In Defense of Peter Singer

Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Here’s Keith Burgess-Jackson on Singer’s Animal Liberation:

Obviously, each of us has many interests, the main one being the interest in not suffering. Let us call beings who have the capacity to suffer “sentient beings.” You and I are sentient beings. Cows, pigs, turkeys, and chickens are sentient. Trees and other plants are not. Rocks and dirt are not. Since cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens, and other animals are sentient, and since suffering is intrinsically bad (you believe that, don’t you?), every sentient being has an interest in not suffering. Trees, plants, rocks, and dirt, not being sentient, cannot suffer (by definition), and therefore have no interest in not suffering. Indeed, they have no interests at all. Nothing matters to them. Sentience appears to be a necessary condition for having interests, and, since being sentient gives one at least the interest in not suffering, it is also a sufficient condition. The class of sentient beings is the same class as (i.e., is coextensive with) the class of beings with interests.

All Singer demands, in Animal Liberation, is that, when we act, we take all relevant interests into account and consider them equally. We must neither disregard nor discount relevant interests. But disregarding and discounting routinely occur with respect to animals’ interest in not suffering. Humans inflict terrible suffering on animals for little or no reason, often just because they like the taste of their flesh. (I refer here to factory farms, where most meat, including, I suspect, all the meat you consume, originates.) That this disregards the animals’ interest in not suffering can be seen by the fact that we would not inflict any amount or kind of suffering on humans in order to satisfy our taste for human flesh (supposing we had such a taste). We are fastidious about respecting human suffering, but cavalier to the point of indifference when it comes to animal suffering.

Just because alleviating suffering doesn’t exhaust the extent of our moral obligations (i.e. it still isn’t right, contra Singer, to painlessley kill a newborn infant), doesn’t mean that it isn’t relevant when making moral decisions.

(Note: the stopped clock I’m referring to is Singer, not KBJ, who is frequently (though, of course, not always) right.)