Richard D. Ryder
Richard D. Ryder
Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder is a British psychologist. He is a former Mellon Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans. He served as chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Council from 1977 to 1979, and is a past president of Britain's Liberal Democrat Animal...

, to describe the exploitative treatment of animals.

Arguments

The central argument of the book is an expansion of the utilitarian
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...

 idea that 'the greatest good' is the only measure of good or ethical behaviour. Singer argues that there is no reason not to apply this to other animals.

Although Singer rejects rights as a moral ideal independent from his utilitarianism based on interests, he accepts rights as derived from utilitarian principles, particularly the principle of minimising suffering. Singer allows that animal rights are not the same as human rights, writing in Animal Liberation that "there are obviously important differences between human and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have." He began his book by defending Mary Wollstonecraft's
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book...

 18th-century critic Thomas Taylor, who argued that if Wollstonecraft's reasoning in defense of women's rights were correct, then "brutes" would have rights too. Taylor thought he had produced a reductio ad absurdum
Reductio ad absurdum
In logic, proof by contradiction is a form of proof that establishes the truth or validity of a proposition by showing that the proposition's being false would imply a contradiction...

 of Wollstonecraft's view; Singer regards it as a sound logical implication.

In Animal Liberation, Singer argues against what he calls speciesism
Speciesism
Speciesism is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. The term was created by British psychologist Richard D...

: discrimination
Discrimination
Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...

 on the grounds that a being belongs to a certain species. He holds the interests of all beings capable of suffering to be worthy of equal consideration
Equal consideration of interests
"Equal consideration of interests" is the name of a moral principle that states that one should both include all affected interests when calculating the rightness of an action, and weigh those interests equally....

, and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color. He argues that animals should have rights based on their ability to feel pain more than their intelligence. In particular, he argues that while animals show lower intelligence than the average human, many severely intellectually challenged humans show equally diminished, if not lower, mental capacity, and that some animals have displayed signs of intelligence (for example, primates learning elements of American sign language
American Sign Language
American Sign Language, or ASL, for a time also called Ameslan, is the dominant sign language of Deaf Americans, including deaf communities in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in some regions of Mexico...

 and other symbolic languages) sometimes on par with that of human children, and that therefore intelligence does not provide a basis for providing nonhuman animals any less consideration than such retarded humans. Singer does not specifically contend that we ought not use animals for food insofar as they are raised and killed in a way that actively avoids the inflicting of pain, but as such farms are uncommon, he concludes that the most practical solution is to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet. Singer also condemns vivisection
Vivisection
Vivisection is defined as surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure...

 except where the benefit (in terms of improved medical treatment, etc.) outweighs the harm done to the animals used.

Reception

Since the publication of Animal Liberation, Singer has received a wide-range of philosophical challenges to his formulation of animal rights. In a lengthy debate in Slate Magazine, Richard Posner
Richard Posner
Richard Allen Posner is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School...

 challenged that Singer failed to see the "radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [his] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees."

In addition, Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum , is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics....

 has argued that the Capability Approach
Capability approach
The capability approach was initially conceived in the 1980s as an approach to welfare economics....

 provides a more adequate foundation of justice than Utilitarianism can supply. Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...

, Nussbaum argues, ignores adaptive preferences, elides the separateness of distinct persons, misidentifies valuable human/non-human emotions such as grief
Grief
Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something to which a bond was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical dimensions...

, and calculates according to "sum-rankings" rather than inviolable protection of intrinsic entitlements. Singer replied to this critique.

Gary L. Francione
Gary L. Francione
Gary Lawrence Francione is an American legal scholar. He is the Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law & Philosophy at Rutgers School of Law-Newark....

's theory of animal rights rejects Singer's utilitarian view and uses an abolitionist approach that is based on sentience
Sentience
Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think from the ability to feel . In modern western philosophy, sentience is the ability to have sensations or experiences...

 alone, rather than on any particular characteristics like self-awareness
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals...

.

Editions

There have been several editions of the book published over the years, each further chronicling the progress of the animal liberation movement. Most editions of the book contain a preface. The animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is an American animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Virginia, and led by Ingrid Newkirk, its international president. A non-profit corporation with 300 employees and two million members and supporters, it claims to be the largest animal rights...

, since its foundation in 1980, has greatly supported the book.
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