84 of 91 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the most important philosophy books ever written, July 3, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: Animal Liberation (Paperback)
Want to upset all the pre-conceptions of your life, and look at the world around you in a radically new way? Then read Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation. Written by an Australian philosophy professor in the 1970s, and revised in the early 1990s, Animal Liberation is the founding book of the modern animal rights movement. As such, Animal Liberation be one of the most influential books of the 20th century.
When Singer's book first appeared, animal rights was on the fringe of the fringe. Animal rights advocates, to the extent that they could get any attention from the press at all, were treated as a bunch of nuts. CBS Evening News compared British animal rights advocates to Monty Python charachters.
But today, especially among young people, animal rights is a major part of political and social activism. So even if you think you're inflexibly opposed to animals having rights, Singer's book will help you understand the millions of people who disagree with you.
Folks who believe that animals have no rights will often assert that because animals are animals, they should have no rights. As Singer points out, the argument is simply a tautology. To say that animals should have no rights because they are animals is no more logical than to say that women should not have rights because they are women, or that Blacks should have no rights because they are Blacks. To say that status as a woman must, in itself, imply that women have no rights is sexism; to say the same about Blacks is racism. And, Singer demonstrates, to say the same about animals is "specisim."
Interestingly, when reformers in the late 18th century began arguing that Blacks should not be enslaved merely because of of their race, pro-slavery advocates had an immediate reply: Arguments which questioned the subordination of Blacks could also be used to question the subordination of women, and the subordination of animals. The defenders of slavery had a point, notes Singer. Once you knock out one kind of subordination, it's harder to defend the subordination that remains.
So if simplistic speciesism is an insufficient basis for denying animals rights, what logical justification is there for current treatment of animals?
It is true, of course, that animals can't do lots of things that humans can, such as write, build complex tools, or describe a religious belief system. But if you compare a profoundly retarded child with one of the higher primates, the primate may have much more advanced skills in the traits that we consider human (such as use of language or tools) than does the profoundly retarded child.
If we acknowledge that the retarded child has rights, then what philosophically plausible claim can be made that the primate does not?
The best test for rights, argues Singer, is a test first articulated by the 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham: "Can it suffer?" If you saw someone using an electric cattle prod to torture an adult human, you would say that the person's rights were being violated. If the severely retarded child were being tortured, you would likewise say that the child's rights were being violated. And because gorillas, dogs, and eagles also feel intense pain when being attacked with electric cattle prods, their rights are likewise violated when they are tortured. In contrast, trees and rocks do not feel pain, as far as we know, and therefore using a cattle prod on a rock is merely a waste of electricity, and not the violation of rights on the part of the rock.
"How can you tell that animals feel pain?" is one rejoinder to the argument above. The theory that animals are mere automotons, and have no more feeling than does a clock, was first articulated by the French philosopher Rene Descartes.
In reply, Singer points out that: First of all, animals react in a manner which we would expect from a being in pain -- they scream, and they try to avoid the source of the pain. Second, all of the evidence we have regarding the nervous system of animals shows that their pain-sensing capacity is structurally similar to the pain-sensing portion of the nervous system in humans.
Having set up a philosophical basis for animal rights, Singer then examines current treatment of animals by humans, to see if violations of rights are involved.
Singer's approach has no sentimentalism about animals in it. He describes his disgust as meeting a woman who gushed "Don't you just love animals!" -- and then offered him a ham sandwich.
The book's discussion of factory farming of animals is particularly powerful. He describes how almost all of the chickens, pigs, and cattle that end up in a supermarket meat tray are subjected to squalid conditions of confinement that can be described as torture. Chickens are confined in cages too small even to lift a wing, and cages are stacked on top of each other so that the top chickens' feces fall on the ones below. To deal with the high death rates that result from these disgusting conditions, the animals are pumped full of high doses of antibiotics
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37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The premiere introduction to modern animal-welfare advocacy, July 21, 2001
Peter Singer is possibly the most famous living philosopher in the world, and this book is an excellent reason to find out why. His arguments start from premises that almost everyone accepts, and they carefully and logically proceed to conclusions which are definately outside the mainstream of typical opinion (to put it mildly). This book is at once accessible and controversial, and evokes strong opinions -- you either love it or hate it, with very few people in the middle.
The good: The book is comprehensive, attempting to answer both the "why" and the "how" of animal liberation. It provides a decent, although not thorough, overview of most of the shocking treatment of animals raised for human consumption and at times might be very difficult to read. Singer's arguments are not mere emotive appeals and are top-notch.
The bad: Although understandable in a book that is aimed at a popular audience, Singer doesn't really go into the foundations of his ethics at all -- there's no answer to "why be ethical?" addressed in the book; instead it assumes that the reader already agrees that one should be ethical and procedes from there. The footnotes are decent but could be more comprehensive, and at times Singer gets a little wordy, which detracts from the impact of his arguments. However, these detractions are minor compared with the overall quality of the book.
The ugly: Most people who read and disagree with Animal Liberation fall into one of two traps. First, they assume that Singer is arguing for animal rights, and trot out a bunch of arguments about moral agency and so forth. However, Singer specifically does not argue for rights, and his ethical system in general is not based on them (he's a utilitarian). (For a look at a rights-based animal welfare defense, please check out some books or articles by Tom Regan.) The second mistaken criticism people tend to make is essentially "Singer's conclusions are very different from mainstream thought! They're obviously ridiculous!" -- i.e., they don't address the quality of the arguments themselves.
This is not to say that there aren't any good rebuttals to Singer's positions, merely that these ain't them.
In conclusion, this book is required reading for anyone interested in the way humans treat and think about other species, or anyone interested in the genesis of the modern animal-welfare movement. Highly recommended!
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