Speciesism
Based on Wikipedia: Speciesism
Imagine if an alien species arrived on Earth tomorrow—vastly more intelligent than us, capable of building technologies we couldn't comprehend. They announce they'll be using humans for food, medical experiments, and entertainment. When we protest, they respond: "But you're less intelligent. That makes you inferior. We have every right to use you as we see fit."
Most of us would recognize this as horrifying prejudice. Yet this is precisely the logic that underlies how humans treat other animals. We call this prejudice speciesism.
What Speciesism Actually Means
The term speciesism refers to discrimination based on species membership. Richard Ryder, the psychologist who coined the word in 1970, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species."
The concept is deliberately parallel to racism and sexism. Just as racism arbitrarily privileges one race over others, and sexism privileges one sex over another, speciesism privileges one species—Homo sapiens—over all others.
But there's an important distinction to make here. Some philosophers define speciesism narrowly as unjustified differential treatment based on species. Others use it more broadly to mean any differential treatment, whether justified or not. This matters because the debate often hinges on whether certain differences between species can ever justify different treatment.
The practical consequences of speciesism are all around us. Modern society treats animals as resources: we confine them in factory farms, kill them by the billions for food, experiment on them in laboratories, use them for entertainment in rodeos and bullfights, and take their fur and skin for clothing. We also refuse to help wild animals suffering from natural causes, and we categorize certain species as "invasive" or "feral" to justify killing them.
Recent research from 2015 and 2019 suggests something even more troubling: people who support animal exploitation tend to hold other prejudiced views as well. The same mindset that says "humans are superior to animals" often goes hand-in-hand with racist, sexist, and other hierarchical worldviews. It's all part of a broader belief in group dominance and supremacy.
The Historical Roots: Recognizing Kinship
The idea that we should extend moral concern to animals isn't new. In fact, some of history's greatest thinkers questioned human supremacy long before the word "speciesism" existed.
In 1753, the French naturalist Buffon wrote in his Histoire Naturelle that animals "whose organization is similar to ours, must experience similar sensations." He acknowledged that their sensations would be "proportioned to the activity and perfection of their senses." Yet even Buffon maintained there was still a fundamental gap between humans and other animals—a contradiction that would echo through the centuries.
Voltaire was more consistent. In his poem about the Lisbon earthquake disaster, he wrote of the kinship between all sentient beings: "All sentient things, born by the same stern law, suffer like me, and like me also die."
Bentham's Revolutionary Question
But it was Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and founder of utilitarianism, who delivered what may be the most famous challenge to human exceptionalism. Writing in 1789 in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham argued that species membership is morally irrelevant. What matters is the capacity to suffer.
His words deserve to be quoted in full:
The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withheld from them but by the hand of tyranny. The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
This was radical thinking. Bentham was saying that intelligence and language ability—the traits humans prize most—are the wrong criteria for moral consideration. The relevant question is whether a being can experience pain and pleasure.
Bentham also supported animal welfare laws, though he accepted the killing and use of animals as long as what he considered unnecessary cruelty was avoided. This compromise position—concern for animal suffering but acceptance of animal use—remains common today.
Darwin's Challenge to Human Masterpiece Thinking
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection fundamentally undermined the idea that humans occupy a special place in nature. In his private notebook in 1838, Darwin observed that humans like to regard themselves as masterpieces produced by a deity, but he thought it was "truer to consider him created from animals."
By 1871, in The Descent of Man, Darwin made the case publicly and systematically. He argued that there is no fundamental difference between humans and higher mammals in their mental faculties. The difference, he insisted, was one of degree, not kind.
The senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
If Darwin was right, then the sharp line we draw between "us" and "them" is an illusion. We're all part of the same continuum.
The Animal Mind Debate
In 1843, Lewis Morgan published an essay in The Knickerbocker magazine arguing that animals display memory, foresight, and reasoning. He pointed to dogs returning to surgeons, beavers building dams, ants storing grain, and marmots posting lookouts as sentries.
Morgan rejected the convenient explanation of "instinct"—the idea that animals are just biological machines following programmed behaviors. Instead, he suggested that humans and other species share common mental principles that differ only in degree. He questioned claims of human moral superiority and criticized hunting for sport and killing animals for food.
