Speciesism is Valid
Students sat on the edge of red fabric covered benches, leaning towards the stage as famed Australian philosopher Peter Singer delivered his speech on animal rights in Assembly Hall last Friday. Some listened with skepticism and others with nods and snaps as he advocated for equality among all beings, citing his doctrine of speciesism.
He applied a utilitarian moral framework to all “conscious” animals’ interests, regardless of species. His speech outlined his belief in the importance of ending the exploitation of animals, especially in the poultry and meat industries for the sake of morality. Although he made some good points, some aspects of Singer’s arguments were questionable.
Anti-speciesism is the center of Dr. Peter Singer’s beliefs on animal rights. This ideology holds that no animal can be denied any basic rights based on the species to which that animal belongs to. Singer’s support for this stems from the belief that animals are just as conscious as humans and that humans’ greater intelligence in no way grants them superiority over other animals.
Where this argument falls is in its assumption that a human’s life and well-being has the same value as an animal’s life and well-being. This is a blatant fallacy because humans and only humans have the ability to conceptualize and actively determine their future. Every single human has the ability to set goals and to aspire to achieve something in his or her time. In other words, we each have a deeper purpose in life. Therefore, a human life is very valuable and to take a human life would be to take away a purpose, which is morally wrong. A chicken’s life, on the other hand, is not as valuable, as they, cognitively speaking, have no aspirations for the future. They cannot set goals and their main purpose is to further their species by reproducing. Therefore, it is morally justifiable to kill a chicken because in doing so, one does not prevent the chicken from achieving aspirations it would have wanted to fulfill and thus, does not take anything away from it. So clearly, the idea that all animals and their lives are equal does not hold.
Singer also deliberated the infliction of suffering upon animals before death. He believes that animals can feel pain and that this pain should be minimized at all costs. But, even though animal brains do release chemicals associated with pain, whether they can truly feel conscious suffering from maltreatment is unclear. This uncertainty is something Singer himself noted on Friday.
Even if animals do experience conscious pain, it can still be argued that it is just to cause animal suffering in order to carry out more important human endeavors. In many cases, this is true, especially in the meat and poultry industries that Singer cited. Currently, the exploitation of animals is required to efficiently produce natural food for our world’s population. If an effective solution that still achieves the problem of efficiently feeding humans and prevents animal suffering is found, it would make sense to use it, but, this has not yet occurred.
Many, including Peter Singer, will say that vegetarianism is already the solution to this problem, but, this lifestyle is neither practical nor healthy for humans. In fact, humans are evolutionarily designed to eat both meat and vegetables as proven by our simple digestive systems and primitive hunter-gatherer behaviors. Therefore, meat is necessary to our diets and the only way to produce enough meat as is required by our world population is if the process is industrialized, which unfortunately, causes animal suffering.
Thus, because human life and necessities can be valued more than other animal lives and suffering, many of Peter Singer’s arguments from Friday cannot be justified. The arguments made in this article are not to say that we should not make an effort to achieve our dietary goals without inflicting suffering upon animals or that we should not try to decrease the amount of meat that we consume, its simply saying that we can morally justify speciesism and animal exploitation.