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Speciesism as a precondition to justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Y. Michael Barilan
Y. Michael Barilan*
Affiliation:
Department of Internal Medicine B, Meir Hospital, Kfar Saba bentovia@shani.net Department of Behavioral Sciences, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
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Abstract

Over and above fairness, the concept of justice presupposes that in any community no one member's wellbeing or life plan is inexorably dependent on the consumption or exploitation of other members. Renunciation of such use of others constitutes moral sociability, without which moral considerability is useless and possibly meaningless. To know if a creature is morally sociable, we must know it in its community; we must know its ecological profile, its species. Justice can be blind to species no more than to circumstance. Speciesism, the recognition of rights on the basis of group membership rather than solely on the basis of moral considerations at the level of the individual creature, embodies this assertion but is often described as a variant of Nazi racism. I consider this description and find it unwarranted, most obviously because Nazi racism extolled the stronger and the abuser and condemned the weaker and the abused, be they species or individuals, humans or animals. To the contrary, I present an argument for speciesism as a precondition to justice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 22 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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