Moral philosopher PETER SINGER’S influential book Animal Liberation appeared in embryonic form as an essay with the same title in The New York Review of Books on 5 April 1973. Made amidst the convulsions of the gay and women’s liberation movements, the author’s appeal for an end to the exploitation of other species hopes to capitalise on the momentum and cultural imprints of gay and feminist activism. Advocating animal equality puts Singer on a collision course with the age-old school of human exceptionalism, whose expressions come in varying degrees of sophistication. A common opinion, for instance, even in passionately unbigoted circles, is that equality only obtains among those with equal innate abilities (such as intelligence); hence it is rightly granted to women, gays and other minorities, and rightly denied to nonhumans. Singer counters by pointing out that even in the absence of conclusive evidence of systematic differences in mental aptitude between human populations, it is quite obvious that such differences do exist between human individuals. Since we do not allow any human being to exploit another on the basis of an IQ gap, Singer urges us to recognise that allowing the exploitation of nonhumans on such a basis is a compromise of morality and logic. Following JEREMY BENTHAM, he submits that the most salient fact in this case is not a being’s mental aptitude but rather its capacity to suffer. This is the point at which detractors tend to seek recourse to language. While nonhuman animals exhibit many of the behavioural signs that lead us to infer the experience of pain, the conspicuous absence of a developed language provides skeptics with a crucial loophole — and, in a philosophical climate that has significantly inflated the role of language, that is not an untenable position. While Singer is willing to entertain the possibility that a rule-governed language is necessary for conceptual thought and intentionality, his response is that pain almost certainly precedes those states on the evolutionary timeline, and does not appear to have a linguistic basis. Indeed, he adds, when expressing feelings and emotions, humans rely mostly on nonverbal signals, which primatologists and other zoologists have shown to be common to many other species. In a similar vein, he goes on to dismantle virtually every objection to his case, be it academic or pragmatic. It will come as no surprise that theists have attempted to dismiss Singer’s work1 as an example of ‘vacuous utilitarianism’. Nevertheless, it takes a heroic level of piety (or callousness) to deny the soundness of his reasoning.
ROGER SCRUTON rebuts Singer in a City Journal essay titled ‘Animal Rights’. See post no. 29, ‘Unburdened Constituencies’.