Singer

Peter Singer holds that our use of animals for food and for scientific research is morally indefensible. In Animal Liberation he argues for this conclusion, by arguing first that animals are entitled to equal moral consideration. This latter argument is as follows. (1) Nonhuman animals, like human animals, have interests; (2) anything that has interests is entitled to moral consideration; therefore (3) nonhuman animals are entitled to moral consideration. But (4) every genuine interest should be accorded the same weight--the same consideration--regardless of whose interest it is. It should make no difference whether the interest is your worst enemy's or your best friend's, a woman's or a man's, a nonhuman animal's or a human animal's. (5) Nonhuman animals are therefore entitled to the same--that is, equal--consideration.

So we are obligated to give equal moral consideration to the interests of animals. But what interests do nonhuman animals have? Answering this important question will involve answering the question why premise (1) above is true--why, in other words, animals have interests at all.

Human and nonhuman animals alike are sentient: they have the capacity for suffering and enjoyment. For this reason we can speak of things going well or badly, better or worse, for them. Some things that happen to nonhuman as well as human animals can be said to be good for them and others not. It comes to the same thing to say that some things are "in their interest" and other things contrary to their interests. So nonhuman as well as human animals have interests. Or at least this is true of those nonhuman animals that are sentient.

It should be obvious by now that, being sentient, nonhuman animals chiefly have an interest in avoiding pain and experiencing enjoyment. In this they are like human animals. But human beings, being possessed of "higher" mental factulties, have more varied interests than nonhuman beings. They certainly can enjoy a wider variety of things (like a good book) and suffer more diverse types of discomforts (anxiety over the remote future). Some human interests therefore are quite different from the interests of any nonhuman animals. When we take account of this, we see that equal consideration not only does not require the same or equal treatment for both human and nonhuman animals; it requires different, and unequal, treatment of them. For it is often different interests that we will be accommodating.

(2) The Immorality of Eating Animals

If, then, we give equal moral consideration to the interests of animals, what do we make of our use of nonhuman animals for food? Singer describes the treatment of animals on "factory farms" as visiting much unnecessary pain, much unnecessary suffering, upon the animals. Pain and suffering are certainly visited upon animals in such practices as the castration of cows. Cows are castrated, says James Rachels,

[b]ecause castrated cows put on more weight, and there is less danger of meat being "tainted" by male hormones. In Britain an anesthetic must be used, unless the animal is very young, but in America anesthetics are not in general use. The procedure is to pin the animal down, take a knife, and slit the scrotum, exposing the testicles. You then grab each testicle in turn and pull on it, breaking the cord that attaches it; on older animals it may be necessary to cut the cord. ("Vegetarianism and 'The Other Weight Problem'," in Pojman (ed.), Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, p. 377.

And this is typical of the way that animals are treated on factory farms; Animal Liberation is full of examples insignificantly different from this. As Singer remarks of this kind of thing, it is typical of what happens to your dinner when it is still an animal.

Singer says not only that our treatment of animals in farming causes them pain and suffering; he says it causes unnecessary pain and suffering. Unnecessary for what? Unnecessary for the achievement of any justifying end.

What good comes of our cruel treatment of animals on factory farms? People like to eat meat. They enjoy it. By inflicting cost-saving pain and suffering on animals we enable humans to satisfy a dietary preference at an affordable price. Beyond that no good comes of it in Singer's view. Our heavy consumption of meat is not healthy. Consumption of much less meat would be healthier, and consumption of no meat at all would probably be healthier still--it would almost certainly be no less healthy. Furthermore our agricultural practices, geared as they extensively are to the production of meat, are environmentally unsound. They are wasteful of resources, including energy resources, and they are so inefficient that, if we cut back by as little as 10% of our meat consumption and correspondingly for our meat production, we would free up enough grains and vegetables to feed most of the Third World.

So we have to weigh two sets of interests against one another: those of the humans who eat animals and those of the animals who are eaten by humans. Singer regards the relevant interests of meat-eating humans as "trivial" by comparison to the relevant interests of the nonhuman animals who will become our food. For the only interest served by our consumption of meat is a dietary preference. Compared to the pain and suffering of castrated cows, de-beaked and overcrowded chickens, cramped and stimulus-deprived veal calves, overworked milk cows--and the list goes on and on--satisfaction of a dietary preference seems pretty trivial. Our treatment of animals clearly discounts the interests of nonhuman animals in favor of such relatively unimportant human interests as a dietary preference. It is therefore morally wrong.

(3) The Oppression of Lab Animals

So much for our use of animals as food. What about our use of them as research subjects? This could be a quite different case. For research can produce knowledge, and medical research in particular can produce cures for diseases. These are important goods to put into the balance against the pain and suffering of lab animals. Certainly they are more important than the satisfaction of a not-even-healthy dietary preference.

Singer argues that most research does not produce, and is not even expected to produce, either cures for disease or, more generally, significant additions to our knowledge. Much research is a dreary repetition of previous experiments and is done by people looking only to use up grant money, maintain a reputation, earn a degree, or just hold down a job. It serves no good purpose in fact and thus cannot be justified any more than our treatment of animals on factory farms.

