A Conversation with Animal Rights Pioneer Peter Singer
In 1970, a graduate philosophy student named Peter Singer happened to meet a fellow student who didn’t eat meat. Even today this is uncommon, but at the time it was radical, and it made Singer pause. “Here I’d been eating meat for 24 years. I was studying ethics. Yet I’d never thought that eating meat might be an ethical problem,” he recalls. “I thought, what does entitle us to treat animals like this? Why is the boundary of our species so important?”
Out of the intellectual journey that followed came Animal Liberation, published in 1975 and considered one of the most influential books in modern history. Encyclopedia Britannica called Singer “one of the world’s most widely recognized public intellectuals,” and he and his seminal work are credited with shaping the modern animal rights movement.
Maybe caterpillars suffer, but do they suffer like us?
Now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, Singer is quick to clarify that his arguments are not fundamentally about rights. Rather, they’re about equality: The interests of similar beings deserve similar moral consideration, regardless of the species they belong to, and avoiding pain is a transcendent interest. “If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration,” he writes. “Beings who are similar in all relevant respects have a similar right to life; and mere membership in our own species is not a morally relevant distinction.”
That message is even more timely—and more challenging—now than when Singer first delivered it. It’s estimated that there are more than 33 billion domesticated chickens, mostly in factory farms, as well as 1 billion pigs and 1.5 billion cows. More than 100 million animals live in laboratories. The scale of their suffering is so vast as to be almost inconceivable. At the same time, however, there is more support than ever before for improving animal welfare and respecting animal rights. And although science has provided new ways of exploiting animals, it has also illuminated their lives and deepened our empathy.
In anticipation of Animal Liberation Now, the newly published update to his classic text, Singer talked to Nautilus about science, ethics, and the future of animals.
