Singer’s framework is particularly useful for calling into question the underlying assumptions of your opponent. Any advocacy of valuing progress, growth, humanity, etc. will most likely rest on the assumption that humans are inherently more valuable than non-human animals. Unless your opponent can identify why that belief is justified, a counter-advocacy of a value that encompasses all those considered “persons” would be more beneficial.
Singer’s advocacy also has implications to any topics that particularly deal with science, medicine, and academics. These lines of study all rely heavily on the superiority of humanity, and use animals to further human aims. Counter values that rely on inclusive values of animals and all life are much more preferable.
Singer also offers a critique of modern philosophy that can be applied in many ways. It calls for a justification of the superiority of human beings that does not rely on rhetoric such as, “intrinsic worth of humanity.” It also calls for a questioning of the basic assumptions of the age. “It is the significant problem of equality, in moral and political philosophy, is invariably formulated in terms of human equality. The effect of this is that the question of the equality of other animals does not confront the philosopher, or student, as an issue itself- and this is already an indication of the failure of philosophy to challenge accepted beliefs.” 17 A critical discussion of what makes beings equal must escape the normalcy of an assumption that humans are and animals aren’t.
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1 http://www.princeton.edu/~uchv/index.html
2 Princeton Weekly Bulletin. December 7, 1998
3 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal.
4 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal.
5 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal.
6 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal.
7 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal.
8 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal.
9 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal.
10 Smith, Wesley J. Peter Singer Gets a Chair. http://www.frontpagemag.com/
11 Smith, Wesley J. Peter Singer Gets a Chair. http://www.frontpagemag.com/
12 Holmes Rolston. Respect for Life: Counting what Singer Finds of no Account. 1999.
13 Holmes Rolston. Respect for Life: Counting what Singer Finds of no Account. 1999.
14 R.M. Hare. Essays on Bioethics. 1993.
15 Peter Singer. Democracy and Disobedience. 1973.
16 Dale Jamieson. Singer and the Practical Ethics Movement. 1993.
17 Peter Singer. All Animals are Equal
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ball, Terrence and Richard Dagger. IDEALS AND IDEOLOGIES, (New York: Longman, 2002).
Hare, R.M. ESSAYS ON BIOETHICS, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Jamieson, Dale. SINGER AND HIS CRITICS, (Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999).
Pojman, Louis J., ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: READINGS IN THEORY AND APPLICATION, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1997).
Singer, Peter. ANIMAL LIBERATION: A NEW ETHICS FOR OUR TREATMENT OF ANIMALS, (New York:
Review/Random House, 1975).
Singer, Peter. DEMOCRACY AND DISOBEDIENCE, (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1973).
Singer, Peter. ETHICS, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Singer, Peter. ETHICS INTO ACTION: HENRY SPIRA AND THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
Singer, Peter. PRACTICAL ETHICS, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
SPECIESISM IS THE NEW RACISM
1. REALIZATION OF THE FAULT OF RACISM IS LIKE REALIZING THE FAULT OF SPECIESISM
Jeremy Bentham, Philosopher and Jurist, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789, ch. XVII.
The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without a redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty or discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
2. SPECIESISM ATTEMPTS TO LOWER GROUPS JUST AS RACISM DID
Colin, McGinn, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, SINGER AND HIS CRITICS, 1999, p. 152-153.
The point is that we should not think of animal pain as intrinsically “ownerless.” Animal minds are not just bundles of subjectless sensations gathered around a single body. If we conceive of animal pain in this subjectless way, thus refusing to grant genuine selfhood to animals, then we will not see why it is morally significant, since pain matters only because it is pain for someone. Putatively ownerless pain sensations have no moral weight, since the alleged pain is not painful to a subject of awareness. In other words, animals need to be granted selves if their sensations are to matter morally. This may seem like a major provision, and one that threatens to exclude animal experience from the moral realm; but in fact it is simply a point about the very concept of experience....An experience always comes with an owner built into it. It is not that you bundle some inherently ownerless experiences together and get a self, as Hume was (partially) inclined to suppose; rather, to speak of experiences at all is already to assume bearers for them- subjects of experience. (This is so whether or not the experiences are conceived to be embodied in an organism.) So, since animals have experiences, they necessarily have selves- by Frege’s point. Thus it is wrong to cause them pain, because this will necessarily be pain for a subject of consciousness.
3. TOO MUCH FOCUS ON RATIONALITY DESTROYS DIVERSITY AS AN IDEAL
Robert C. Solomon, Quincy Lee Centennial and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, SINGER AND HIS CRITICS, 1999, p.69.
The danger is that reason, instead of building on our natural impulses, may instead undermine them. If the basis of ethics is personal feeling for those we care about, there is the very real danger that, in over-enlarging the circle to include everyone and everything or in turning from the personal to the impersonality of reason , we will lose precisely that dimension of the personal that produces ethics in the first place. But I want to be equally cautious about premature enthusiasm for those universal feelings of love, called agape, which have been defended by some of the great (and not-so-great) religious thinkers of the world. There is the very familiar danger that such feelings, however noble their object or intent, will degenerate into a diffuse and ultimately pointless sentimentality, or worse, that form of hypocrisy that 9as has often been said of such “lovers of humanity” as Rousseau and Marx) adores the species but deplores almost every individual of it. The natural sensibility that is at issue here is nothing so lofty as love or even universal care, but rather a kind of kinship or fellow-feeling, which may well produce much caring and many kindnesses but will also provoke rivalry and competition. The basic biological sense we seek, in other words, is not so much a particular attitude or emotion as it is a sense of belonging, the social sense as such.
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