Pro Speciesist Arguments are Clearly Ad Hoc

And clearly don't work.

Central to the Animal Rights movement is a rejection of Speciesism. Speciesism is often misunderstood. Sometimes people believe it’s giving a species preferential treatment over another in any circumstance, but that’s not quite right. It’s giving preference for one species over another by virtue of their species membership. For example, it wouldn’t be speciesist to give preference to a human over a pig because a human is able to suffer more (let’s just assume that’s true). However, it would be speciesist to give preference to a human over a pig because they are human. This sort of discrimination, the anti-speciesist claims, is analogous to other forms of discrimination such as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. That is, it’s arbitrary, because species membership itself holds no moral significance.

This, I think, is pretty obvious. If I were to meet a chimpanzee that had the same conscious experience as a human, with all the same capacities (e.g reading, writing, and talking), I would think them worthy of all the same moral rights a human has. They should be able to vote, drive, and go to university. This might sound odd, but I think most people share this intuition, because that’s what we think when we see this scenario in science fiction. When we watch Star Trek, we see many different species, but I don’t think many of us think that Vulcans are less deserving of moral consideration simply because they aren’t human. We don’t look at them on the bridge and think “Who let that filthy Vulcan touch the controls. Someone grab the antibacterial spray!”.

Usually when arguing against animal rights, people don’t go straight for the species membership card. They usually appeal to things like intelligence, the ability to communicate, the ability to reciprocate rights, etc. However, the problem with saying these traits are morally significant to the degree that it’s okay to eat those without them, is that it commits us to saying it’s permissible to eat certain humans. Babies, people with dementia, and people with brain injuries all lack these characteristics, yet they are still morally valuable, so they act as counter examples. It’s at this point that the speciesist claims that species membership is actually what’s valuable. They then limber up and perform mental gymnastics so impressive they could qualify for the Olympics.

Group Properties Response

One response is to say that the characteristics like intelligence (I’ll just use that for now, as it correlates with the others) do in fact matter, but we don’t prescribe moral worth on the individual level. Humans generally are intelligent, and so the entire group matters. Animals generally aren’t intelligent, and so they don’t.

The problem with this is that it makes an individual’s moral worth extrinsic instead of intrinsic. It means whether or not it’s wrong to eat me depends on the mental capacities of other people, which is absurd. Imagine that a disease spread through the Earth, and damaged the brains of 70% of humans such that they had the cognitive capacities of a cow – would that mean it’s now okay to eat the humans unaffected? They now belong to a group that generally isn’t intelligent, so it must be!

The other problem is that it’s not clear why species grouping should be privileged when deciding moral worth. I could just as easily group sentient beings as mammals, reptiles, fish, etc. In that case, again, mammals aren’t generally smart. Does this mean it’s okay to eat me? I could even make a group of you + all jellyfish. The average intelligence of that group is really dumb! Sorry, pal, but your life is now forfeit.

This line of reasoning is obviously ad hoc. People just invent it on the spot because they want to sidestep the baby counter example. When someone hurts someone else, we never make an appeal to the intelligence of our group. When children hurt each other we say things like “How would you feel if they did that to you”, and “you shouldn’t do that to them because it hurts”. We don’t say “You shouldn’t steal Timmy’s toy, because he belongs to a group that is generally intelligent!”.

Staudenmaier’s response

Peter Staudenmaier writes a critique of anti-speciesism in his essay Ambiguities in Animal Rights. He thinks that speciesism is disanalogous with other forms of discrimination such as racism or sexism.

The central analogy to the civil rights movement and the women's movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf.

Am I crazy or is this totally irrelevant? Why think racism is bad because black people fought for their rights themselves? Surely, it’s bad because black people are moral patients and deserve respect. To think it matters who fought for the moral consideration is to claim that were it the case that white people were the ones that fought for civil rights, racism would no long be discriminatory - but that’s ridiculous!

Both movements were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, "We're sentient beings too!" They argued, "We're fully human too!" Animal liberation doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it.

Again, this just seems beside the point - why does it matter what arguments specific civil rights movements used? Let’s say the way civil rights movements argued for their moral consideration mattered. This would mean that if women really did argue for the vote on the grounds that they were sentient beings, then the anti-speciesist arguments would work! Which means Staudenmaier thinks whether or not anti-speciesist arguments work depends on what the suffragettes happened to say a hundred years ago, which is just bizarre.

