Book Review on Animal Liberation the Definitive Classic of the Animals Movement

1975 volume past Peter Singer

Animal Liberation

Encompass of the offset edition
Author	Peter Singer
Country	U.s.
Language	English
Subject	Animal rights
Publisher	HarperCollins
Publication engagement	1975 (2d edition 1990, 3rd edition 2002, fourth edition 2009, 40th anniversary edition 2015)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback) and eBook
Pages	311 (2009 edition)
ISBN	978-0-06-171130-5 (2009 edition)

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 argument of its ideas. Singer himself rejected the apply of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to human and nonhuman animals. Following Jeremy Bentham, Vocalist argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their power to experience suffering and that the thought of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. He popularized the term "speciesism" in the volume, which had been coined by Richard D. Ryder to describe the exploitative treatment of animals.^[ane]

Summary [edit]

Singer's key argument is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that "the greatest skillful" is the only measure of good or ethical behavior. He argues that there is no reason not to apply this principle to other animals.

Although Singer rejects 'rights' as a moral concept, his position is derived from utilitarian principles of minimizing suffering.^{[Notes 1]} Vocalizer allows that fauna rights are non the same as human rights, writing in Creature Liberation that "in that location are obviously important differences between humans and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each accept."^[2]

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 than 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 detail, he argues that while animals bear witness lower intelligence than the boilerplate human, many severely intellectually challenged humans show equally macerated, 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 homo children. Therefore, intelligence does non provide a basis for giving nonhuman animals any less consideration than such intellectually challenged humans.^[3] Singer concludes that the most applied 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 impairment done to the animals used.^[4]

Reception [edit]

Activist Ingrid Newkirk wrote of Animal Liberation, "Information technology forever changed the chat about our handling of animals. Information technology fabricated people—myself included—modify what we ate, what we wore, and how we perceived animals."^[5] Other activists who claim that their attitudes to animals changed afterward reading the book include Peter Tatchell^[6] and Matt Ball.^[7]

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 volume's affect:

It's had effects around the margins, of form, but they have mostly been minor. When I wrote information technology, I actually idea the book would change the globe. I know it sounds a little 1000 at present, but at the time the sixties however existed for u.s.. It looked equally if real changes were possible, and I allow myself believe that this would be i of them. All yous have to practice is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been.^[8]

The volume has also received a wide range of philosophical challenges to his formulation of fauna rights. In a lengthy debate in Slate Mag, published in 2001, Richard Posner wrote, among other things, that Singer failed to see the "radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [his] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a good for you pig than in a greatly intellectually challenged child, that commands inflicting a bottom pain on a human existence to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental power of a normal homo being, would require the cede of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees." Singer replied to and rejected this claim.^{[nine] [10] [11] [12] [13] [fourteen] [xv] [xvi] [17]}

In addition, Martha Nussbaum has argued that the adequacy approach provides a more adequate foundation of justice than Utilitarianism can supply. Utilitarianism, Nussbaum argues, ignores adaptive preferences, elides the separateness of distinct persons, misidentifies valuable human/non-homo emotions such as grief, and calculates according to "sum-rankings" rather than inviolable protection of intrinsic entitlements.^[18]

Roger Scruton, a moral philosopher who criticised Singer's work for what Scruton said was fake equivalence betwixt creature and man consciousness and the pejorative use of utilitarianism, singled Animal Liberation for criticism. He wrote that Singer'due south works, including Creature Liberation (1975), "contain petty or no philosophical argument. They derive their radical moral conclusions from a vacuous utilitarianism that counts the hurting and pleasance of all living things equally every bit significant and that ignores simply about everything that has been said in our philosophical tradition about the real distinction between persons and animals."^[19]

Editions [edit]

There accept been several editions of the volume published over the years, each further chronicling the progress of the beast liberation movement.^{[ citation needed ]}

Personal background [edit]

