Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
over animals. “If speciesism is false, liberationism scores points or is even mandat-
ory.” Such, I think, is the underlying motivation of much pro-animal writing when it
addresses speciesism. The argument proposed here is different: attempting to decon-
struct speciesist intuitions is beside the moral point. Robust liberationism is conceptu-
ally and practically continuous with these traditional intuitions (even if they are false).
Still, is there any reason why we should retain our speciesist biases? The problem
with rigorously justifying speciesism surfaces when one attempts to unpack the greater
importance of humans over nonhumans. Judgments over relative importance presup-
pose a frame of reference that, in the case of animal ethics, begs the question: prop-
erties that human beings value induce us to fallaciously accept an overall value judg-
ment concerning a species as such. The fallacy stems from our agnosticism regarding
animal minds. We cannot assess what animals value for the obvious reason that they
do not appear to make value judgments. The most meaningful thing we say is that
we care more for humans, and that humans are more important to us. This, obvi-
ously, does not justify the belief that humans are generally more important, unless
one assumes that the general and the human are one and the same. Once again, this
would beg the question against animals.
Let us generalize the issue. Can we ever justify a sense in which X is more im-
portant than Y? Subjective importance makes sense of such judgments (“X is more
valuable
to me
than Y”). But such subjective usage is useless when defending spe-
ciesism: if all we are able to say is that humans value other humans over animals,
we cannot infer that humans are in fact more valuable than animals. Crack addicts
value a drug more than food. Yet this need not imply that drugs are more important
than food. This holds unless the human frame of reference is taken to be all-import-
ant, an assumption that would beg the question against animals and what might be
important to them. Literature that supports speciesism offers three answers to this ap-
parent impasse: first, assertions of human superiority based on some greater potential
or by alluding to special properties that humans possess, properties that make humans
more important; second, upholding species solidarity (which thus grounds particular
obligations to members of one's own species over other beings); third, reclaiming
some of the more traditional anchors of speciesism (humans have a soul; animals do
not, or humans have divine permission to regard themselves as superior to other an-
imals). Liberationists have offered strong arguments against each of these, and I do
not intend to rehash this debate here.
Yet does my inclination to throw a dog overboard in order to save a drowning wo-
man actually stem from a sense of solidarity, or from the greater potential of her life
in contrast to the dog's? Does tossing the dog emerge from my grasp of a particular
obligation I have to the woman? Am I moved to act because of my awareness that