Imagine that we had an alternate history, where white women argued for the vote not because they were also human, but because they were white. In this history, when black people argued for civil rights on the grounds that they were human, the alternate Staudenmaier could just as easily say:

The suffragette movement was built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared whiteness in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied it. No feminist ever argued, "We're human beings too!" They argued, "We're fully white too!" Black rights doctrine, far from extending this racist impulse, directly undermines it.

Which would be obviously confused. The reason why civil rights movements argued for their moral consideration on the grounds of being human is because people in the past were speciesist. His argument amounts to saying “Well people in the past thought being human is what matters, so it must do!”.

Staudenmaier then goes on to say that because animals have different capacities to humans, respecting their interests looks different to respecting the interests of a human.

To grasp the significance of this difference, consider the following. I live with several people and a number of cats, toward whom I have various ethical responsibilities. If I am convinced that one of my human housemates needs to take some kind of medicine, it is not acceptable for me to force feed it to her, assuming she isn’t deranged. Instead, I can try to persuade her, through rational deliberation and ethical argument, that it would be best if she took the medicine. But if I think that one of the cats needs to take some kind of medicine, I may well have no choice but to force feed it to him or trick him into eating it. (7) In other words, taking the interests of animals seriously and treating them as morally considerable beings requires a very different sort of ethical action from the sort that is typically appropriate with other people.

I’m not really sure why this counts in favour of speciesism. First, it’s worth pointing out that he is committing himself to saying than non-humans deserve moral consideration. He says that respecting the interests of the cat requires giving them medicine, which is a far cry from what we actually do to most animals.

Additionally, the difference in treatment here is clearly not motivated by species membership, it’s motivated by a capacity for reason. The reason you need to sneak the cat their medicine is because you can’t reason with them, not because they’re cat. If the cat was smart like Puss in Boots, we would think it appropriate to treat them the same way we treat humans (We’d also, presumably, ask for his autograph). So, I’m not really sure what this is supposed to illustrate.

Saying that humans and animals ought be treated differently doesn’t undermine the antispeciesist position because antispeciesists almost always accept that. We don’t argue that dogs should be able to drive, and that pigs should vote, because in those scenarios there are relevant differences. Dogs don’t know how to drive, and pigs don’t know how to vote. We just argue that species membership itself isn’t a good reason to ban them from those practices.

The failure to account for this salient feature of moral conduct is one reason why so many proponents of animal rights are hostile to humanist values. But an equally serious failing of animal rights thinking is its obliviousness to ecological values. Recall that on the animal rights view, it is only individual creatures endowed with sentience that deserve moral consideration. Trees, plants, lakes, rivers, forests, ecosystems, even most creatures that zoologists classify as “animals” have no interests, well-being, or worth of their own, except inasmuch as they promote the interests of sentient beings. Animal rights advocates have simply traded in speciesism for phylumism.

Yep! Trees and ecosystems don’t have moral status. They only matter instrumentally for the sentient beings that can use/experience them. I don’t think that’s a bullet to bite. It’s also really weird to argue that antispeciesism doesn’t work because it doesn’t cast the moral net wide enough, and then conclude that we should keep the net even smaller. Under his view animals and trees don’t matter, unless he holds a really strange position that humans matter, lakes matter, but cows don’t.

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The problem with using specieisist views to justify our treatment of animals is that it commits you to saying it’s permissible to eat certain humans, that moral worth is extrinsic, or that it would be permissible to discriminate against other intelligent species – but these are all deeply implausible. Speciesists bend and twist themselves in order to fit their bigotry into their otherwise liberal worldview.

I imagine this is motivated by an evolutionary and cultural bias in favour of one’s own species, but the fact that we know these are influencing us should give us further reason to doubt our speciesist views! There is a lot of talk these days about discrimination and privilege, but we rarely acknowledge the greatest privilege of being human. By merely being born into these bodies, we are spared the fate of rotting in a factory farm or having a knife plunged into our neck. In fact, animals are so discriminated against that the mere mentioning of their plight in the same breath as other social justice movements is considered offensive. Sadly, the irony of calling someone bigoted for standing up for those being discriminated against is usually lost on people.