At Jacobin, several philosophically illiterate morons have — seemingly in an attempt to win the prize for the ‘worst hit-piece on Singer written by Jacobin’ — written an embarrassingly bad piece. These disgusting slimeballs have, in an attempt to justify the vicious torture, sexual abuse, and murder of trillions of animals, tried to use social justice concepts against the victim’s of humanity’s worst crimes. History will not be kind to these people — those who muster their limited intellectual firepower, before aiming it at one of history’s most important causes.
The first part of the Jacobin article is mostly unremarkable rambling — you can read it at the link above. They next say
But Singer goes much further than decrying factory farming when he equates these conditions to the conditions of slavery, specifically the system of race-based chattel slavery that Europeans and their descendants perpetrated in the Americas for more than 400 years. Yancy challenges this comparison, noting that, while it’s worth discussing the concept of equality for animals, we are still a long way from achieving it for human beings, including “black people, the disabled, women and others, here in the United States and around the world.”
Singer responds first by minimizing this failure, noting that today “there is at least widespread acceptance that such discrimination is wrong, and there are laws that seek to prevent it.” He goes on to argue:
This is dishonest; in full context, Singer said the following.
P.S.: Although it is true, of course, that we have not overcome racism, sexism or discrimination against people with disabilities, there is at least widespread acceptance that such discrimination is wrong, and there are laws that seek to prevent it. With speciesism, we are very far from reaching that point. If we were to compare attitudes about speciesism today with past racist attitudes, we would have to say that we are back in the days in which the slave trade was still legal, although under challenge by some enlightened voices.
Why do racism, sexism and discrimination against people with disabilities still exist, despite the widespread acceptance that they are wrong? There are several reasons, but surely one is that many people act unthinkingly on the basis of their emotional impulses, without reflecting on the ethics of what they are doing. That, of course, invites us to discuss why some people have these negative emotional impulses toward people of other races, and that in turn leads to the old debate whether such prejudices are innate or are learned from one’s culture and environment. There is evidence that even babies are attracted to faces that look more like those of the people they see around them all the time, so there could be an evolved innate element, but culture certainly plays a very significant role.
He wasn’t downplaying it — he was merely claiming that you have very few people who are currently open advocates of racism. The same, however, is not true of speciesism. This is undeniable — charges of speciesism are ignored and laughed at, unlike those of racism.
It’s also not clear how this interacts with Singer’s argument. Responding to the claim that we shouldn’t brutally torture to death trillions of beings by claiming that humans aren’t yet equal is a total non-sequitur.
The interviewer who is, as Jacobin notes, “philosopher George Yancy, known for his work on race and critical whiteness studies,” goes on to agree with Singer, saying
Having referenced the slave trade, I think that it is important to keep in mind that it was partly constituted by a white racist ideology that held that Africans were sub-persons. There was also the European notion that nonwhites were incapable of planning their own lives and had to be paternalistically ruled over. As a white Australian, are there parallels in terms of how the indigenous people of Australia have been treated, especially in terms of sub-personhood, and paternalism?
Jacobin next claims
Singer thinks human consciousness has advanced with regard to racism, contending that, while racism still exists, it is widely condemned, and that where it does persist it can be explained by people’s individual attitudes. After significant prodding by Yancy, Singer concedes that such attitudes are often reinforced by some institutions in society, but is unwilling to specify which ones. Instead he conjectures that “it would take detailed evidence and analysis to demonstrate that each of these sectors, and each of its divisions and subdivisions, involves or expresses racist practices.”
This is totally false. The evidence for the first claim is the sentence “many people act unthinkingly on the basis of their emotional impulses, without reflecting on the ethics of what they are doing. That, of course, invites us to discuss why some people have these negative emotional impulses toward people of other races.” However, if you read it in full context, you see the following claim — totally opposite of what Jacobin claims.
Why do racism, sexism and discrimination against people with disabilities still exist, despite the widespread acceptance that they are wrong? There are several reasons, but surely one is that many people act unthinkingly on the basis of their emotional impulses, without reflecting on the ethics of what they are doing. That, of course, invites us to discuss why some people have these negative emotional impulses toward people of other races, and that in turn leads to the old debate whether such prejudices are innate or are learned from one’s culture and environment. There is evidence that even babies are attracted to faces that look more like those of the people they see around them all the time, so there could be an evolved innate element, but culture certainly plays a very significant role.
