Is it 'Speciesism' That’s the Problem?

A compilation of arguments against the argument against speciesism

The prevailing framework for understanding human wrongs against animals remains the one developed by Peter Singer in his seminal Animal Liberation. His argument is simple: In our dealings with other species, we humans are guilty of a prejudice analogous to that of racism and sexism—what he called ‘speciesism.’ Racists do wrong because they, in his words, “violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species.”¹ In each of these cases, the wrong that is done is nothing more than the failure to treat like cases alike; it is, therefore, to discriminate on the basis of some arbitrary difference—whether that be race, or sex, or species.

For a while I have found this argument irksome. Not just unhelpful, it is false, it obscures, and it constrains our thinking.

1) Speciesism is ahistorical. To be a speciesist is to discount the interests of those who do not belong to the species ‘Homo sapiens’ and thus to commit the error of determining moral worth on the basis of biological categories that are of no moral relevance. However, the concept of ‘species’ was coined only in the seventeenth century, whereas the systematic exclusion of non-human animals from the moral community stretches back to the dawn of agriculture. If speciesism’s explanatory force depends on a concept that emerged only recently, then it cannot adequately account for the centuries of animal exploitation that preceded it.

By contrast, the notion of ‘anthropocentrism’ (or ‘human supremacy’) fares better. The dismissal of animals here is understood in terms of their distance from what is considered properly ‘human,’ which isn’t a biological category, but a normative ideal which serves the function of sanctioning the subordination both of other members of our own species, as well as of non-human animals.²

2) The analogy does not work. It holds the badness of animal injustice to be akin to the badness of human injustice insofar as both consist in arbitrary discrimination. While I can agree that arbitrary discrimination is common to both, the seeming implication that the badness of racism, sexism, and other forms of human oppressions is reducible to arbitrary discrimination is certainly false. To believe this is to fail to appreciate how the badness of human oppression is largely to do with the subjective experience of dehumanization. To be dehumanized is to feel one’s humanity denied and debased, one’s self-esteem eroded, one’s agency undercut from within. Much of this harm isn’t directly attributable to arbitrary discrimination. Instead, it is a product of unconscious stigma and other societal forces that are out of our control. And while it is undoubtedly true that animals suffer when we impose ourselves on them, their experience of that imposition will be different from the experience of dehumanization.³ As Syl Ko writes: “nonhuman animals cannot subjectively experience a lack of humanity… we cannot override their subjective perspectives such that we could program them to suffer what it is like to feel less than human.”⁴

3) The widespread and popular use of the argument from analogy has alienated justice movements with whom we ought to be building alliances. Obvious examples of this can be found in the infamous PETA exhibits The Holocaust on Your Plate (in which harrowing scenes from Nazi concentration camps were displayed alongside images of animals suffering in modern-day factory farms), and Are Animals the New Slaves? (in which images of captive animals reared for human consumption were displayed alongside images of the 19th-century African slave trade). Both exhibits were widely condemned, especially among those historically oppressed groups with whom animals were being compared. The reason is fairly straightforward: though the intent may have been to amplify the suffering of animals to the level of human tragedy, there is nothing in the analogy itself to prevent one from reading into it the exact inverse: a reduction of humans to the status of ‘Animal’—that is to say, worthless and expendable. It’s no wonder then why many Black and Jewish communities have interpreted these comparison as dehumanizing—or worse, as similar to those tactics used by the Nazis and slaveholders to justify acts of violence and domination.⁵

The breeding of such resentment should worry animal advocates insofar as it can result in deep and lasting rifts between animal and other social justice movements—what Claire Jean Kim has called a ‘posture of mutual disavowal.’ When this happens,

“each group elevates its own suffering and justice claims over the suffering and justice claims of the other group, either partly or wholly invalidating the latter as a matter of political and moral concern. Disavowal, an act of disassociation and rejection, can range from failing to recognize that one is causing harm to the other group to refusing to acknowledge that the other group suffers or has valid justice claims to actively and knowingly reproducing patterns of social injury to the other group.”⁶

4) Very few of us are actually speciesists. A speciesist is usually defined as someone who consistently assigns the same (greater) weight to the interests of humans and the same (lesser) weight to the interests of non-human animals, no matter the context. This implies that a speciesist would never discriminate against humans because of the group they belong to, or consider the interests of some animals as equal to the interests of humans depending on the species of that animal or one’s relationship to them. Those who advance the argument against speciesism are therefore implicitly committed to the bewildering view that discrimination against humans is entirely a thing of the past. They also have no way of accounting for the fondness of many supposed speciesists for the animals that inhabit their homes, or for dogs, cats, primates, dolphins, whales (etc.) in general.⁷

5) One doesn’t need to be an anti-speciesist in order to align oneself with the aims of animal liberation. It must be made clear, first, that there are a few different kinds of speciesism, not all of which are incompatible with the aims of animal liberation. Here are a few examples of what I will call ‘benign’ forms of speciesism:

• When interests are alike, those of humans ought to take precedence over those of animals simply because they are human interests.

