Waiting to Collide

One of Singer’s three main points in favor of animal liberation is the similarity between animal struggle and the civil rights movement or women’s suffrage. He likens “speciesism” to sexism or racism, where a preference for, or belief in the superiority of, one group over another is arbitrarily formed. Further, he argues his stance from the existence of “marginal cases,” or people who by birth or accident, have lesser capacities than a typical human. Singer theoretically argues that we should not do to an animal what we would not do to a marginal case of our own species, or we are acting on simple bias.

I may ethically kill and eat an animal because it is inferior to me. A very simple concept held true by most humans. Not a point of contention outside of the realm of religious views or an excess of wealth. From the simplest view, we are animals. Animals eat animals. A cat eats a bird, and it is not evil. A spider kills another spider in a territorial dispute. It is nature.

Barring a religious debate, most would agree that we are animals of the classification Homo sapiens sapiens. Unlike the cat who eats the mouse, or the spider-killing spider, we are responsible for our actions. Animals are ethically neutral, but we subscribe to the higher notion of ethics — that there is an appropriate way to behave other than what is dictated by our most natural self. There is no such thing as animal murder. There is no animal rape. Do we exist in, or outside of nature?

If we are above nature in the sense that we subscribe to ethics, and are responsible for our actions, that places animals below us, justly. We have a capability that animals do not, and therefore, have earned a station above that of a dog, a mouse, a chimp, or an elephant. A chimpanzee will never debate if it is right to slaughter its prey — I will.

If we exist within nature, we are obligated to behave as our instincts tell us we ought to behave. The teeth in my skull, my appetite, and the diet of my chimpanzee cousins indicate that we are omnivores. Our omnivorous friends, the bear and the ant, would agree: other animals taste good.  If our so-loved-by-animal-rightists cousins are any indication, how would our society function?

We may not be peaceful animals, but we are animals that subscribe to notions of right and wrong.  By asking us to deny our superior ability to rationalize and to ignore our animal appetites, animal rightists offend both sensibilities and are dually irrational and unnatural.

“And if it is this ability to rationalize and choose that sets us above animals,” a Singer-supporter may ask, “then what about marginal cases?”

What puts a baby or a retarded human above an animal? Species.  This is a warranted preference; we ARE superior to animals.  They ARE our dinner.  We cannot deny that we exist at the very top of the food chain.  But where do we draw the line between what is dinner, and what is a dependent on our income tax report?  Species.  Like a nice, clean line of birth in defining abortion or murder, we have the convenient line of human or not human.