In an essay entitled "Animal Liberation: A Personal View", Vocalizer 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 Oct 1969, and in 1970 had lunch with a fellow graduate educatee, Richard Keshen, who avoided meat. This led Singer to enquire as to why. Vocalizer then read Ruth Harrison's volume, Animal Machines, also equally a paper by Roslind Godlovitch (who would later co-edit Animals, Men and Morals), which convinced him to become a vegetarian and to take animate being suffering seriously as a philosophical issue.^[twenty]

See also [edit]

• Tom Regan
• List of vegan media

Notes [edit]

1. ^ This follows his fellow utilitarian John Stuart Factory, whose defense force of the rights of the individual in On Freedom (1859) is introduced with the qualification, "It is proper to state that I forego any reward which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract correct every bit a matter independent of utility".^{[ improper synthesis? ]}

. This grossly oversimplifies Mill'due south position as regards 'act' and 'dominion' utilitarianism, which is usefully summarised here Can a utilitarian respect rights? by Chris Lyons

References [edit]

1. ^ Peter Vocalizer, "A Utilitarian Defence of Beast Liberation," in Environmental Ethics, ed. Louis Pojman (Stamford, CT: Wadsworth, 2001), 35."
2. ^ Op. cit., p. 2.
3. ^ Singer, Peter. "On Humans and Animals". IAI TV. Retrieved 11 December 2013.
4. ^ Gareth Walsh, "Father of animal activism backs monkey testing", The Sunday Times, November 26, 2006.
5. ^ "What Is Fauna Liberation? Philosopher Peter Singer's Groundbreaking Work Turns forty | A Bulletin From PETA's President | All About PETA | About". PETA. 2015-04-14. Retrieved 2015-07-26 .
6. ^ Tatchell, Peter (29 January 2009). "The book that changed my life - Animal Liberation". The New Statesman. United kingdom. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017. Retrieved 23 December 2016.
7. ^ Back encompass of the Oct 2015 Vintage edition of Animal Liberation. "Few books can honestly be said to take launched a major social move. Creature Liberation is 1. Peter Singer's work has changed millions and millions of lives, including mine. Much more importantly, though, Professor Singer's book helped define and build the move that is fundamentally shifting the way humans relate to our beau animals and that volition eventually stop the barbaric treatment of billions of sentient individuals." —Matt Ball, author of The Accidental Activist and senior adviser for VegFund.
8. ^ Michael Specter, "The Dangerous Philosopher", The New Yorker, 6 September 1999
9. ^ "Animal Rights, contend between Peter Vocalist and Richard Posner (collected)". Utilitarian.net. Archived from the original on 2015-05-09. Retrieved 2015-07-26 .
10. ^ "Dialogues: Animal Rights (Letter 1, Singer to Posner)". Slate Mag. 2001-06-12. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
11. ^ "Dialogues: Fauna Rights (Letter 2, Posner to Vocaliser)". Slate Magazine. 2001-06-12. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
12. ^ "Dialogues: Fauna Rights (Letter Three, Singer to Posner)". Slate Magazine. 2001-06-13. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
13. ^ "Dialogues: Animal Rights (Letter 4, Posner to Vocalizer)". Slate Magazine. 2001-06-thirteen. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
14. ^ "Dialogues: Brute Rights (Letter Five, Singer to Posner)". Slate Magazine. 2001-06-thirteen. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
15. ^ "Dialogues: Animal Rights (Letter of the alphabet 6, Posner to Vocaliser)". Slate Mag. 2001-06-14. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
16. ^ "Dialogues: Animal Rights (Letter Seven, Singer to Posner)". Slate Mag. 2001-06-xiv. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
17. ^ "Dialogues: Fauna Rights (Letter of the alphabet Viii, Posner to Singer)". Slate Magazine. 2001-06-14. Retrieved 2020-08-23 .
18. ^ Nussbaum, Martha and Cass Sunstein, eds. Animal Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 299–320.
19. ^ Scruton, Roger. "Animal Rights", City Periodical, summertime 2000.
    • Scruton (1998).
20. ^ Vocalist, Peter (2001). "Animal Liberation: A Personal View". Writings on an ethical life. London: Fourth Estate. pp. 293–302. ISBN1841155500.

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_(book)

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