Peter Singer's Animal Liberation Explained

First published in 1975, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is one of the foundational works in the modern animal rights movement. Interestingly, however, Singer doesn’t argue that we should treat animals well due to potential rights they may have. Instead, he takes the perspective of equal consideration of interests from utilitarian ethics.

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory in which the “right” action is the one that results in the greatest overall happiness or the least amount of suffering for the group as a whole. Since nonhuman animals can suffer, Singer claims that an animal’s interest to not suffer must be weighed equally with human interests.

If we ignore that in favor of our convenience, we are partaking in speciesism: a term Singer coined to describe the assumption that human interests matter more just because we are human. He likens this to racism and sexism, predicting that future generations will be as appalled to our treatment of nonhuman animals as us to practices like slavery, oppression of women, and caste-based discrimination.

In his book, Singer spends a chapter each discussing factory farming and animal experimentation to illustrate our current speciesism. In industrial agriculture, animals live and die in confinement and pain to give us cheap meat, eggs, and dairy. Animal experimentation is often carried out with little regard for the physical and mental pain it causes. Both practices are unnecessary in many instances. Humans don’t actually need meat to survive. Many experiments, Singer especially critiques maternal deprivation studies on monkeys and other primates, are redundant or serve a human interest not actually needed for our survival.

In later editions, Singer touches on the contribution of factory farming to global warming. Meat production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, making cutting back on animal products an environmental imperative in addition to an ethical choice.

Singer’s final chapter concludes his work with a call to action:

”The animals themselves are incapable of demanding their own liberation, or of protesting against their condition with votes, demonstrations, or boycotts. Human beings have the power to continue to oppress other species forever, or until we make this planet unsuitable for living beings. Will our tyranny continue, proving that morality counts for nothing when it clashes with self-interest, as the most cynical of poets and philosophers have always said? Or will we rise to the challenge and prove our capacity for genuine altruism by ending our ruthless exploitation of the species in our power, not because we are forced to do so by rebels or terrorists, but because we recognize that our position is morally indefensible?”