All Animals Are Equal

by Peter Singer

In recent years a number of oppressed groups have campaigned vigorously for equality. The classic instance is the Black Liberation movement, which demands an end to the prejudice and discrimination that has made blacks second-class citizens. The immediate appeal of the black liberation movement and its initial, if limited, success made it a model for other oppressed groups to follow. We became familiar with liberation movements for Spanish-Americans, gay people, and a variety of other minorities. When a majority group—women—began their campaign, some thought we had come to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the last universally accepted form of discrimination, practiced without secrecy or pretense even in those liberal circles that have long prided themselves on their freedom from prejudice against racial minorities

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays

12 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Peter Singer is sometimes called "the world’s most influential living philosopher" although he thinks that if that is true, it doesn't say much for all the other living philosophers around today. He has also been called the father (or grandfather?) of the modern animal rights movement, even though he doesn't base his philosophical views on rights, either for humans or for animals.


In 2005 Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute ranked him 3rd among Global Thought Leaders for 2013. (He has since slipped to 36th.) He is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethics, and for his writings on the obligations of the affluent to aid those living in extreme poverty. 


Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. In 2011 Time included Animal Liberation on its “All-TIME” list of the 100 best nonfiction books published in English since the magazine began, in 1923. Singer has written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than 50 books, including Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), The Point of View of the Universe (with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), The Most Good You Can Do, Ethics in the Real World and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction. His works have appeared in more than 30 languages.

Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, first published in 2009, led him to found a non-profit organization of the same name. In 2019, Singer got back the rights to the book and granted them to the organization, enabling it to make the eBook and audiobook versions available free from its website, www.thelifeyoucansave.org.



Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. After teaching in England, the United States and Australia, he has, since 1999, been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is married, with three daughters and four grandchildren. His recreations include hiking and surfing. In 2012 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, the nation’s highest civic honour.

Reviews

[Summer]

Boy, one year out of school and my academic reading skills are rusty! This 10 page paper took me at least 30 mins to read! But I did really wanted to understand where he was coming from.

I think Daphne recommended this way back in second year uni - sorry for only getting around to it 5 years later haha.

I thought this was an efficient and punchy essay, written well for a general audience. I think most of his points are more sound and valid than not. At the very least it's mind opening.

[Lisa Elodie]

Die Gedanken Singers sind echt interessant und wichtig, auch seine Argumentation ist meistens gelungen, jedoch hapert es an einigen Stellen mit dieser. Es gibt einige offene Stellen, auf die er hätte vorbereitet sein können.

[Valentin]

4,5/5⭐️
war für mich ein super einstieg in tierethik und damit zusammenhängende gedanken (etwa veganismus!)

[Chim C]

I really might become a vegan after this it all kinda made sense. The feminism and racism section got repetitive and bland.

[Kallinikos]

Many of his points about equality and moral relevance are good, and they are well-backed with accompanying descriptions of factory farming / animal experimentation. However, his blanket dismissal of religious arguments for intrinsic human dignity on the basis that ‘contemporary philosophers have cast off these metaphysical and religious shackles’ is too easy (and the Great Chain of Being is only one, and by no means the only dominant classical method, through which the argument has been made). He often points out the difficult conclusions opposing arguments pose to but he rarely confronts his own - for example that he seems to imply that using a dog for medical research is just as bad as using a human infant. But some points are out of the scope of the paper.

[Vivien Danzi]

It's been wonderful reading that book! You get a completely new picture of animals, which I not only like but also find fascinating, as you're rarely looking outside your own box! That's really inspiring and can be used for many other situations as well when you think about the idea of maybe thinking more before acting or just kind of randomly eating anything. Of course you need to find that out, it's a process. :)

[Ricco]

Kinda mid

[Julsi Regensburger]

Super buch für jeden der anfangen will sich mit Ethik auseinander zu setzen, persönlich lehne ich aber Utilitarismus ab, und find seine Herangehensweise nicht IDEAL.

