Animal Liberation Now

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While effective altruism – the philanthropic social movement you helped originate – has its critics, it has gained a following in recent years, including in Silicon Valley tech circles (disgraced cryptocurrency founder Sam Bankman-Fried was prominent in the movement). One newer idea it has spawned is longtermism. It prioriti ses the distant future over the concerns of today and advocates reducing the risk of our extinction, for example, by thwarting the possibility of hostile artificial intelligence (AI) and coloni sing space. To what extent do you endorse longtermism? Do they operate according to a moral philosophy? I’d pay cash money to know, but it’s unlikely we’ll decipher it if they do. What sort of moral philosophy might it be, which permits consumption of one’s own species when convenient, and pushes individuals to, essentially, commit suicide initiated by a single sexual encounter. Although the philosophical and ethical arguments I make have stood up very well to all those years of rigorous philosophical discussion, the two longest chapters of the book are descriptions of the use of animals in research, and in factory farming. Obviously these two areas have changed greatly, so a large part of the book was no longer relevant to the way we treat animals today.

What Is Animal Liberation? Philosopher Peter Singer's Groundbreaking Work Turns 40 | A Message From PETA's President | All About PETA | About". PETA. 14 April 2015 . Retrieved 26 July 2015. This is perhaps the most important facet to writing an interesting essay; since if you can make your essay personally engaging to the reader,

In Animal Liberation, both in the original 1975 book and in Animal Liberation Now, I reject speciesism, and defend the principle of equal consideration for similar interests, irrespective of whether the interests are those of a human or a nonhuman animal. So if there are ways of raising animals, and giving their interests the same importance and consideration that we give to similar interests of humans — for example, not to have pain inflicted on them, to be part of a social group that suits their needs, and to be able to do things that they enjoy doing — and as part of that process, we obtain food that we like to eat, then it may not be wrong to raise animals in that way. A pork industry representative still felt able to admonish the activist for “putting stress on our animals”. The compassion as well as the outrage and horror that Singer’s writing has elicited in readers over the years has surely contributed to Animal Liberation’s influence - including on some of those who reject Singer’s principle of equality for humans and non-humans. The future for animals?

No, that is still my view. The separation of cows and calves is sufficient reason for rejecting dairy products, unless you can find a dairy farm that leaves the calves with their mothers and only markets the surplus. In Animal Liberation Now, I mention the Ahimsa Dairy Foundation, in Rutland, that does that, as well as one dairy farm in Australia and one in Germany. Anyone who knows their Attenborough might already be countering that fish do have projects. Examples come readily to mind: as well as salmon, which migrate vast distances upstream to spawn before they die, there are puffer fish that produce ornate circular ‘mandalas’ on the seabed to entice a mate, or grouper fish that collaborate with moray eels to hunt prey. Singer seems more abreast of this than Nussbaum (he mentions all of these examples). Of course, you could dismiss such behaviours as ‘instinct’, but elsewhere in her book Nussbaum is rightly sceptical of this move (rejecting, for example, the idea that altruistic behaviour in animals is merely instinctual and hence not properly ‘moral’). In this case, however, she seems to succumb to a condition described by Korsgaard: the inability to imagine ‘the ways in which creatures of a different species, whose minds are in some ways deeply alien to our own, might experience their own fates and their own existence, and how important they might be to themselves’. I wrote Animal Liberation Now to bring the book up to date and make it relevant for the present century . The changes are very substantial. I wanted to describe the progress we have made, but also indicate how far we still have to go. I thought it important to include new research showing that fish are capable of suffering, and also that some invertebrate animals are. And I wanted to discuss issues that were not on my radar in 1975, like the contribution of the meat industry to climate change. In addition, the growing significance of Asian countries, and especially China, both in factory farming and in research on animals, means that the new edition is more global in its approach than the earlier ones. Philosopher Peter Singer has said that the animal rights movement has “failed to achieve what I had hoped it would achieve”.make for difficult reading. Ideally then, if what you come up with is to be termed as an interesting essay, it is upon you to ensure that by The original 1975 edition was updated to take account of the fact that animal liberation movements were now growing in many countries, whereas in 1975 there were few, if any. I’m curious as to what has prompted you to issue a revised edition in 2023?

Singer’s argument about speciesism is controversial. Many philosophers have come to accept it. But others believe there is something about simply being human that is special. Even so, Singer’s opponents have had difficulty undermining his position. What Singer calls ‘interests’ are now more commonly described as contributors to well-being or welfare or prudential value. By any name, the concept is that of what is (non-instrumentally) good for or beneficial to a given subject, i.e., what makes that subject better off. (To avoid begging questions, understand ‘subject’ in a syntactical sense, like the subject of a sentence, rather than a psychological sense involving conscious ‘subjectivity’.) There is now a rather large philosophical literature on well-being and the necessary and sufficient conditions for contributors to well-being. Singer’s hedonism, the view that only pleasure is fundamentally good for subjects and only pain fundamentally bad, is just one theory of well-being among many others.Should we apply human ethical categories to other animals? Do we include plankton and protozoa? If not, why not? And if we don’t, are we simply making moral claims out of preference, a (literally, I think) warm fuzzy feeling for certain animals?

For every point you identify as one of things you will need to talk about in your essay, you need to also ask yourself how you can present the same point in a Can you explain your position against speciesism, the belief most humans hold that we are superior to other animals? Shouldn’t humans count more? Preventing forest destruction for beef farming, or opting to rewild farming land, may turn out to be necessary for preventing more extreme global warming. Abolishing factory farming may also limit future animal-originated pandemics.Despite this juggernaut, Singer retains some hope – so long as there are (as the book’s dedication reads) “many good people striving to bring about a better world for all sentient beings”. At the time, speciesism was a radical concept that was adopted by some animal rights groups but was largely ignored by the general public.