Could Humans' Supposed Potential Justify Speciesism?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume I, p. 19 of the PDF edition · English translation

5.1. The appeal to potential

It is sometimes argued that only humans should be respected (or should be respected to a greater degree) because all humans (and only humans) allegedly have the potential to develop certain capacities or relationships, even though many humans do not in fact have them²³. The capacities most often cited are complex cognitive capacities, and the relationships most often cited are relationships of mutual solidarity, political relationships, or power relationships.

What is meant by potential is the following. Babies do not yet possess, for example, complex cognitive capacities, but they may one day come to have them as adults. Elderly people with a degenerative mental illness no longer possess those capacities, but they once had them. They are therefore potential bearers of those capacities and relationships, even if not actual bearers.

Nonhuman animals, on the other hand, allegedly lack this potential, and therefore, according to this view, it would be justified to do certain things to them that would never be right if done to humans, such as using them for food, clothing, as test subjects, and so on, and also not helping them when they are victims of disease, hunger, thirst, and so on.

5.2. Problems with the appeal to potential

Let us look at some problems with this argument²⁴:

A first problem is that there are humans who do not even have the potential to develop those capacities or relationships. For example, there are humans with an incurable congenital condition that will prevent them throughout their entire lives from exercising those capacities and relationships. According to the appeal to potential, it would be right to do to them all the terrible things that are done to nonhuman animals.

In response to this, proponents of the appeal to potential sometimes argue that, in the case of these humans, we have to take into account the possibility of a scientific breakthrough or even a miracle²⁵. However, one could reply that it would then be arbitrary not to take the same possibilities into account in the case of nonhuman animals.

A second problem is that the appeal in question does not explain why possessing (actually or potentially) those capacities or relationships would be relevant to whether someone should receive moral consideration or to determining how much consideration they should receive. This is simply assumed by the argument, without any explanation.

The third (and main) problem is that the reasons we have, for example, not to cause suffering to a child seem to exist simply because suffering is something bad, and not because the child may in the future come to develop those capacities and relationships. For example, if we know that a child has a terminal illness and will die before developing those capacities and relationships, it seems we still have every reason to respect her as much as any other human being. If so, then it makes no sense to say that we do not have to respect nonhuman animals (or that they should be respected to a lesser degree) because they lack the potential for those capacities or relationships.