All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. It's had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly been minor. In September 1999, he was quoted by Michael Specter in The New Yorker on the book's impact: Singer has expressed regret that the book did not have more impact. It made people-myself included-change what we ate, what we wore, and how we perceived animals." Other activists who claim that their attitudes to animals changed after reading the book include Peter Tatchell and Matt Ball. Reception Īctivist Ingrid Newkirk wrote of Animal Liberation, "It forever changed the conversation about our treatment of animals. He also condemns vivisection except where the benefit (in terms of improved medical treatment, etc.) outweighs the harm done to the animals used. Singer concludes that the most practical solution is to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet. Therefore, intelligence does not provide a basis for giving nonhuman animals any less consideration than such intellectually challenged humans. In particular, he argues that while animals show lower intelligence than the average human, many severely intellectually challenged humans show equally diminished, if not lower, mental capacity and that some animals have displayed signs of intelligence (for example, primates learning elements of American sign language and other symbolic languages) sometimes on a par with that of human children. He argues that animals rights should be based on their capacity to feel pain more than on their intelligence.
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He holds the interests of all beings capable of suffering to be worthy of equal consideration and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their species is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color. In Animal Liberation, Singer argues against what he calls speciesism: discrimination on the grounds that a being belongs to a certain species. Singer allows that animal rights are not the same as human rights, writing in Animal Liberation that "there are obviously important differences between humans and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have." He argues that there is no reason not to apply this principle to other animals.Īlthough Singer rejects 'rights' as a moral concept, his position is derived from utilitarian principles of minimizing suffering. Singer's central argument is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that "the greatest good" is the only measure of good or ethical behavior.
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