William Saletan reports on a movement afoot in Spain to grant “basic rights” to great apes – a group that includes chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. A resolution approved by a Spanish parliamentary committe would “commit the government to ending involuntary use of apes in circuses, TV ads, and dangerous experiments.”

The resolution is based on the work of the Great Ape Project, a group co-founded by Peter Singer, whose goal is to extend “the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans” and to extend to them the right to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture.

Saletan, however, makes a somewhat strange claim. Since, he says, GAP’s argument for the extension of basic rights to great apes is based on certain “morally significant qualities” that scientific research has shown them to possess, the animal rights argument for the equality of all animals is thereby undermined:

These are appeals to discrimination, not universal equality. Most animals don’t have a rich cultural life. They can’t make tools. They don’t teach languages. Singer even points out that “chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas have long-term relationships, not only between mothers and children, but also between unrelated apes.” Special rights for animals in committed relationships! It sounds like a Moral Majority for vegans.

Opening your mind to science-based animal rights doesn’t eliminate inequality. It just makes the inequality more scientific. A rat can’t match a pig, much less a boy. In fact, as a GAP board member points out, “We are closer genetically to a chimp than a mouse is to a rat.”

George Orwell wrote the cruel finale to this tale 63 years ago in Animal Farm: “All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.” That wasn’t how the egalitarian uprising in the book was supposed to turn out. It wasn’t how the animal rights movement was supposed to turn out, either.

Asserting a level of basic rights for animals doesn’t depend on the kind of empirical equality that Saletan seems to think. Just as human rights don’t vary according to people’s intelligence, usefulness, artistic skill, personal charm, or physical attractiveness it’s quite possible to contend for a basic level of moral consideration for animals that isn’t tied to things like having a cultural life, making tools, etc. As Jeremy Bentham memorably put it, the question is not “Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Or, to put it more precisely, the morally significant fact about animals, at least the higher ones, is that they are beings for whom things can go better or worse, they have interests, and experience life from a particular point of view.

Even before I read Tzachi Zamir’s fine book, I thought that the whole debate about “speciesism” was a bit of a red herring. Even allowing that human beings are superior to animals in whatever way you like, it doesn’t follow that we can simply treat them anyway we want to. An animal doesn’t have to be morally equal to a human being to deserve not to be arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The reasoning for this conclusion proceeds from basic notions of justice, fairness, and compassion and doesn’t, as Zamir argues, require a radical revision in our concepts of human worth. Most of us already accept the idea that we shouldn’t inflict unnecessary suffering on animals; it’s just that we have a very low threshold for what we consider to be “necessary.” If we were more consistent in our application of this principle, we’d be well on the road to a full-throated program of animal liberation, or so I would argue.

In fact, it may the very differences between animals that help ground a program of animal rights. It’s living a life befitting an ape – and not being imprisoned, experimented on, or used for human entertainment – that constitutes an ape’s well-being. We don’t need to try and make apes equal with humans, but we might want to think about letting them be apes.

[UPDATE: Edited slightly for clairty]