What this text is about
Almost everyone says they like animals. Even so, billions of them are bred, locked up, and killed every year to become food, clothing, or lab test subjects. How do people think about this? This text shows that there are three main ways to answer the question: do animals matter?
View 1: animals don't matter for their own sake
For some people, mistreating an animal is only wrong because of how it affects humans. For example: someone who is cruel to a dog might "practice" being cruel to people. Or: eating meat is bad only because it hurts our health or the environment.
Notice that, in this view, the animal itself doesn't count. What counts is what happens to humans.
View 2: animals matter, but less
Other people say animals matter for their own sake, but less than humans do. They build a kind of ladder, with humans at the top. Some give animals almost no weight. Others give them quite a lot. Some people also build the ladder by intelligence instead of by species.
View 3: equal pain counts equally
The third view says that all sentient beings deserve the same consideration. If a pig and a child feel pain of the same size, both pains count the same.
For this view, the suffering we cause animals is already enough to show that exploiting them is unfair, even if it doesn't harm any human. And it also applies to the suffering animals go through in the wild, from hunger, disease, or disasters.
What speciesism is
The text uses the word speciesism for treating someone worse just because of their species. And it uses anthropocentrism for the idea that humans are at the center and are worth more.
The author shows that most people use a double standard. If the victims were human, nobody would accept what is done to animals. This has a name: a moral double standard.
In short
- There are three views: animals don't matter, they matter less, or they matter equally.
- Speciesism is giving someone less weight just because of their species.
- Most people accept things done to animals that they would never accept if done to humans.