IS SPECIESISM OPPOSED TO LIBERATIONISM? - Ethics and the Beast - page 8

to promote marginal human interests before she advances cardinal nonhuman ones,
even ones that affect only a small number of human beings (e.g., she can volunteer
to give music appreciation classes in a poor neighborhood rather than tend to sick
loose animals). But she will not believe that this permits her to actively suppress an
animal's interest so as to advance a human one. And she will thus be a fully com-
mitted liberationist, demanding that all animal-related exploitative practices should im-
mediately cease.
Even speciesism that holds to a categorical version of trumping interests in Brody's
sense is, then, continuous with a robust liberationist agenda. In nontechnical terms:
one can believe that human beings are more important than animals, that their in-
terests come first in the sense that any human interest takes precedence over that of a
nonhuman animal (meaning that it is morally obligatory to advance any human in-
terest before advancing any animal interest), yet still not only refuse to actively
thwart animal interests, but also be an abolitionist regarding most animal- related
practices.
It now appears that the form of speciesism that actually opposes liberationism is
this:
Speciesism (3): It is justified to actively thwart the interests of a nonhuman animal
when they conflict with the interests of a human animal, and it is justified to do so
because these are human interests.
But (3) still fails to constitute antiliberationism because it lacks restrictions specify-
ing the relative importance of the conflicting interests. Even stout liberationists would
not be troubled over minor discounting of animal interests (ships crossing the ocean
may alarm fish as they pass, yet I know of no activist who would oppose naval
travel on this basis). To generate antiliberationism, the overridden interests of the an-
imal must be substantial while the human interests are marginal.
Here we enter a more substantive dimension of the debate. If liberationists admit
that minor nonhuman interests may be discounted, they might get pushed to admit
that substantial human interests justify actively discounting nonhuman interests. Liber-
ationists would oppose this contention (rightly in my opinion). But at this point the
debate usually degenerates into survival, lifeboat scenarios. These involve challenging
liberationists through conjuring situations involving human/nonhuman life/death con-
flicts (saving a man through tossing a dog overboard when only one can be saved
implies a speciesist bias, and so the liberationist is supposed to be embarrassed into
admitting her own tacit speciesism). There are various liberationist counterarguments
to this. 9 Yet I do not think that liberationists need to worry about such contrived
cases. They can bite the bullet, admitting that in life/death situations they would pro-
mote human survival even if this meant actively killing an animal. Yet they would