Newborn Piglet
Is ‘specism’ a valid ethical category?
The Australian ethicist Peter Singer has contended that to say one species of animal is of more intrinsic worth than another is to be guilty of ‘specism’, which is akin to racism among our species, humanity. His claim is supported by such a contention as this: a healthy piglet has more right to existence than a newborn human child with severe psychological ‘deficiencies’ because it has a level of consciousness, self awareness, and a interest in its own survival which the newborn will never possess.
Well David, ethicists often distinguish moral objects from moral agents. Moral objects are those things whose preferences, interests, rights and so on should be taken into consideration in our moral deliberations, while moral agents are those things which can properly be held morally responsible (praised, blamed and so on) for their decisions and actions. Ethicists disagree about exactly which things fall into which category, but most agree that not all moral objects are moral agents.
Peter Singer, Tom Regan and other moral philosophers who argue against speciesism hold, in effect, that sentient non-human animals are moral objects, even though very few (if any) are moral agents. Regan believes that all animals have inherent rights and that we cannot assign them a lesser value because of a perceived lack of rationality, while assigning a higher value to infants and the mentally impaired solely on the grounds of their being members of the supposedly superior human species. To do so would be logically baseless, it would rely on our evolutionary bias towards our own species. It would be a form of prejudice; speciesism.
It’s not clear that if we follow the logic of Singer’s argumentation that we must conclude that the piglet in the example has more of a “right to existence” than the mentally impaired child. According to Singer’s “Equal consideration of interests” principle, individual rights are unimportant philosophically; what is instead much more relevant is the consideration of an individual’s interests. Given that both the piglet and the infant are sentient beings- capable of perception and feeling (including pain) – we must give their interests equal weight in our moral deliberations. If the former has an interest in its own survival and a self awareness which the latter lacks, we must factor this into the moral calculus.
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