The word speciesism came to me while I was lying in a bath
in Oxford some 35 years ago. It was like racism or sexism - a prejudice
based upon morally irrelevant physical differences. Since Darwin we have
known we are human animals related to all the other animals through
evolution; how, then, can we justify our almost total oppression of all
the other species? All animal species can suffer pain and distress.
Animals scream and writhe like us; their nervous systems are similar and
contain the same biochemicals that we know are associated with the
experience of pain in ourselves.
Our concern for the pain and distress of others should be
extended to any "painient" - pain-feeling - being regardless of his or her
sex, class, race, religion, nationality or species. Indeed, if aliens from
outer space turn out to be painient, or if we ever manufacture machines
who are painient, then we must widen the moral circle to include them.
Painience is the only convincing basis for attributing rights or, indeed,
interests to others.
Many other qualities, such as "inherent value," have been
suggested. But value cannot exist in the absence of consciousness or
potential consciousness. Thus, rocks and rivers and houses have no
interests and no rights of their own. This does not mean, of course, that
they are not of value to us, and to many other painients, including those
who need them as habitats and who would suffer without them.
Many moral principles and ideals have been proposed over
the centuries - justice, freedom, equality, brotherhood, for example. But
these are mere stepping stones to the ultimate good, which is happiness;
and happiness is made easier by freedom from all forms of pain and
suffering (using the words "pain" and "suffering" interchangeably).
Indeed, if you think about it carefully you can see that the reason why
these other ideals are considered important is that people have believed
that they are essential to the banishment of suffering. In fact they do
sometimes have this result, but not always.
Why emphasize pain and other forms of suffering rather
than pleasure and happiness? One answer is that pain is much more powerful
than pleasure. Would you not rather avoid an hour's torture than gain an
hour's bliss? Pain is the one and only true evil. What, then, about the
masochist? The answer is that pain gives him pleasure that is greater than
his pain!
One of the important tenets of painism (the name I give to
my moral approach) is that we should concentrate upon the individual
because it is the individual - not the race, the nation or the species -
who does the actual suffering. For this reason, the pains and pleasures of
several individuals cannot meaningfully be aggregated, as occurs in
utilitarianism and most moral theories. One of the problems with the
utilitarian view is that, for example, the sufferings of a gang-rape
victim can be justified if the rape gives a greater sum total of pleasure
to the rapists. But consciousness, surely, is bounded by the boundaries of
the individual. My pain and the pain of others are thus in separate
categories; you cannot add or subtract them from each other. They are
worlds apart.
Without directly experiencing pains and pleasures they are
not really there - we are counting merely their husks. Thus, for example,
inflicting 100 units of pain on one individual is, I would argue, far
worse than inflicting a single unit of pain on a thousand or a million
individuals, even though the total of pain in the latter case is far
greater. In any situation we should thus concern ourselves primarily with
the pain of the individual who is the maximum sufferer. It does not
matter, morally speaking, who or what the maximum sufferer is - whether
human, non-human or machine. Pain is pain regardless of its host.
Of course, each species is different in its needs and in
its reactions. What is painful for some is not necessarily so for others.
So we can treat different species differently, but we should always treat
equal suffering equally. In the case of non-humans, we see them
mercilessly exploited in factory farms, in laboratories and in the wild. A
whale may take 20 minutes to die after being harpooned. A lynx may suffer
for a week with her broken leg held in a steel-toothed trap. A battery hen
lives all her life unable to even stretch her wings. An animal in a
toxicity test, poisoned with a household product, may linger in agony for
hours or days before dying.
These are major abuses causing great suffering. Yet they
are still justified on the grounds that these painients are not of the
same species as ourselves. It is almost as if some people had not heard of
Darwin! We treat the other animals not as relatives but as unfeeling
things. We would not dream of treating our babies, or mentally handicapped
adults, in these ways - yet these humans are sometimes less intelligent
and less able to communicate with us than are some exploited nonhumans.
The simple truth is that we exploit the other animals and
cause them suffering because we are more powerful than they are. Does this
mean that if those aforementioned aliens landed on Earth and turned out to
be far more powerful than us we would let them - without argument - chase
and kill us for sport, experiment on us or breed us in factory farms, and
turn us into tasty humanburgers? Would we accept their explanation that it
was perfectly moral for them to do all these things as we were not of
their species?
Basically, it boils down to cold logic. If we are going to
care about the suffering of other humans then logically we should care
about the suffering of non-humans too. It is the heartless exploiter of
animals, not the animal protectionist, who is being irrational, showing a
sentimental tendency to put his own species on a pedestal. We all, thank
goodness, feel a natural spark of sympathy for the sufferings of others.
We need to catch that spark and fan it into a fire of rational and
universal compassion.
All of this has implications, of course. If we gradually
bring non-humans into the same moral and legal circle as ourselves then we
will not be able to exploit them as our slaves. Much progress has been
made with sensible new European legislation in recent decades, but there
is still a very long way to go. Some international recognition of the
moral status of animals is long overdue. There are various conservation
treaties, but nothing at UN level, for example, that recognizes the
rights, interests or welfare of the animals themselves. That must, and I
believe will, change.
* Dr Richard Ryder was Mellon Professor at Tulane
University, New Orleans, and has been chairman of the RSPCA council; he is
the author of Painism: A Modern Morality, and his new book, Putting
Morality Back into Politics, will be published by Academic Imprint in 2006
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