What if some research program did promise substantial increases in knowledge or a cure for, say, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, or ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease)? Would this promise justify research that involved the sort of painful treatment of animals described by Singer? To simplify things, suppose it to be certain that the research would yield a cure, or preventative therapy, for one of these diseases. Would the good end justify the grisly means? This is certainly less clear than the case of agriculture; for there is no significant good in the agricultural case to put up against the agony of the animals. Here, in the research case, there is. Or rather might be; for, as earlier noted, much actual research only fills a welcome gap in our knowledge.

I do not know how to resolve this. But I would note some further complications here for Singer and more particularly for Singer's utilitarianism. Suppose you as a utilitarian allow that, at least in principle, the benefits yielded by research on animals could be great enough to justify the harm done to the animals. Then it should follow that the benefits could, again in principle, be great enough to justify research done on humans. If, on the other hand, you insist that research on humans could never be justified (surely a reasonable position!), then you must conclude that it could never be justified on animals. It seems that either both or neither can be justified. Why is this? If you are a utilitarian, then research on animals could only be justified by the goodness of the consequences. The consequences would have to be better than the consequences of doing no research on animals. But if they were ever better than the consequences of doing no research on animals, they could also be better than the consequences of doing no research on humans. If research on animals could be justified, then it could also be justified on humans.

This is all a result of Singer's utilitarianism. For, as a utilitarian, Singer holds that we should weigh interests against one another in deliberation, and we should choose the course of action that has the best consequences in terms of respecting interests. For sentient beings this would mean that we should try to minimize suffering or maximize enjoyment, or, more precisely, produce the most favorable balance of respected interests over the sum of sentient beings affected. It is at least possible, in some cases, that this most favorable balance could be achieved by sacrificing the interests of some sentient beings to the interests of some much larger number of sentient beings. (Think of the Aunt Bea example described in Tom Regan's "The Radical Egalitarian Case for Animal Rights," in Pojman (ed.), Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, p. 43.)

None of this shows that animals don't have interests or that we should not give them equal consideration. It shows that the utilitarian method of aggregating consequences, of making all moral reasoning into a kind of cost/benefit analysis, is incorrect.

(4) Sentience: Too Broad or Too Narrow?

What of Singer's view that sentience entitles a being to moral consideration? This can be challenged as too broad or as too narrow.

Most people react to Singer's view at first by regarding it as much too broad. It says that nonhuman animals are entitled to moral consideration. "Cows, chickens, and pigs? Are you serious?"

Well, what's the alternative? The obvious alternative is to require some kind of mental sophistication, beyond the capabilities of nonhuman animals, as the qualification for moral consideration. The difficulty with this, in all its variants, is that it ends up being too narrow even for its proponents because it would exclude even some human beings from moral consideration: the very young, the severely retarded. For so-called pro-lifers, most significantly, it would exclude fetuses.

Some respond to this difficulty by making humanity as such into the condition that entitles a being to moral consideration. It is Singer's discussion of this that is often the most irritating or, less often, the most persuasive to readers. Singer calls it "speciesism" to make humanity as such into the criterion of moral considerability. This is analogous to racism or sexism (hence the analogous name "speciesism"); for it is just as arbitrary, and hence unjustifiable, as racism and sexism. Why should human beings alone, or preeminently, be entitled to moral consideration? "Because they are human" seems no better an answer to this question than "because they are white males" would be to the corresponding question about the moral status of white men. "What about white men makes them exclusively, or preeminently, entitled to moral consideration?" The question surely is in order. To answer it one must cite some further fact about white men alone, or about them preeminently, that entitles them exclusively to moral consideration or to more of it than others. Needless to say, no such further fact has been, or can be, provided. But once we try to give a nonarbitrary answer to the question of the moral status of human beings, once we try to provide the further fact about human beings which qualifies them alone for moral consideration, we find ourselves in the same case. We get caught in a kind of pincers: Whatever further fact is proposed to qualify all and only human beings for moral consideration, it turns out either to exclude some human beings or to include some nonhuman animals.

In the end, it seems reasonable to conclude, moral consideration will have to be extended to at least some nonhuman animals, and sentience seems a more reasonable basis for the entitlement to moral consideration than anything narrower.

Yet sentience has also been challenged as too narrow. Some have proposed that it is life--being alive--that entitles a thing to moral consideration. How can this be? What can be said in favor of this idea?

Recall our earlier argument that sentient beings have interests. If a being is sentient, then there will be a state or condition of the being that counts as its good; there will be a better and a worse for it. In the light of these points it was concluded that sentient beings can be said to have interests. Now the same line of thought can be used to show that all living things have interests. (Even fungus?) To be sure, Kenneth Goodpaster, the only author we read who endorses life as the basis of moral considerability, is also not an egalitarian. He does not think that we need give equal consideration to all living things or that we should not give more consideration to beagles than to bacteria, or to people than to the other primates.

These remarks leave a lot of questions unresolved, but their tendency should be clear. It is fairly certain, I think, that we should give moral consideration to the interests of all sentient animals; it is less certain that we are obligated to give them equal consideration. It is highly plausible to regard all living things as meriting some moral consideration; it is also highly plausible to regard them as not all meriting equal consideration.