Morgan later expanded these ideas in an unpublished 1857 paper called "Animal Psychology," where he speculated that animals might possess moral capacities and even immortal souls. Though his work went largely unnoticed at the time, later scholars recognized it as an unusually early critique of instinct-based explanations within American psychology.
Schopenhauer's Critique of Western Religion
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer took aim at the religious foundations of human supremacy. He argued that anthropocentrism—human-centered thinking—was a fundamental defect of Christianity and Judaism. These religions, he claimed, contributed to animal suffering by separating humans from other animals and encouraging their treatment as mere things.
Schopenhauer praised Eastern religions like Brahmanism and Buddhism for teaching kinship between humans and animals through the doctrine of metempsychosis—the transmigration of souls. If you might be reincarnated as a dog or a pig, you're less likely to mistreat them.
The Secularist Movement for Animal Rights
According to historian Chien-Hui Li, late nineteenth and early twentieth century secularist thinkers developed arguments for animals based on utility and evolutionary kinship. These thinkers were seeking a morality independent of religious authority.
Many initially supported vivisection—experimenting on living animals—if it benefited humans. But over time, they questioned whether such experiments were truly necessary. Figures like George William Foote argued for considering long-term moral principles rather than immediate gains.
Drawing on evolutionary theory, they emphasized common origins and similarities between humans and animals. They rejected the idea of a theological gulf separating species and argued that morality should extend to all beings capable of experiencing pain and pleasure.
Salt's Universal Brotherhood
Henry Salt, a British writer and early animal rights advocate, published Animals' Rights in 1892. He argued that for humans to do justice to other animals, they must abandon the notion of a "great gulf" between species. Instead, Salt called for recognizing "the common bond of humanity that unites all living beings in one universal brotherhood."
This wasn't just philosophical abstraction. Salt was arguing that animals needed concrete, enforceable rights to protect them from cruelty.
Evans and the Implications of Evolution
Edward Payson Evans, an American scholar, made similar arguments in his 1897 work Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology. He criticized anthropocentric psychology and ethics for treating humans as fundamentally different from other sentient beings.
Evans insisted that Darwin's theory implied moral duties not just toward enslaved humans but toward nonhuman animals as well. Beyond kind treatment, animals needed rights enforceable by law. Once we recognize our kinship with other sentient beings, Evans argued, mistreating them becomes impossible to justify.
Moore's Zoocentricism
J. Howard Moore, an American zoologist and philosopher, took these ideas even further. In his 1895 work, he described vegetarianism as the ethical result of recognizing evolutionary kinship. He criticized what he called the "pre-Darwinian delusion" that animals were created for human use.
By 1899, Moore was arguing that human ethics had evolved to include various human groups but had stopped there. He proposed "zoocentricism" as the next step—extending ethical concern to the entire sentient universe.
In his 1906 book The Universal Kinship, Moore compared the mistreatment of animals to denying ethical relations among human groups. He called for applying the Golden Rule to all sentient beings:
Do as you would be done by, and not to the dark man and the white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well; not to creatures of your own anatomy only, but to all creatures.
This was a radical universalism that most people, even today, would find challenging.
The Birth of the Term
Despite all this historical groundwork, the word "speciesism" didn't exist until 1970. That's when Richard Ryder, a British psychologist and member of an Oxford academic group focused on animal rights, coined it in a privately printed pamphlet.
The pamphlet was distributed to protest animal experimentation. Ryder deliberately crafted the term to create a rhetorical parallel with racism and sexism. If discriminating based on race or sex is wrong, why should discriminating based on species be acceptable?
In the pamphlet, Ryder wrote: "Since Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no 'magical' essential difference between humans and other animals, biologically speaking. Why then do we make an almost total distinction morally? If all organisms are on one physical continuum, then we should also be on the same moral continuum."
He pointed out that five million animals were being used each year in British experiments at that time. Attempting to gain benefits for our own species through the mistreatment of others was, he wrote, "just 'speciesism' and as such it is a selfish emotional argument rather than a reasoned one."
