About Speciesism

About Speciesism

Speciesism is the prejudice that species is a morally relevant characteristic. Speciesism says that moral status is not supervenient on psychology but includes biological identity. Two individuals could be psychologically identical and yet not share their moral standing, because of a difference of species. In particular, identity of interests does not entail identity of moral status. I am not concerned here with the truth or falsity of speciesism; I am concerned with the interpretation of the doctrine. The general anti-speciesist idea is to label a specific bias against non-human animals—treating them as morally lesser on account of their difference from the human species. Are we really biased against other species, rightly or wrongly? To answer that question, we need a workable definition of species. In biology the concept of species is somewhat vexed. The textbook definition is that two organisms are of the same species if and only if they can interbreed. There are all sorts of problems with this definition, but I am not concerned with those problems; I am concerned only with the relevance of this concept to our standard moral practices. For it is clear that we do not discriminate against other animals based on the principle of interbreeding—this does not enter into our thoughts or attitudes. And it is also clear that it is neither necessary nor sufficient for equality of moral status: not necessary because we would not discriminate against individuals just like us save for an inability to interbreed with us; and not sufficient because being able to interbreed with us does not logically preclude large differences of phenotype (e.g., looking and behaving like a dog). This criterion has nothing to do with our actual discriminatory practices, which are based on outer appearances. It is the same with a genetic criterion: we don’t care if the other’s genotype coincides with ours, and might never have heard of the genotype. Sameness of genes is not the basis of our discriminatory attitudes. Some biologists (rightly in my view) are chary of the whole concept of a species in carving up animal populations (how do species differ from intra-species types?); yet we still discriminate against animals morally. The obvious conclusion is obvious: we discriminate on the basis of surface appearance. Not even phenotype, since this includes internal anatomy, but simply how the organism perceptually appears. Even simpler: our moral attitudes depend on how the animal looks. The point the anti-speciesist is making is that looks are no basis for moral judgment. The animal may look very different from you, but it might have identical interests—say, in not being eaten for food. If it looks like a human, you don’t kill it for food; but if it looks like a chicken, you do– irrespective of its psychology (desires, interests, capacity for happiness, susceptibility to pain). The proper conclusion, then, is that the prejudice in question is aptly labeled “surfacism” not “speciesism”: that last term is a mischaracterization of the prejudice in question. There is no such prejudice on any reasonable definition of “species”, but there is a prejudice of going by surface appearances—which are, of course, correlated with species differences, roughly speaking. The term “speciesism” gets the point across well enough, but strictly speaking it is a misnomer; “surfacism” is better.

This terminological revision brings out an important point: the prejudice in question is not unique to our treatment of animals; in fact, it is rampant. It is the general form of human prejudices (with a couple of interesting exceptions, which we shall come to). Racism is clearly largely dependent on surfacism (“lookism”): we must not judge the quality of a man’s character by the color of his skin—skin being most apparent to the naked eye. Other prejudices cluster around this focus on visual appearance, but it is surely fundamental: looking black is the problem (or possibly white). The mistake is to infer from the surface features to the inner person: it may be indistinguishable from that of the observer. There is no necessary correlation between outer and inner: skin color and character are independent variables. Just so, hairiness is not necessarily correlated with psychology: I could be ten times hairier than you and yet equally intelligent. The body type and the mind type are not invariably linked. At bottom, the root of the problem lies in the inaccessibility of minds to the senses—the other minds problem. We cannot observer another individual’s mind, though we can observe his body; and we can’t infer the one from the other. Morality concerns mind and mind is invisible, so morality is epistemologically at a disadvantage; we can’t just look and see the morally relevant status of an individual—though we can come to know it by other means. Going by surface appearance may be a quick and easy way to assess the other’s moral standing, but it is not a reliable way. You look and see that another organism is an insect, so you don’t worry too much about its well-being; but this method is worse than useless when it comes to other animals. It is wrong to assume that other animals are morally inferior to us just because they look different; we need deeper knowledge of their inner nature. This is the truth behind the talk of “speciesism”. What is called “racism” is logically similar: we needn’t get hung up about the definition of race in order to formulate the moral issues (or even assume that race is a real category); we just need to identify the problem as a form of surfacism, a common human weakness. Anyone can see that surfacism is just plain stupid; no rational person would be caught dead being found guilty of it.

Now that we have the right concept in our hands, we can try generalizing it. This is not difficult. Consider sexism, agism, and heightism: aren’t these clearly instances of surfacism? Women look different from men, old people look different from young people, short people look different from tall people. Prejudices form around these perceptual facts, but you can’t infer anything that matters from them—intelligence, character, capacity for happiness, susceptibility to pain. The corresponding prejudices are less intense than in the case of animals and other races, but they all form a recognizable natural kind—they are all forms of surfacism. It isn’t that the concept of speciesism (so called) is a radical conceptual and moral departure; it is just the same old prejudice that we see in intra-human cases. Basically, it’s a matter of varying body types. Body type is not a sound basis for moral evaluation—simple. This is just fallacious reasoning (I’m not saying it is nothing but this fallacy). It is basically the same with other prejudices with which we are familiar: type of clothing, hairstyle, weight, accent, language spoken, etc. None of these tell you much if anything about morally relevant matters—yet people have an irrational tendency to rely on them. Animals are just one end of a spectrum of cases.

Are there any exceptions to this generalization? I can think of two candidates: anti-semitism and homophobia. These do not seem dependent on perceptual appearance: Jews and homosexuals don’t look that different from Gentiles and heterosexuals. People don’t infer unfavorable judgments from their appearance, though there may be minor divergences in this respect. The prejudice is not derived from misguided inferences from surface appearance. What they do derive from is hard to say—the question has been controversial. I won’t attempt to resolve the issue, except to note that combating them requires more than pointing out the fallacy of inferring mind from body. It is necessary to refute commonly held beliefs about the people in question. They are more puzzling as prejudices than the other kinds, less easily diagnosed. I don’t see much similarity between them except to say they have been historically entrenched. To be gay and Jewish can’t be easy, because you are up against two forms of prejudice not one—or dark-skinned, gay, and Jewish (a relatively small group). However, my aim here has been to outline a taxonomy of prejudices not to undermine them (except indirectly).[1]

[1] It is an interesting question whether there would be any prejudices of the types we are familiar with if there were no visual difference to ground them: all animals look alike, all people look alike, men and women look alike, etc. There might still be deep differences at a non-visual level, but nothing at the visual level—would that preclude the usual prejudices? If so, vision is the main culprit.