The next claim that Singer required “significant prodding” before recognizing that racism is partly institutional is totally false; this was the preceding exchange.
G.Y.: Above, you mentioned “emotional impulses,” but don’t you think that white racism is also based upon institutional structures? Racist practices are expressed systemically through banks, education, the prison industrial complex, health care, etc that just need to keep functioning to continue privileging and empowering some (white people) and oppressing and degrading others (black people). Historically, the concept of institutional racism was systematically deployed during the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and was popularized by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Touré) and Charles V. Hamilton.
P.S.: What you are here referring to as “the institutional system” includes distinct sectors of society, and each of these sectors has its own divisions and subdivisions. The extent to which they are racist will vary, and it would take detailed evidence and analysis to demonstrate that each of these sectors, and each of its divisions and subdivisions, involves or expresses racist practices. So all I can say, without getting into all the detailed evidence that would be needed to consider each sector and then build back to an overall picture, is that where there is institutional racism, it can take the place of racist emotional impulses. Often, however, there will be racist emotional attitudes as well, and they will then support the institutional structures, making them more difficult to change.
G.Y.: And, in turn, can we say that institutional structures can instill and support certain racist emotional impulses?
P.S.: Yes. Where racist institutional structures continue to exist, they will provide a specific channel for racist feelings and attitudes, and in some situations, will serve to legitimate and reinforce them. But we cannot say how important this is without first determining which institutional structures are still racist, and to what extent and in what ways they are racist.
Next, Jacobin says
Here he apparently ignores the fact that entire academic disciplines have been doing just such work for years and have, as Yancy points out, come up with quite a bit of data regarding structural inequality and racism. Indeed, the very idea of structural racism as part and parcel of capitalism seems lost on Singer. He seems to think that, although the process is slow, racism is generally not accepted and is therefore on its way out. Speciesism, on the other hand, is more ingrained — and therefore more insidious.
Singer didn’t ignore this — he agreed with the broad idea, claiming that one should try to figure out which institutions are racist, in what ways they are racist, and try to find ways to stop them. This is just a snappy journalist line about ignoring things — when he does nothing of the sort, beyond not describing them explicitly.
Singer’s paradigm also specifies that humans and nonhuman animals should be equal where they have “similar interests.” But are human and nonhuman animals’ interests similar?
If these Jacobin nitwits had taken the time to read Singer’s influential book Animal Liberation, they’d have seen where Singer describes how their interests are similar. While an animal has no interest in driving a care, they do have an interest in having their desires achieved, suffering avoided, and so on.
The biologist and radical Steven Rose, in his essay “Proud to Be a Speciesist,” says that the term speciesism
was coined to make the claim that the issue of animal rights is on a par with the struggles for women’s rights, or Black people’s rights, or civil rights. But these human struggles are those in which the oppressed themselves rise up to demand justice and equality, to insist that they are not the objects but the subjects of history.
Much like many who try to downplay the animal holocaust, these people have accidentally sanctioned a holocaust of the severely mentally disabled. After all, there are severely mentally disabled people who can’t rise up and speak for themselves. Would it be permissible to torture them, sexually abuse them, grind them up in blenders, and beat their brains against concrete floors? This is all legal industry practice.
Or, take the case of one-year-old children with terminal illnesses. They’ll never reach an age where they can advocate for themselves — and they’re less intelligent than the pigs, chickens, and cows that we viciously torture, whose brains adorn the concrete as their heads are smashed against it — all totally legal. Would it be permissible to reopen Auschwitz — fill it with the mentally disabled and with terminally ill one-year-olds, before murdering them en masse? In an attempt to play some weird social justice trick, the authors have sanctioned holocausting severely mentally disabled people — people who cannot self advocate.
Rose here is using the term in a different sense than Singer does, but his point stands. Animals, no matter what Singer and other animal rights activists may want to claim, are objects of history. To compare them with humans who have suffered and do suffer oppression — and, importantly, consciously resist that oppression — is factually wrong, not to mention reactionary.