[Juani Filardo]

Highly recommended to someone like me, who wants to improve their veganism-related German vocabulary. Not an easy read, at any rate, but a necessary one.

Die Frage ist: Können sie leiden?

[Eve]

TW: ableist slurs by today's standards are in Singer's work. Whether he's ableist otherwise is an open question.

I wanted to make this 4.5 stars, but considering the complaints I have, I'm leaning towards 3.5 Basically, while this was a decent early step, it doesn't go far enough & also is liable to speciesism & ableism, which I mean we aren't immune to propaganda, so lol.

So this is a very iconic essay, and just from seeing animal liberation stuff like in passing from animal liberationists etc, this was interesting. it was cool to see the source.

Firstly, he conflates racism with race chauvinism, and doesn't get that there are different forms of racism, such as white supremacist racism, etc. So this ends up playing into the hands of the "all lives matter' crowd, as well as thinking everything comes down to thought, as opposed to the social infrastructure that contributes to environmental factors. However, I suspect this is more of an error of his contemporary era as opposed to being on him & only him. But it does undermine his activism proposals as I've been talking about this whole review.

Secondly, the essay is from summer 1974, there are slurs used for developmentally delayed people. While part of this is due to different eras using different words, he seems to talk as if special needs can't be met or that faciliation is impossible. I'll give more details throughout this review, but basically I think he refuses to listen to the marginalized. It comes off as how to be polite to avoid getting called out (like to be fair, I've heard activists use "calling in" these days in order to help make it non-antagonistic & routine, to help the injured become safer when advocating for their safety, but you see this awkwardness of attitudes kind of come up, such as when he's talking about prejudices liberation movements combat).

While there are a lot of gaps have since been able to been filled out in support of Singer's points (such as "the bell curve" being racist, animals testing being a substitute for medical experimentation on enslaved humans, tests being used to create a hierarchy instead of a reading like we can see with autism tests), I find it troubling that this essay's point still continue gatekeeping in the name of equity instead of equality. For example, he acts as if the developmentally delayed can't get problems resolved by using different tools.

My biggest complaint is that he basically acts as if we cannot develop communication methods with other species in order to get their consent & so forth. Like to use the binary I learned from Paulo Freire (which was popular in the 1970s), Singer's lack of inventiveness of tools (for example, perhaps getting rid of voting/electoralism in favor of consensus gathering & making, perhaps direct democracy) is "necrophiliac". It is also awkward that he conflates womanhood with pregnancy, especially since I live in an era where men with uteruses & pregnant men are a common sight, but this article was written in an era when the transsexual vs transgender binary was considered legible because we didn't get that cis people also got those operations too.

But yeah, my experiences as a special needs student & adult I did feel like were spoken to (such as how tests/measurements get rigged, and like gerrymandering, etc) but I think he was too permanenent with such statuses & he could've said we need to change how we do things in order to include more people of all species, as opposed to denying people rights due to inability & calling that ignorance equitable.

Also I find the pleasure/suffering criteria to be too much gatekeeping. Like disrespect is disrespect, and similar to how he was like we won't know the binary results of environment vs genetics, this feels like a rehash. Like there's so many different forms of life & we therefore don't know who we are interacting with overall. But I do appreciate how he basically tells us to not put our points on undecided outcomes, which is like one of the premises of "good jew, bad jew" being an anti-semitic talking point.

I also found out more about how veganism, which tends to be lifestyle/shopping activism, has historical connections with transphobes, so I really need to learn the timeline of that in relation to summer 1974. This is also so because the spelling in the edition I had was very British, and Britian's colonialist history, its eugenicist history, its lack of queer studies like USAmericans have (in addition to having to face the injury of settler colonial racism everyday), means this essay probably got used by transphobes before & I will need to be very wary of that.

Also lastly, I suspect the author not only doesn't realize how cruel powerful humans are to other "humans", but also as an extension to not thinking of redesigning stuff to be accessible, he doesn't seem to think perhaps humans should be reciprocating.

[Daniel Hageman]

Great read for those interested in speciesism.

[Phantom]

meh