• When there is a clash between survival interests, humans always ought to take priority over animals.

• When it comes to making decisions about whose interests to promote, even the most trivial of human interests always ought to take priority over the advancement of the interests of animals, however significant they may be.

If taken to mean just this, speciesism isn’t on its own able to justify the exploitative industries that liberationists are seeking to dismantle; and, if not, then there’s no reason for it to be the primary target of our critique. Such industries can be defended only if one ventures much further and holds that advancing the most trivial human interests justifies thwarting the most important animal interests.⁸ But if this is the position that is entailed in our complicity with those industries that ravage animal bodies without compunction, then is speciesism really the right word or is it altogether too weak to describe the severity of our moral failing?

6) In claiming our fault to be merely that of holding onto an irrational belief, one deflects attention from a range of other vices and failings that are also manifest in our treatment of animals. What is said to be the matter with speciesism is, as we’ve seen, that it signals an inconsistency: we would not treat humans in the ways we treat animals and we can give no good reason why—we cannot, in other words, justify the discrepancy in our behavior. But here we can ask: Is this really all that this behavior amounts to—an inconsistency? Is there not, as David E. Cooper writes, also hatred “recognizable in people’s malevolent attitudes towards what they regard as vermin and pests?” Or “negligence, insensitivity… manifested by… irresponsible pet owners who leave their animals hungry or lonely”? Or vanity “observed in the boasting of shooters, in wearing fur and carrying bags made of reptile skins”? Or “indifference and willful ignorance [in] a public content to put out of mind the impact of their supermarket purchases on the lives of the animals they eat”? And is it not greed “that impels people to demand that they can have, at every meal, meat at a cheap price that only animal factories can provide”?⁹

Consider also that most of us are wildly inconsistent about a great deal—our commitment to waking up early, to losing weight, inconsistent also in our political opinions, our choice of friends, our taste in movies, etc. None of these, however, carry nearly the same kind of moral weight. The charge of speciesism does not then go far enough: it aborts the investigation before reaching what is truly abhorrent about our relationship with animals. What it fails to ask, in other words, is what this seeming discrepancy reveals about our character.

Of course, what it might end up revealing is that there really isn’t much of a discrepancy at all. It could be, after all, that we would treat humans just as badly if it turned out we could get away with it; and that the only reason we don’t is because other humans, even the weakest among us, hold some power over us and so, to some extent, can retaliate. The inconsistency in our behavior could thus stem from the fact that with animals we can simply get away with it. If all this is true, then speciesism isn’t the problem; the problem is deeper and wider reaching than that.¹⁰

7) By focusing on individually held prejudices, the charge of speciesism risks obscuring the institutional systems and economic structures that are also responsible for their exploitation, and for the formation of such prejudice in the first place.¹¹ By this I mean that the powers at play in the subjugation of animals aren’t always or entirely under the control of the individual, but sometimes operate in and through us without our ever being consciously aware of them. Our behaviors are conditioned by outside forces, our attitudes shaped, and our perception of reality distorted—all in ways that render us complicit in the violence perpetrated against animals.

Consider, first, the failure of the law to confer protections to the most vulnerable individuals—rats and mice that are experimented on, for instance, or to chickens raised for food or exploited for their eggs—while categorizing them as property. In the case of animals experimented on, the law not only permits but mandates animal testing for many medications and consumer goods. Market pressures likewise reward efficiency and cost reduction, pushing industries to intensify production at the expense of animal welfare. And there is, finally, the fact that our culture and our institutions fails to inculcate in us the virtues that would allow us to respond to animals and their plight in the way that is ethically required.

1. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (Ecco, 2009), 9.

2. I take this argument Matthew Calarco’s The Three Ethologies (Chicago, 2024), 30-31.

3. I write about this in my article “Racism, Speciesism, and the Argument from Analogy: A Critique of the Vernacular of Animal Liberation” Journal of Applied Philosophy (2025).

4. Syl Ko. “An Interview with Syl Ko.” Tier-Autonomie 6, no. 1 (2019), 11.

5. I also write about this in my article “Racism, Speciesism, and the Argument from Analogy: A Critique of the Vernacular of Animal Liberation” Journal of Applied Philosophy (2025).

6. Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings (Cambridge, 2015), 118.

7. I take this argument Matthew Calarco’s The Three Ethologies (Chicago, 2024), 28.

8. This argument I take from Tzachi Zamir’s Ethics and the Beast (Princeton, 2007), 3-15.

9. These quotes taken from David E. Cooper’s Animals and Misanthropy (Taylor and Francis, 2018), 86-90.

10. This is roughly David E. Cooper’s argument in Animals and Misanthropy.

11. On this topic, see David Nibert’s Animal Rights/Human Rights (Bloomsbury, 2002).