The anti-Jacobin, which wants to justify genociding the mentally disabled, would write the following
“Mentally disabled people and terminally ill one-year-old children, no matter what Singer and other baby and disability rights activists may want to claim, are objects of history. To compare them with humans who have suffered and do suffer oppression — and, importantly, consciously resist that oppression — is factually wrong, not to mention reactionary.”
Memes — and serious political arguments — that compare factory farms to slavery and genocide are profoundly racist. The animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is notorious for employing lynching and Holocaust imagery; in 2009, PETA members dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes outside Madison Square Garden to protest the “eugenic” breeding practices promoted by the Westminster Dog Show. Animal-rights activists also routinely appropriate the vocabulary of the nineteenth-century antislavery movement, referring to themselves, for example, as “abolitionists.”
Ah yes, people like Alex Hershaft — who notably survived the holocaust — are antisemites. I’ve personally heard black vegans make the comparison between factory farming and slavery. I disagree with PETA’s messaging often — as is true in this case. However, if we think that animals even matter one one thousandth as much as humans, than factory farming will still be the worst crime in history.
My family is Jewish — my great grandparents left due to antisemitism a few decades before the holocaust. There is nothing more despicable than using the treatment of the holocaust victims to justify the same types of treatment — mass murder, gassing, and vicious inhumane testing — to non-human animals. If you switched out chickens, cows, and pigs with Jews — you’d have recreated Auschwitz.
The Jacobin authors object to the language of abolitionism. I assume the authors would have similar objections to modern descriptions of people as police abolitionists, prison abolitionists, and so on. If not, then this is just moralistic harping — not a real objection. To call oneself an abolitionist is just to favor efforts to abolish factory farming — one need not claim that they’re like those who abolished slavery.
Singer turns this historical fact on its head:
If we think that simply being a member of the species homo sapiens justifies us in giving more weight to the interests of members of our own species than we give to members of other species, what are we to say to the racists or sexists who make the same claim on behalf of their race or sex?
This question is tied up with the general question of whether animals have rights similar, or equal, to humans. For Singer, there is a universal moral right that applies to all living beings. He borrows this wholesale from the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. For Singer, what gives living things rights — and imposes on human beings a moral obligation to honor those rights — is their ability to suffer.
Several lies here evince sloppy research — if any.
Singer was a preference utilitarian when he wrote animal liberation — he did not agree with Bentham that suffering makes a being matter. He makes this abundantly clear in animal liberation, where he argues for equal consideration of interests.
Singer doesn’t believe in rights — he just believes in consideration of interests. He is, after all, a utilitarian.
Singer doesn’t think all living beings matter, for they can’t all suffer — bacteria, plants, and protozoa are alive, but they can’t suffer, nor do they have interests.
For Singer, this gulf should give us more sympathy for the suffering of nonhuman animals. He states in the interview that that “the thinking that is characteristic of indigenous peoples” involves less of this separation.
More lies — Singer was specifically asked if he thought this was a western conception, the question that was asked was the following
G.Y.: To what extent do you think that biases against nonhuman animals are grounded within a certain unethical stewardship toward nature itself? Do you think that this is a specifically Western approach to nature where nature is conceived as an “object” over which we ought to have absolute control? Certainly, Francis Bacon seems to have had this idea. Of course, then there was René Descartes, who argued that nonhuman animals are mere machines.
Singer’s answer didn’t homogenize indigenous cultures — he described these ideas greater prevalence in indigenous cultures. There’s a reason the authors didn’t provide Singer’s full quote, preferring to quote part of a sentence, dishonestly. The full quote was this.
It is true that Western thinking emphasizes the gulf between humans and nature, and also between humans and animals, to a far greater extent than Eastern thinking, or the thinking that is characteristic of indigenous peoples.
Next, the Jacobin authors say
After all, we must not idealize “nature.” The food chain is a violent place; nature is, as Alfred Lord Tennyson put it, “red in tooth and claw.” It is not a Disney forest full of cute critters who all get along. There is no moral way for a cat to kill and eat a mouse. Overcoming the metabolic rift — the alienation of human beings from nature and from ourselves — would require, in part, that human beings gain a greater understanding of our place in the natural world. This includes the food chain.
Singer doesn’t do that — we as humans are not animals and shouldn’t do things merely because animals do them. Animals frequently rape each other and eat humans, but we shouldn’t rape each other and eat humans. This is a total non-sequitur — though the authors don’t even make it a complete argument; they just drop a little FYI about the food-chain before returning to more nonsense.
