Peter Singer's Animal Liberation grew out of book review he wrote for The New York Review of Books in 1973, a full fifty years ago. Here is a bullet-point summentary of that review; I am using the reprinted version of the review, pages 11-30 in Why Vegan?, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2020. The book reviewed was Animals, Men and Morals, edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and John Harris.
- “…a demand that we cease to regard the exploitation of other animals as natural and inevitable, and that, instead, we see it as a continuing moral outrage [pp. 11-12].”
- Bentham gets a look in (which now (2023) is more-or-less obligatory)!: ‘The question is not, Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?’
- Do animals suffer? (People seem to want to believe that the answer is no.) But animal physiology and behavior seems to suggest the capacity for suffering -- which also is pretty much all that we have to go on when we consider whether other human beings are capable of suffering. (The capacity of our commonly farmed animals to suffer is not now contested, really. Controversy continues with respect to bivalves and insects.)
- Singer is frequently associated with the word “speciesism” (a parallel, for example, to sexism and racism). But he is always careful to indicate, as he does in this book review, that the term originates with Richard Ryder, not with Singer himself.
- The paradox of animal experimentation: the animals we experiment upon need to be like us (so that we can learn something about ourselves from the experiments) but also not like us (so we can justify the cruel experiments that we would not allow upon humans).
- “Man may always have killed other species for food, but he has never exploited them so ruthlessly as he does today [p. 27].”
- Some of the worst abuses of farm animals: veal, battery cages, maiming and removing body parts without anesthesia
- Will people change their behavior? (Fifty years later, the answer is still no, for the most part.)
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