by thurnandtaxis » Mon May 08, 2006 2:00 pm
an interview from Salon<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/08/singer/index.html">www.salon.com/books/int/2...index.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Author Peter Singer (Animal Liberation, 1975) talks about his new <br>book "The Way We Eat".<br><br>Here's a nice excerpt:<br><br><br>SALON: Could you explain your position on "speciesism," and what this has to do with your call to "expand the circle"?<br><br>SINGER: The argument, in essence, is that we have, over centuries of history, expanded the circle of beings whom we regard as morally significant. If you go back in time you'll find tribes that were essentially only concerned with their own tribal members. If you were a member of another tribe, you could be killed with impunity. When we got beyond that there were still boundaries to our moral sphere, but these were based on nationality, or race, or religious belief. Anyone outside those boundaries didn't count. Slavery is the best example here. If you were not a member of the European race, if you were African, specifically, you could be enslaved. So we got beyond that. We have expanded the circle beyond our own race and we reject as wrongful the idea that something like race or religion or gender can be a basis for claiming another being's interests count less than our own.<br><br>So the argument is that this is also an arbitrary stopping place; it's also a form of discrimination, which I call "speciesism," that has parallels with racism. I am not saying it's identical, but in both cases you have this group that has power over the outsiders, and develops an ideology that says, Those outside our circle don't matter, and therefore we can make use of them for our own convenience.<br><br>That is what we have done, and still do, with other species. They're effectively things; they're property that we can own, buy and sell. We use them as is convenient and we keep them in ways that suit us best, producing products we want at the cheapest prices. So my argument is simply that this is wrong, this is not justifiable if we want to defend the idea of human equality against those who have a narrower definition. I don't think we can say that somehow we, as humans, are the sole repository of all moral value, and that all beings beyond our species don't matter. I think they do matter, and we need to expand our moral consideration to take that into account.<br><br>SALON: So you are saying that expanding the circle to include other species is really no different than expanding it to include other races?<br><br>SINGER:Yes, I think it's a constant progression, a broadening of that circle.<br><br>SALON: But surely there's a significant difference between a Jew, for instance, and a chicken. These are different orders of beings.<br><br>SINGER: Well, of course, there's no argument about that. The question is whether saying that you are not a member of my kind, and that therefore I don't have to give consideration to your interests, is something that was said by the Nazis and the slave traders, and is also something that we are saying to other species. The question is, what is the relevant difference here? There is no doubt that there is a huge difference between human and nonhuman animals. But what we are overlooking is the fact that nonhuman animals are conscious beings, that they can suffer. And we ignore that suffering, just as the Nazis ignored the suffering of the Jews, or the slave traders ignored the suffering of the Africans. I'm not saying that it's the same sort of suffering. I am not saying that factory farming is the same as the Holocaust or the slave trade, but it's clear that there is an immense amount of suffering in it, and just as we think that the Nazis were wrong to ignore the suffering of their victims, so we are wrong to ignore the sufferings of our victims. <p></p><i></i>
