Rethinking specism: beyond the quarrel between utilitarism and animal rights

Abstract

The idea of rethinking speciesism beyond the quarrel of utilitarianism and animal rights, which invaded the cause and generated continuous dissensions, has as its central objective to show that the animal cause is also, in depth, a human cause, because the struggle for animal goes through the profound confrontation of our tyranny, which is responsible for also destroying our own species. This understanding of the extension of what the animal cause itself is depends, and this is what we intend to show here, on going deeper into the meaning and direction of the concept of speciesism, from the British psychologist Richard Ryder. Intuited as a “selfish emotional argument, instead of a rational one” that leads us to believe that we have legitimate rights to subject all species to our interests, the concept lacked, however, greater elaboration, greater consistency, that is, it needed to go through rigid stages of a conceptual construction and, this, who provided it was not Ryder himself, but the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in the pioneering work, in the classic of the cause, Animal Liberation. It is here that the concept becomes popular and causes very significant changes, such as the exponential growth of veganism itself as an ethical way of existing that says a generalized “no” to the exploitation of lives, but which, at the same time, generated disagreements by such a concept will be activated and develop on utilitarian soil. Decidedly, we think that such a quarrel can be minimized in view of the perception that speciesism is much more than a prejudice that can be overcome by humanity and compassion. It is something that is intrinsically linked to a type of power that gave rise to a specific type of man (which concerns all of us who live under this structure of power) that needs to be uncovered and deconstructed with the utmost urgency.