Perhaps the most common defence of animal rights is based on the claim that it is wrong to discriminate on the grounds of species. Just as it is wrong to treat people differently on the basis of race or sex—so animal rights advocates argue—it is wrong to treat other animals differently on the basis of their species membership. In this article, Sophie Grace Chappell argues against this dominant view in animal ethics. Chappell argues for the inherent value of animals, not based on detached reasoning about discrimination, but instead based on an ethics of love and attention.

How should we think about the (other) animals? I believe we should think about them as inherently valuable and deserving of protection—in short, as having rights. In that broad sense, this essay is a defence of animal rights.

At first glance, it might not look like that. In philosophy we don’t just want the right conclusions; we want the right conclusions for the right reasons. And a lot of the commonest arguments for animal rights don’t, in my view, give us the right reasons. So I start by unpicking some bad arguments for animal rights. Then I present what I hope is a better argument.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Humanity and the gods of nature With Slavoj Žižek, Jack Symes, Peter Singer, Nancy Sherman

Perhaps the commonest argument you hear for animal rights is built on this claim:

Anti-Speciesism: It is morally wrong to discriminate on the grounds of species.

Often Anti-Speciesism is argued for by analogy with two other positions allegedly parallel to it:

Anti-Racism: It is morally wrong to discriminate on the grounds of race.

Anti-Sexism: It is morally wrong to discriminate on the grounds of sex.

Are these positions analogous? Well, they do have this in common: all three are guaranteed trivially true by their wording. These three statements all say that it is morally wrong to “discriminate”. But as the word is usually defined, “discriminate” means “treat differently in a morally wrong way”. And it is not news that it is morally wrong to act in a morally wrong way. All three positions alike are trivial and uninformative.

So we need to replace “discriminate” with “treat beings differently”:

Anti-Speciesism 2: It is morally wrong to treat beings differently on the grounds of species. 

Anti-Racism 2: It is morally wrong to treat beings differently on the grounds of race.

Anti-Sexism 2: It is morally wrong to treat beings differently on the grounds of sex.

The trouble with these positions is that they’re all false. To take them in reverse order:

Doctors regularly treat their female patients differently from their male ones: male patients don’t routinely get offered mammograms, and female patients don’t routinely get offered prostate checks.

Doctors sometimes treat patients of different races differently too, because there are some diseases to which some races are particularly genetically susceptible.

Doctors are professionally concerned with humans, not with animals of other species. And vets, who are professionally concerned with animals of other species, not with humans, treat different species of non-human animal very differently.

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Distinctions of treatment between species are as commonplace as distinctions of treatment between races and sexes. None of them is automatically morally wrong.

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