Animal Liberation (book)
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals is a 1975 book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer. It is widely considered within the animal liberation movement to be the founding philosophical statement of its ideas. Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to human and nonhuman animals. Following Jeremy Bentham, Singer argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to experience suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. He popularized the term "speciesism" in the book, which had been coined by Richard D. Ryder to describe the exploitative treatment of animals.[1]
Author
United States
English
- 1975 (first edition)
- 1990 (second edition)
- 2002 (third edition)
- 2009 (fourth edition)
- 2015 (40th anniversary edition)
- 2023 (revised edition)
311 (2009 edition)
978-0-06-171130-5 (2009 edition)
A revised edition titled Animal Liberation Now was released on 23 May 2023.[2]
Summary[edit]
Singer allows that animal rights are not the same as human rights, writing in Animal Liberation that "there are obviously important differences between humans and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have."[3]
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]
Personal background[edit]
In an essay entitled "Animal Liberation: A Personal View", Singer describes the personal background that led to his adoption of the views he sets out in Animal Liberation. He writes of how he arrived in Oxford in October 1969, and in 1970 had lunch with a fellow graduate student, Richard Keshen, who avoided meat. This led Singer to inquire as to why and then to read Ruth Harrison's book, Animal Machines, as well as a paper by Roslind Godlovitch (who would later co-edit Animals, Men and Morals), which convinced him to become a vegetarian and to take animal suffering seriously as a philosophical issue.[13]
Animal Liberation Now[edit]
A revised edition, titled Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed, was released on 23 May 2023. It features a new foreword by Yuval Noah Harari and two-thirds of the book consists of entirely new material and it also documents changes in animal welfare since the book's original publication, along with other developments, such as the impact of meat consumption on climate and on the risk of spreading dangerous new viruses.[2]