Environmental Ethics

Volume 2, Issue 2, Summer 1980

Rights, Interests, and Moral Equality

I discuss Peter Singer’s claim that the interests of animals merit equal consideration with those of human beings. I show that there are morally relevant differences between humans and animals that Singer’s rather narrow utilitarian conception of morality fails to capture. Further, I argue that Singer’s formal conception of moral equality is so thin as to be virtually vacuous and that his attempts to give it more substance point to just the kind of differences between humans and animals that undermine his equalitarian thesis.