make for difficult reading. Ideally then, if what you come up with is to be termed as an interesting essay, it is upon you to ensure that by In Animal Liberation, Singer argues against what he calls speciesism: discrimination on the grounds that a being belongs to a certain species. He holds the interests of all beings capable of suffering to be worthy of equal consideration and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color. He argues that animals' rights should be based on their capacity to feel pain more than on their intelligence. In particular, he argues that while animals show lower intelligence than the average human, many severely intellectually challenged humans show equally diminished, if not lower, mental capacity and that some animals have displayed signs of intelligence (for example, primates learning elements of American sign language and other symbolic languages) sometimes on a par with that of human children. Therefore, intelligence does not provide a basis for giving nonhuman animals any less consideration than such intellectually challenged humans. [4] Singer concludes that the most practical solution is to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet. He also condemns vivisection except where the benefit (in terms of improved medical treatment, etc.) outweighs the harm done to the animals used. [5] Reception [ edit ] The remaining philosophical problem for Singer, however, is that it is, pre-theoretically, very plausible that pleasure and pain avoidance do not exhaust well-being and interests. Indeed, to anyone not already in the grips of a psychologistic theory of well-being, it should be intuitive that things can be good or bad, better or worse for any kind of living thing and not just the relatively small number of those with mental states. It is straightforwardly good for a typical plant to have access to sunlight, water and soil nutrients. It is bad for a typical mushroom to be placed in a bright, hot, dry environment. It is good for a methanotrophic bacterium to have access to methane, bad for a typical bacterium to be bathed in pure alcohol. These non-animals have ‘interests’, in the sense of goodness-for-a-subject, even if they do not consciously ‘take an interest’ in them.

Now, Aristotle’s views on the subject are important and influential enough in the history of philosophy that his theory of goodness or ‘interests’ should not have been dismissed without comment by a philosopher in 1975. But the philosophy and ‘positive’ psychology of well-being has exploded in the intervening decades. There are now many more views under discussion, and relatively few expert participants in these discussions nowadays are hedonists. There are plenty of other purely psychological views, as well as more ‘objective’ (not-purely-psychological) views. If we accepted any of these alternatives, we would thereby draw the line of interests and moral concern in different places from Singer’s line of sentience (i.e., capacity for pleasure and pain). On a perfectionist view like Aristotle’s, more living things than just sentient animals would have interests; on a more cognitively complex view from positive psychology (involving, e.g., a sense of meaning or purpose), only some but not all sentient animals would have interests. Here in 2023, Singer should not rest his book’s entire argument on a widely rejected assumption with no more defense than that Bentham held the view. Animal Liberation Now' And The Case For More Humane Treatment Of Animals : 1A Fifty years ago, Princeton University ethicist Peter Singer made the case that humans assume they're morally superior to other animals and that their actions against them are justified. A reasoned plea for the humane treatment of animals that galvanised the animal-rights movement the way the Rachel Carson's Silent Spring drew activists to environmentalism' The New York Times This extension of moral equality, Singer is careful to point out, does not mean that it is always impermissible for humans to harm or make use of other animals. From a utilitarian perspective, there are no absolute moral prohibitions or imperatives (other than the imperative to maximise ‘utility’). It is permissible to cause harm or pain to a creature, whether human or non-human, if this leads to more happiness and less suffering overall. For instance, Singer allows that experimentation on primates as part of research aimed at improving the treatment of Parkinson’s may be justified. But he argues that this is not the case for the majority of experiments on animals (he tells us that the scale of animal experimentation is unknown – although known to be vast – because most animals aren’t even counted; the US Animal Welfare Act, for instance, excludes rats, mice and birds, i.e., the most common experimental subjects). In Animal Liberation, both in the original 1975 book and in Animal Liberation Now, I reject speciesism, and defend the principle of equal consideration for similar interests, irrespective of whether the interests are those of a human or a nonhuman animal. So if there are ways of raising animals, and giving their interests the same importance and consideration that we give to similar interests of humans — for example, not to have pain inflicted on them, to be part of a social group that suits their needs, and to be able to do things that they enjoy doing — and as part of that process, we obtain food that we like to eat, then it may not be wrong to raise animals in that way.

