Animal Ethics: Singer, Regan, and the Question of Moral Status

The Australian philosopher Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) is widely credited with launching the modern animal ethics movement and popularizing the term "speciesism," coined slightly earlier by the British psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970, to denote an unjustified bias toward the interests of one's own species analogous to racism or sexism. Singer argues from a preference-utilitarian framework, drawing on the utilitarian principle of equal consideration of interests articulated by Jeremy Bentham — whose 1789 remark that regarding animals "the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" Singer treats as the foundational insight of the field — that any being capable of suffering has an interest in avoiding it, and that this interest must be given equal weight in moral calculation regardless of the species of the being who has it, without requiring that all beings be treated identically. On this basis, Singer condemns factory farming and much animal experimentation as inflicting suffering that is not offset by a proportionate increase in aggregate welfare, while allowing that some uses of animals could in principle be justified if their benefits genuinely outweighed the suffering caused.