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Hi, I'm Peter Singer and I'm going to
talk to you about speciesism. Speciesism
is a bias or prejudice against beings on
the grounds of their species. So it's
similar to racism and sexism, which are
biases or prejudices against people on
grounds of their race or sex. In all of
these cases there's a powerful,
dominant group which gives itself a
higher moral status than it gives to the
others, the outsiders, and it uses them
for its own ends. Obviously in the case
of animals we use them for food, for
research, for entertainment, in many other
ways that ignore their interests. And I
argue that primarily we do this simply
because they're not members of our
species. Now some people will say it's
not because of their species, but because
they're not rational or autonomous or
self-aware or other characteristics like
that. But there are some members of our
species, they are also not rational or
autonomous or self-aware. In fact we were
all born that way. And some humans
unfortunately never get beyond that
because of severe brain damage or a
genetic abnormality. But we don't treat
them the way that we treat non-human
animals and I see that as evidence that
it is speciesism that is driving the
difference. Sometimes also we are
speciesist between different species of
non-human animal. So for example we may
be shocked to learn that in some
countries people eat dogs. But we eat
pigs and pigs are just as intelligent,
just as playful, just as much capable of
enjoying a good life as dogs are. So I
think that's also a prejudice, that we're
prepared to treat pigs in ways that are
so much worse than the ways we treat dogs.
I hope that's enough to give you some idea
of what speciesism involves. Thank you.
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