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By Root 675 0

and, provided you accept its premises, difficult to refute. Take the premise of equality among people, which most of us readily accept. Yet what do we really mean by it? After all, people are not, as a matter of fact, equal at all—some are smarter than others, handsomer, more gifted, whatever. “Equality is a moral idea,” Singer points out, “not an assertion of fact.” The moral idea is that everyone’s interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of “what they are like or what abilities they have.” Fair enough; many philosophers have gone this far. But few have then taken the next logical step. “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose?”

This is the nub of Singer’s argument, and right away, here on page six, I began scribbling objections in the margin. But humans differ from animals in morally significant ways. Yes they do, Singer readily acknowledges, which is why we shouldn’t treat pigs and children alike. Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out; children have an interest in being educated, pigs in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest humans share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.

Here Singer quotes a famous passage from Jeremy Bentham, the eighteenth-century utilitarian philosopher. Bentham is writing in 1789, after the French had freed their black slaves and granted them fundamental rights, but before the British or Americans had acted. “The day may come,” Bentham wrote, “when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights.” Bentham then asks what characteristics entitle any being to moral consideration. “Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse?” Bentham asks. “But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversational animal, than an infant.”

“The question is not Can they reason? Or Can they talk? But Can they suffer?”

Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers call the “argument from marginal cases,” or AMC for short. It goes like this: There are humans—infants, the severely retarded, the demented—whose mental function does not rise to the level of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions (obey the golden rule, etc.) we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the chimpanzee?

Because he’s a chimp, I furiously scribble in the margin, and they’re human beings! For Singer that’s not good enough. To exclude the chimp from moral consideration simply because he’s not human is no different than excluding the slave simply because he’s not white. In the same way we’d call that exclusion “racist” the animal rightist contends it is “speciesist” to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he’s not human. But the differences between blacks and whites are trivial compared to the differences between my son and the chimp. Singer asks us to imagine a hypothetical society that discriminates on the basis of something nontrivial—intelligence, say. If that scheme offends our sense of equality, as it surely does, then why is the fact that animals lack this or that human characteristic any more just as a basis for discrimination? Either we do not owe any justice to the severely retarded, he concludes, or we do owe it to animals with higher capabilities.

This is where I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the steer’s interest into account or accept that I’m a speciesist.

For the time being, I decided, I’ll plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak.

But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights thinkers