Ryder's Analogy to Racism
Ryder expanded on the concept in a 1971 essay called "Experiments on Animals," published in the collection Animals, Men and Morals. He drew the parallel explicitly:
In as much as both "race" and "species" are vague terms used in the classification of living creatures according, largely, to physical appearance, an analogy can be made between them. Discrimination on grounds of race, although most universally condoned two centuries ago, is now widely condemned. Similarly, it may come to pass that enlightened minds may one day abhor "speciesism" as much as they now detest "racism."
The logic, he argued, was identical. If it's wrong to inflict suffering on innocent humans, it's also wrong to inflict suffering on innocent individuals of other species. The time had come, Ryder wrote, to act on this logic.
Peter Singer Makes It Famous
The term might have remained obscure if not for Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher who popularized it in his 1975 book Animal Liberation. Singer had been a graduate student at Oxford and knew Ryder personally. He credited Ryder with coining the term and devoted an entire chapter to it: "Man's Dominion: a short history of speciesism."
Singer defined speciesism as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species." He then drew the parallel to other forms of discrimination:
Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favouring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.
The Principle of Equal Consideration
Singer approached this from a preference-utilitarian perspective. He argued that speciesism violates the principle of equal consideration of interests—an idea based on Jeremy Bentham's maxim: "each to count for one, and none for more than one."
There may be differences between humans and nonhumans, Singer acknowledged. But they share the capacity to suffer. We must give equal consideration to that suffering.
Any moral theory that allows similar cases to be treated differently, Singer argued, fails as an acceptable ethical framework. If a human and a pig can both suffer, and suffering is what matters morally, then causing equal suffering to each is equally wrong.
Singer admitted the term was awkward but said he couldn't think of a better one. It caught on anyway. By 1985, "speciesism" appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as "discrimination against or exploitation of animal species by human beings, based on an assumption of mankind's superiority."
In 1994, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy offered a broader definition: "By analogy with racism and sexism, the improper stance of refusing respect to the lives, dignity, or needs of animals of other than the human species."
The Modern Movement
Since Singer's book, the concept has been championed by numerous philosophers and animal rights advocates. Peter Singer himself remains influential, along with scholars like Oscar Horta, Steven Wise, Gary Francione, Melanie Joy, David Nibert, Steven Best, and Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
These thinkers point to speciesism as the underlying ideology that enables the animal-industrial complex—the vast system of factory farming, slaughterhouses, animal testing laboratories, fur farms, blood sports, and other forms of institutionalized animal exploitation.
The numbers are staggering. Tens of billions of land animals are killed for food each year worldwide. Millions more are used in experiments. The scale of suffering involved is difficult to comprehend.
The Critics Push Back
Not everyone accepts the concept of speciesism or its implications. Philosophers including Carl Cohen, Nel Noddings, Bernard Williams, and Roger Scruton have criticized the term or challenged elements of it.
Some argue that species membership is morally relevant—that there's nothing wrong with privileging our own kind. Others contend that the analogy to racism and sexism is flawed because race and sex are morally arbitrary categories within a species, while species differences may involve morally relevant capacities.
Still others accept that we should avoid causing unnecessary suffering to animals but reject the idea that this requires treating animal and human interests as equal. They argue for a hierarchy of moral consideration that places humans at the top.
Why It Matters
The debate over speciesism isn't just academic. It has profound practical implications for how we live our lives.
If the critics of speciesism are right, then much of what we currently do to animals is morally indefensible. Factory farming, which causes immense suffering to billions of sentient creatures, would be one of the greatest moral catastrophes in history. Animal experimentation, hunting, fur farming, and other practices would require serious moral justification that many believe is lacking.
On the other hand, if species membership is morally relevant, or if there are other justifications for differential treatment, then our current practices might be defensible—or at least not as clearly wrong as anti-speciesism advocates claim.
The question cuts to the heart of how we understand ourselves and our place in the natural world. Are we genuinely special in some morally relevant way? Or are we simply one species among many, distinguished mainly by our power to dominate others—a power that comes with no special moral privilege?
The concept of speciesism challenges us to examine assumptions we rarely question. It asks us to consider whether the interests of a pig, a chicken, or a cow matter less than ours simply because they belong to a different species. And it demands we provide a better answer than "because I'm human and they're not."
That's a question worth grappling with, even if—especially if—we find the answer uncomfortable.