Introduction Peter Singer The book that follows is very different from the one that appeared under the same title twenty years ago. That work reflected the first generation of the modern animal movement – a movement that began, hesitatingly, in the 1960s, in the United Kingdom. The first sign of a new, more radical approach to combating the maltreatment of animals was the willingness of some members of the League Against Cruel Sports to engage in sabotage to stop hunting with hounds. They started using chemicals to dull the fox’s scent, or they laid false scents to mislead the dogs. By 1963, the Hunt Saboteurs Association emerged as a separate organization, freed from the constraints of the more traditional League. At first, this new radicalism was still focused only on putting an end to hunting with hounds. But just one year after the founding of the Hunt Saboteurs Association, Ruth Harrison’s Animal Machines was published. For the first time, the British public became aware of the existence of factory farming. This system of animal production, Harrison persuasively argued, acknowledges cruelty only when profitability ceases. Unfortunately for the animals, the individual productivity of a laying hen is less significant for the profitability of egg producers than the number of hens the producers can cram inside their sheds. Thus profitability proved compatible with a vast amount of cruelty. A dairy farmer named Peter Roberts tried to persuade the major British animal welfare organizations to take up the issue of factory farming. Getting little response, in 1967 he started Compassion in World Farming. It has now grown into an international organization and a major player in farm animal welfare issues in Europe. Peter Singer 2 Philosophy got involved in the animal question in the early 1970s, when three graduate students at Oxford – Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch, together with John Harris – edited Animals, Men and Morals , the first modern work in which philosophers – among others – discuss the ethics of our treatment of animals. The book attracted virtually no attention. I tried to remedy this situation by writing by a review essay in The New York Review of Books under the more dramatic title “Animal Liberation.” That was followed by my own book with the same title, and after that, a number of other philosophers began to write about the topic from their own ethical perspectives. As James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin observed in The Animal Rights Crusade: The Growth of a Moral Protest , “Philosophers served as midwives of the animal rights movement in the late 1970s” (1992: 90). The metaphor is apt: philosophers were not the mother of the movement, but they did ease its passage into the world and – who knows – may have prevented it being stillborn. In his essay below, Richard Ryder, who was present at the birth, speculates on the reasons why it happened at that particular time. In 1970 the number of writings on the ethical status of animals was tiny. Sixteen years later, when the first edition of this book appeared, it was small. In a comprehensive bibliography of writings on this subject, Charles Magel (1989) lists only 94 works in the first 1970 years of the Christian era, and 240 works from 1970 to 1988, when the bibliography was completed. The tally now must be in the thousands. Nor is this debate simply a Western phenomenon. Leading works on animals and ethics have been translated into most of the world’s major languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and scholars, writers, and activists in many countries have contributed. This new edition reflects the current state of the animal movement. In the last twenty years the movement has grown and matured. Hence I have not felt the need to reprint the work of well-known thinkers, like Tom Regan, Stephen Clark, and Mary Midgley, who contributed to the first edition. Their essays are now widely available in anthologies, and they have written their own books explaining their positions more fully. In this edition, I wanted to give a voice to a new generation of thinkers and activists. Only one essay, Marian Dawkins’s discussion of the basis for assessing suffering in animals, has been reprinted unchanged. Three essays – describing the situation for animals in farms, laboratories, and zoos – are revised versions of essays that appeared in the first edition. The remaining fourteen essays appear here for the first time. The structure of the book is unchanged. We begin with essays on the ideas behind the movement. To come to grips with the crux of the ethical Introduction 3 debate, it helps to distinguish two questions. The first revolves around the idea of “speciesism,” a term that is now in good dictionaries, but did not even exist thirty-five years ago. (It was coined by Richard Ryder, in a leaflet about experiments on animals.) Speciesism is, in brief, the idea that it is justifiable to give preference to beings simply on the grounds that they are members of the species Homo sapiens . The first issue, then, is whether speciesism itself can be defended. The second issue is whether, if speciesism cannot be defended, there are other characteristics about human beings that justify placing greater moral significance on what happens to them than on what happens to nonhuman animals. The view that species is in itself a reason for treating some beings as morally more significant than others is often assumed but rarely defended. Some who write as if they are defending “speciesism” are in fact defending an affirmative answer to the second question, arguing that there are morally relevant differences between human beings and other animals that entitle us to give more weight to the interests of humans. The only argument I’ve come across that looks like a defense of speciesism itself is the claim that just as parents have a special obligation to care for their own children in preference to the children of strangers, so we have a special obligation to other members of our species in preference to members of other species. Advocates of this position usually pass in silence over the obvious case that lies between the family and the species. Thus in Darwinian Dominion , Lewis Petrinovich, an authority on ornithology and evolution, says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives – and then lists “children, kin, neighbors, and species” (1999: 29). If the argument works for both the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere of the species, it should also work for the middle case: race. But an argument that supported preferring the interests of members of our own race over those of members of other races would receive a hostile reaction from most people, who are not racists. Yet if the argument doesn’t lead to the conclusion that race is a morally relevant boundary, how can it show that species is? The late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, writing in 1983, argued that we can’t infer much from the fact that we do not yet have “a theory of the moral importance of species membership” – and, in particular, of the moral importance of the fact that a being is a member of the species Homo sapiens – because nobody thought that we needed such a theory, and so no one had spent much time trying to formulate one. But even as Nozick was writing this, the issue of the moral status of animals, and hence of the Peter Singer 4 moral importance of species membership, had become a pressing one, both philosophically and with a broader public suddenly concerned about factory farming and experiments on animals. So over the last twenty years, many philosophers have spent a lot of time trying to formulate a theory of the moral importance of being a member of the species Homo sapiens . And yet we still do not have a satisfactory account of why membership of our species should matter so much, morally. Nozick’s comment, therefore, takes on a quite different significance. The continuing failure of philosophers to produce a plausible theory of the moral importance of species membership indicates, with increasing probability, that there is no such plausible theory. That takes us to the second question. If species is not morally important in itself, is there something else that happens to coincide with the species boundary, on the basis of which we can justify the inferior consideration we give to nonhuman animals? Those who think that morality is based on a social contract argue that it is the lack of a capacity to reciprocate. Ethics, they say, arises out of an agreement that if I do not harm you, you will not harm me. Since animals cannot take part in this agreement, we have no direct duties to them. The difficulty with this approach to ethics is that it also means that we have no direct duties to small children, or to future generations yet unborn. If we produce radioactive waste that will be deadly for thousands of years, is it unethical to put it into a container that will last 150 years and then drop it into a convenient lake? If it is, ethics cannot be based on reciprocity. Many other ways of marking the special moral significance of human beings have been suggested: the ability to reason, self-awareness, possessing a sense of justice, language, autonomy, and so on. But the problem with all of these allegedly distinguishing marks is, as noted above, that some humans are entirely lacking in these characteristics and few want to consign these humans to the same moral category as nonhuman animals.