We should certainly try to alleviate unnecessary suffering when dealing with animals, but as journalist Arun Gupta pointed out in a recent speech, this is at best a case of negative rights: for example, the right of “not needlessly being subjected to cruelty.” Rights, from a materialist perspective, are meaningless outside of human existence; suffering does not necessarily confer rights. It’s only possible to talk about human rights, civil rights, or women’s rights because different groups of humans who face oppression have struggled and continue to struggle to win these rights. This is not the case with animal rights.
This is totally refuted by the previous example of mentally disabled people and terminally ill children. We humans can and should advocate for animal rights. But even if you think animals don’t have rights — as is true of Singer and I — animals can still suffer, and we shouldn’t inflict heinous suffering on trillions of sentient beings.
No animals have ever struggled to gain better treatment in food production or to oppose unnecessary experimentation by cosmetic companies. Insofar as animal rights exist, it is humans who have granted and fought for these rights. Animals themselves cannot be said to have inherent rights that we do not give them.
No severely mentally disabled people or terminally ill one-year-olds have ever struggled to gain better treatment in food production or to oppose unnecessary experimentation by cosmetic companies. Insofar as mentally disabled or terminally ill one-year-olds rights exist, it is humans who have granted and fought for these rights. Animals themselves cannot be said to have inherent rights that we do not give them.
This discussion of rights is central to Singer’s argument that it is speciesism to claim that all human life is more valuable than all nonhuman animal life. In his 1979 book Practical Ethics, Singer flirts with eugenics by dismissing the “slippery slope” argument and arguing that “denying rights to social misfits” is unlikely to lead to totalitarianism. He insists that his aim is not to “lower the status of any humans” but to raise the status of animals. Using offensive terminology that was common at the time, he argues:
Once we allow that a grossly retarded human being has no higher moral status than an animal we have begun our descent down a slope, the next level of which is denying rights to social misfits, and the bottom of which is a totalitarian government disposing of anyone it does not like by classifying them as mentally defective.
Given that it was common at the time and wasn’t seen as offensive, this clearly isn’t a mark against Singer. If several hundred years from now the phrase ‘black person’ is considered a racial slur, that wouldn’t mean those who currently wrote using the phrase black person did anything wrong.
Singer dismisses this scenario as “no more than a possibility,” though one might be forgiven for wondering whether Nazi Germany has slipped his mind. His critics contend that Singer has already traveled too far down the slippery slope, pointing to his open advocacy of infanticide for babies with disabilities. If such children are no more cognitively advanced than monkeys or pigs, Singer argues in Unsanctifying Human Life, then the only reason killing them is immoral is their membership in our species: they are valuable because they are human.
I’ve already responded to this here.
Singer argues that this tendency to assign innate value on the basis of species membership is in principle no different than a racist’s argument for superiority on the basis of racial membership and therefore cannot be defended.
As is unsurprising, the Jacobin writers have no response to this charge, beyond scoffing.
Tellingly, Singer’s colleague Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence, defends Singer’s academic freedom on the basis of the civility of his tone in making such arguments: “He is not a demagogue, a shouter, a hater. He sets forth his positions with clarity and defends them with rational arguments.” This defense extends no such courtesy or freedom to the many professors of color recently dismissed for criticizing Israeli policies in less measured tones; the content of the argument becomes less important than the tone in which it is expressed.
Ah yes, some random colleague of Singer must agree with the entire status quo — the firing of every person for every reason.
The absurdity of arguing that speciesism and racism are equivalent is quickly evident. Though science-fiction worlds like Star Trek use a variety of morally equivalent, sentient fictional species to draw analogies about racism and difference, here on Earth race is — at its core — a social construction enforced by social codes, not a biological category.
Attempts to structure ideas of race in terms of biological difference have always been deeply rooted in the material need to justify racism in order to perpetuate systems such as slavery. (See, for example, Steven Jay Gould’s classic The Mismeasure of Man for a comprehensive look at the roots of “race science” or “bioracism,” and Karen Fields and Barbara Fields’s masterful Racecraft for more on the relationship between slavery, racism, and the construction of race.)
