Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Speciesism (6): Human interests are more important than animal interests, in the
sense that promoting even trivial human interests ought to take precedence over ad-
vancing animal interests. Only survival interests justify actively thwarting an animal's
survival interests.
While (6) is intuitive, (5) is not. Strategically, the advantage of endorsing (6) from
a liberationist stance is that the most counterintuitive implications of liberationism, on
which antiliberationists focus, become conceptually dissociated from liberationism. One
can obviously choose to hold on to them too, maintaining that survival conflicts do
not justify sacrificing animals. But liberationism as such does not require this fraught
extension.
My goal is
not
to urge liberationists to begin defining themselves as speciesists.
My aim is to show that the category of “speciesism” is itself not important: accepting
or denying that one is or is not a speciesist, at least in most of its senses, does not
have much of a bearing on the issues that are actually debated and on the practices
that need to be abolished. Moreover, the more popular speciesist intuitions can be
readily digested by liberationists without jeopardizing the call for reform. Later
chapters in this topic show how this modified liberationist argument mobilizes criti-
cism of specific animal-related practices.
