Henry Imler April 26th, 2006

Simon Cushing argues against Speciesism in his paper “Against ‘Humanism’: Speciesism, Personhood, and Preference.” He uses Peter Singer’s definition of Speciesism :

Speciesism…is a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of one’s own species and against those of members of another species.

Speciesism is often called “Humanism“, which of course is Speciesism by the human race. Cushing uses two formulations of Speciesism, a strong and a weak:

Strong Formulation :

All and only (innocent ) humans are moral persons

Weak Formulation :

The personhood of a being should hinge (wholly or in part) on its membership in a particular species or group of species.

Cushing quickly uses the E.T. example to demonstrate the flaw in the two formulations. The E.T. example supposes one encounters a alien life-form that has the same capacities as humans. Such a being would be a person because it same the same qualities as a human and humans are persons. However, since no one has encountered such a being (verifiably), Cushing considers another formulation of Humanism, Terrestrial Humanism :

All and only (innocent) biological humans are the only beings that in fact,
in the world as we know it, are moral persons.

Cushing now asks why it is that all and only humans are persons on earth. The only reply to this question is what he calls Secondary Speciesism :

Species can be a helpful guide to personhood because the capacities necessary to personhood are, as a matter of contingent fact, possessed uniquely by certain species.

There is a lingering problem with this formulation and Cushing picks up on it quickly. If we are talking about what makes a being a person and the only the features unique to humans fit this billing, what are these features like? People will respond with answers like “the ability to make moral determinations.” The problem with answers like that is not all human exhibit those characteristics. Whatever criteria one selects as uniquely human that gives humans the edge in the personhood debate; there are humans that do not exhibit those characteristics. Cushing points out two classic examples, infants and the severely retarded. They are humans that do not exhibit personhood characteristics. If one denies chimps personhood for lacking characteristic X, and if infants and the severely retarded also lack characteristic X; one would be guilty of humanism.

In order to be logically consistent (and that is, after all, the whole point of ethics) one must exclude infants and the severely retarded from the category of personhood. This means, of course, that they loose all rights associated with personhood, including the right to life. There are, of course possible ways to get around this:”The Unsound Argument(An Objective View of Personhood)”:http://unsoundargument.com/papers/objective-view-of-personhood/, but Cushing does not include them in his paper.

Some people still “bite the bullet” and agree that only agents are persons. Cushing formulates Necessary Agency for Personhood (NAP) :

One is not entitled to the kind of moral consideration that persons receive without the capacity for moral agency.

Many people find this idea horrifying. The idea that babies and the retarded can be used for any sort of testing that animals are subject to would be soundly defeated in any poll taken anywhere. While this alone does not guarantee that the idea is false, the strong intuitions against such an idea suggest that further justification is needed… badly. The two modifications that Cushing gives are as follows :

1. There might be other factors that lead persons to treat certain non-persons as persons.
2. There are certain conditions that lead to the inclusion of certain non-persons into the class of persons.

Even if we allow for one or two above, Cushing still thinks that we are guilty of tertiary Speciesism as the following example of tertiary racism shows:

Look, we’ve got to have some experimental subjects for medicine to make advances, so we can’t grant personhood to all non-agents, as the losses would be too great for the agents. So I say that we grant personhood to all white non-agents, but not on all nonwhite non-agents. There can be nothing wrong with such favoritism, because after all, none of them deserve personhood, so there can be no objections. However, recognizing feelings of attachment by parents for their children as much as by pet owners for their pets, we will allow human experimentation only on nonwhite orphan babies, and have it done in secret, so as not to distress the public.

Cushing concludes that primary Speciesism is wrong via the ET example and that secondary Speciesism is wrong because there is overlap between the abilities of animals and the abilities of humans if we use Agency as the criteria for personhood:

Because of the rejected conclusion that human babies and the human severely retarded are not persons, Cushing suggests that we move the line of personhood back to include at the very least, advanced animals. He goes on to suggest that this line be recognized by law.

• Ethics , Notes
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