Peter Singer All Animals Are Equal Analysis

Peter Singer is an Australian ethical and political philosopher best known for creating the intellectual foundation for the modern animal rights movement. In 1975 he published Animal Liberation which influenced the growth of the animal rights movement by bring to attention the procedural torture and abuse inside factory farms and for scientific research. In this publication, Singer introduced a now famous philosophical concept of “speciesism” to the world, even though the initial creator of the term was a British psychologist by the name of Dr. Richard D. Ryder. Speciesism, defined by Singer’s All Animals Are Equal, “is a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interest of members of one’s own species and against those members of other species”

Singer’s argument is valid in the sense that the conclusion follows from the premises. In addition, though, some may argue that not all the premises used are completely true. A few of the premises that could have been established on a false basis is the implication that eating and buying meat is always wrong and the concept of factory farming being wrong, emphasizing the exclusion of other external influences like the character of the people doing such activities which influences us to consider the wrongness of factory farming. Even with all the inconsistent beliefs on the accuracy of Singer’s premises, there is no morally relevant difference between thoughts experiments and

Singer explains to us that no matter the criteria in which we use to justify killing animals and other nonhumans for our own pleasure, we will have to admit to ourselves that the criteria doesn’t always “follow precisely the boundary of our own species…” (Timmons, 386). Society holds the ideology that there are just some specific features in certain beings, such as human beings in this case, which makes their lives more valuable than that of another species. Singer shows the discrepancy in this belief by stating that there will surely be nonhumans’ lives that are more valuable than the lives of some humans (Timmons, 386). For example, you have chimpanzees, pigs and dogs that have a “higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others” as compared to mentally defective humans and infants (Timmons, 386). In addition, you have dolphins with echolocation and elephants who can experience grieve, as mentioned in the article “The Case Against Speciesism” written by Sentience Politics. Singer establishes these valuable characteristics in animals and concludes that if we try to use this criterion of possessing certain characteristics for the basis of the right to life, then we must