On speciesism
8 Mar 2023
There has been a growing trend over the last half-century or so to defend animal rights. For some, human history has moved towards the recognition of rights to a broader set of people: slaves, women, and now, animals. Others even argue that, just as we now view those who defended slavery two centuries ago as morally wrong (despite their inability to see it at the time), future generations may judge us similarly for permitting harm to animals today.
This topic raises three key questions: Do any non-human beings possess rights or individual moral relevance? If so, what should those rights be? And which non-human beings count as morally relevant? In what follows, I will focus solely on the last question.
Advocates for the moral relevance of non-human beings tend to focus almost exclusively on animals — more specifically, on sentient animals.
But why should sentient animals have moral relevance simply because they are sentient? Let’s return to a common argument: that future generations will judge us as morally misguided for failing to recognize animal rights, just as we now judge past generations for defending slavery. This comparison is often used to accuse our current thinking of speciesism.
However, this line of reasoning runs into a slippery slope. If it's speciesist to exclude sentient animals, then why stop there? Why exclude non-sentient animals? Or non-animal living organisms like plants, fungi, and bacteria? Would that be a form of “kingdom-ism”? And what about non-living entities — viruses, or even inanimate objects like rocks, water, or chairs?
Returning to sentient animals: if sentience is what grants an animal moral status, then it’s worth asking — does removing that feature also remove its moral relevance? If a dog is born with a rare condition that renders it non-sentient, does it lose the moral status we afford its sentient peers? What if a sentient dog is given a drug that removes its sentience without causing any pain? And what if the same drug were administered to a human being instead of a dog?
Beyond sentience, it seems that society often values traits that are — arguably — morally irrelevant when assigning moral status to animals. The most obvious example is cuteness. Cute animals — dogs, cats, foxes, deer, and so on — are typically given greater moral consideration than other sentient animals, like rats. Even squirrels, which are rodents too, carry similar diseases, and rummage through garbage just like rats, are seen as more worthy of protection simply because they’re more aesthetically appealing. If someone kills a rat on the street, no one reacts — but if that person kills a beloved squirrel, people are outraged.
Size seems to play a role as well. Generally, the larger the animal, the more moral status we attribute to it, even beyond considerations like endangered status. A deer tends to be seen as more morally significant than a squirrel, and a shark more than a zebrafish. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”, as Orwell said.