It’s not clear what the argument is here, but it seems that they’re saying racism is different because it’s not about biology, but instead it’s about social codes. However, it seems that the legal mistreatment of animals would also be a social code. Furthermore, even if racism were on the basis of biology, it would still be bad. Pointing out a difference doesn’t show the difference to be morally relevant — racism being not firmly biologically grounded has nothing to do with its horror.
The horror of racism comes from the vast suffering inflicted on untold numbers of selves. Yet the same is true of our torture and brutalization of animals in factory farms.
There’s also something funny about the authors claiming that the difference between racism and specesism are self evident, before appealing to a distinction that would not be drawn by most people outside of leftist academia. This is especially amusing because their allegedly morally relevant distinction would involve claiming that, if racists were consistent biologically and discriminated on the basis of objective biomarkers, they’d be doing something much less bad.
Human beings, whatever their racial identity, possess agency. Enslaved human beings, even in the most brutal days of the chattel system, were self-directed beings who not only felt pain and experienced self-perception but who loved, reasoned, wrote, and above all fought for their own freedom. Other species will never display that kind of agency.
What about terminally ill children and the severely mentally disabled? Many of them don’t love, reason, write, and fight for freedom. Yet we still shouldn’t grind them up in blenders.
Ultimately, it is Singer’s individualism — his insistence on seeing racism as an individual moral and intellectual failing rather than as a social system in an unequal society — that prevents him from understanding the problem with posing speciesism and racism as equivalent. Singer argues that “we should treat beings as individuals, rather than as members of a species” because he believes, in classic liberal fashion, that regarding every being as a freestanding entity to be evaluated on its own merits, unmoored from any larger context, is the fairest option.
No, it’s the fact that Singer has spent more than 5 seconds thinking through the issues that leads to it — something which I unfortunately can’t say of these authors. They clearly haven’t read animal liberation — where Singer specifically presses the argument from marginal cases against a view like theirs.
Unfortunately, this method of analysis fails utterly to take social, systemic, and even species-level factors into account. It’s quite similar to the liberal argument that racism can be ended through simple “colorblindness.” In addition, his only proposed solutions are based on the individual as the primary unit of agency. Actions you can take toward animal liberation include becoming a vegetarian or vegan, avoiding products where animal experimentation is used, and so on, and arguing with others to do the same.
It’s evidently clear that the Jacobin writing process started with an attempt to tar Singer as some liberal shill and then reasoned (if it can be called that) backwards from there. The evidence for this claim is selective quotes out of context, subsequently dishonestly lied about.
In the same vein, to make purely utilitarian arguments about the worth of the lives of people with disabilities and people of color without regard for the historical context in which such lives have been and still are consistently treated as being of less worth — to pretend that the playing field is level — is, whatever the intent of conclusion of those arguments, itself a form of moral violence.
You’ll be unsurprised to know that the authors have no arguments against utilitarianism — just rhetorical fluff. Singer never denied any historical context — the authors should check their back health, given how much of a stretch this claim is. Singer NEVER claims that the playing field is level. There is also no explanation of why this is “moral violence” (unclear what that means — is it saying the violence is moral?! Who knows — though moral violence is certainly better than immoral violence).
Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to become a vegetarian, to advocate for better treatment for animals, or to oppose factory farming. At the end of the day, though, the “speciesism” argument, with its false equivalence to racism and its insistence that “animal lives matter,” is simply incompatible with a genuine antiracism.
You can be opposed to speciesism and avoid making the comparisons Singer has made. Ultimately though, this article has failed spectacularly, totally, and utterly to provide any semblance of a refutation of a single one of Singer’s points. They barely even managed to make him sound objectionable while taking out of context quotes from an off-the-cuff interview. This is the lowest of the low, a despicably bad piece of journalism.
I agree that the article failed to refute any of Singer's points, but was that really its purpose?
Seems more like a rally around the flag hit piece designed to crustalize outrage then a serious attempt to counter his views. I.E. if you asked the authors of this piece of they thought all the ad hominem attacks here are responsive, I would be shocked (and would then agree with you) if they said yes.
I think that if you're going to write responses to this kind of article, you should address it on its own terms, which seem to be emotion driven anger at Singer (entire justifiable, he's really very annoying), using your excellent writing skills.