The Anthropocentric Shadow in Singer's Animal Liberation — Epoche C1
Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) is the book that turned the moral status of animals from a fringe concern into a live philosophical and political question. It is widely read as a consistent, radical assault on anthropocentrism — the view that human beings are the centre of moral concern and that everything else matters only in relation to us. Yet a closer examination reveals an inherent tension. When Singer's framework moves from the prevention of suffering to the valuation of individual lives, it quietly internalises an anthropocentric normative lens: it ranks lives by capacities that are, as a matter of fact, most fully developed in humans. This essay makes that tension visible. To do so it must first lay out the machinery of Singer's argument more carefully than the slogan version usually does, because the shadow falls exactly at the joint between two parts of the theory that are often run together. The machinery: speciesism, utilitarianism, and equal consideration Three technical terms carry the argument, and each needs its plain meaning. Speciesism is a bias in favour of the members of one's own species and against members of other species, purely on the ground of species membership. The word was coined in 1970 by the British psychologist Richard Ryder, in a privately circulated Oxford pamphlet, and developed in his book Victims of Science (1975); Singer borrowed it and made it famous. The term is deliberately built on the model of "racism" and "sexism": in each case, the charge is that a biological boundary is being treated as a moral boundary without any argument for why it should be one. Utilitarianism is the ethical theory that an action is right exactly insofar as it produces the best overall balance of welfare for everyone affected, with each individual's welfare counted once and no one's counted extra. It is a consequentialist theory: the rightness of an act depends only on its outcomes, not on the intentions behind it or on rules it breaks. The tradition descends from Jeremy Bentham, who in 1789 already drew the conclusion Singer would press two centuries later: when deciding who belongs inside the moral circle, the question is not whether a creature can reason or talk, but whether it can suffer. Within utilitarianism there are two main accounts of what "welfare" is. The hedonistic version, Bentham's own, says welfare is pleasure and the absence of pain — states of felt experience. The preference version says welfare is the satisfaction of preferences: things go well for a being to the extent that what it wants to happen, happens, whether or not the satisfaction is felt as pleasure. The difference matters enormously for the question of killing: a painless death deprives the hedonist's ledger only of future pleasant experiences, while on the preference view it also thwarts the victim's desire to go on living. One correction to the received picture is needed here, and it matters for the argument. Animal Liberation itself is officially neutral between ethical theories: Singer wrote it to persuade the widest possible audience, and its load-bearing principle — the equal consideration of interests, the rule that interests of the same kind and strength must be given the same moral weight no matter whose they are — is meant to be acceptable to a Kantian or a contract theorist as much as to a utilitarian. Singer's own commitment to preference utilitarianism is spelled out not in the 1975 book but in Practical Ethics (1979), where the consequences for the ethics of killing — the question of when and why it is wrong to end a life — are worked through explicitly. So the tension this essay traces is strictly a tension in Singer's overall position, made visible when the two books are read together. A second, smaller correction: it is loose to describe Singer as an advocate of animal rights . As a utilitarian he has no theoretical room for rights as foundational moral entities — trump cards that hold regardless of consequences — and he has said that he uses the word only as convenient political shorthand. The philosopher of animal rights properly so called is Tom Regan, who appears below as Singer's chief internal critic. The principle of equal consideration of interests deserves unpacking, because much turns on what it does not say. It does not demand equal treatment — a pig has no interest in being taught to read, so denying it schooling wrongs it in no way. It demands equal weighting of like interests: the interest of a pig in not being burned counts for the same as the interest of a human in not being burned, if the suffering is of the same intensity and duration. On this principle, the capacity to suffer — sentience , in the philosopher's vocabulary — is the entry ticket to moral consideration, because only a sentient being can have interests at all. A stone cannot fare well or badly; a chicken can. So far the framework looks like a clean solvent for species boundaries, and applied to suffering it is: pain is pain, whoever hosts it. From suffering to killing: where the hierarchy enters The trouble begins when the question shifts from how much may a being be made to suffer to how bad is it that a being's life ends . These are different questions, and Singer answers them with different tools. Suffering is an experience, and equal consideration handles it symmetrically across species. But death, if it is painless, is not an experience at all. Why then is killing wrong? A hedonistic utilitarian says: because it removes all the pleasure the victim would have had. A preference utilitarian says: because it thwarts the victim's preferences — above all the forward-looking ones, the desire to go on living, to finish what one has started, to see next spring. Here Singer, in Practical Ethics , introduces a distinction that does the decisive work. Following a definition that goes back to John Locke, he uses person as a technical term for a being that is aware of itself as the same entity e