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As Singer argues, such large-scale, profit-driven systems cannot treat animals humanely. Meanwhile, scientific research continues to show that animals, including farmed species, possess many mental capacities similar to those of humans. These capacities, as Charles Darwin recognised, include affection, grief, sympathy, memory, attention and curiosity. I’m not saying that all curbs on animal self-determination are wrong. Having recently discovered a mass mouse grave under the sofa, I have come to the view that my flourishing is unjustly impeded by my feline housemates’ unconstrained nocturnal activities, and have instituted a curfew. They can still hunt, but they miss out on the primetime hours when their prey are most active. This seems to me a reasonable compromise, but it would be implausible to maintain that doesn’t involve the thwarting of feline striving. * In her eagerness to accede to cat confinement, Nussbaum sometimes falls into an implausibility of this kind. His new book "Animal Liberation Now" revisits the themes of his 1975 seminal classic, Animal Liberation, and examines how the animal rights movement intersects with climate change, social justice, and more. Tatchell, Peter (29 January 2009). "The book that changed my life - Animal Liberation". The New Statesman. UK. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017 . Retrieved 23 December 2016.

I don’t find it absurd to want to treat insects with more care. But it seems to me that – contra Nussbaum’s breezy suggestion that ‘we can easily regroup’ and move creatures into the protected category as more evidence becomes available – theorists of animal equality need insects to be at best possibly sentient, and ideally less likely than not to be sentient (it may not be a coincidence that even Sebo’s relatively high upper estimate of the probability of insect sentience is only 40 per cent). The suspicion is that all the probability talk – don’t ask how the estimates are arrived at – is just a proxy for saying what Singer and others have disbarred themselves from saying: that insects matter a bit, but not as much as other beings. Suppose for a moment that we are convinced of insect sentience, and also committed (as both Nussbaum and Singer claim to be) to the position that the interests of all sentient beings matter equally. If insects are sentient, then since they vastly outnumber us and all other species on Earth, Singer would have to say that their interests should outweigh all others. What to do with a child with head lice? At least one other theory of goodness-for-a-subject is almost as old and just as influential. According to Aristotle’s naturalist perfectionism, it is good for every kind of living thing (as well as for at least some collectives, such as human city-states) to fulfil its natural function based upon its distinctive capacities. Derivatively, it is also good for every kind of living thing to have internal states (e.g., bodily integrity) and external resources (e.g., sources of nutrition) that enable it to perform its natural function well. And, in fact, Aristotle’s general biological theory explains how we know that all living things have their own forms of well-being. Aristotle claims that it is distinctive of all living things—plants, fungi, animals and, if he were aware of them, single-celled organisms—to have capacities and needs for nutrition, growth, self-maintenance and reproduction. Further, it is distinctive of all animals to have capacities for sensation, perception and locomotion and to have corresponding sensory, desiderative, emotional and social needs. While what is distinctive of humans is (supposedly) our rationality, we still share in all of these common animal and ‘vegetative’ needs. We already accept that it is good for humans to meet these needs, to survive and reproduce and avoid serious pain and engage in social relationships. Well, it is just as good for other animals and other living things to meet these same, common needs. And notice how this is just like Singer’s argument that non-human animal pain matters morally: we know human pain matters and non-human animals can experience the same kind of pain, so theirs matters just as much.

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Singer has expressed regret that the book did not have more impact. In September 1999, he was quoted by Michael Specter in The New Yorker on the book's impact: Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed is an expanded, more comprehensive revision of Singer’s classic book. The title reflects his latest assessment of the state of animal rights. These conditions, Singer makes clear, are not aberrations but the norm. European countries aren’t much better than the US. There have been a handful of hard-won reforms – EU countries are now required to give animals sufficient space to turn round and laying hens must be provided with perches and nesting boxes – but even these provisions are not always enforced. And for anyone who’s thinking, ‘But I get all my meat at Waitrose!’ Singer has bad news. Many people assume that what is ‘organic’ or expensive must be more ethical – even cheaper outlets increasingly boast their green and animal-friendly credentials – but Singer tells us that only a fraction of 1 per cent of meat is not factory farmed. The conditions in which dairy cows are kept are just as bad as those of many animals reared for food. Without denying the theoretical possibility of the ‘conscientious omnivore’– in principle, Singer’s utilitarianism has no quarrel with the painless killing and eating of an animal that has enjoyed a good life – he argues that for all but a very few (those who have access to a truly humane farm or smallholding), veganism is the only ethical policy. Do they operate according to a moral philosophy? I’d pay cash money to know, but it’s unlikely we’ll decipher it if they do. What sort of moral philosophy might it be, which permits consumption of one’s own species when convenient, and pushes individuals to, essentially, commit suicide initiated by a single sexual encounter. Philosopher Peter Singer has said that the animal rights movement has “failed to achieve what I had hoped it would achieve”.