Can Critiques of ‘Speciesism’ be Disentangled from Ableism?

On November 4^th 2020, The Guardian reported the proposed slaughter of 15-17 million mink in Denmark. 12 people had become infected with a novel strand of Covid-19 transmitted to them from the mink, who had first been infected themselves by human handlers. Concerns arose that further infections might compromise the efficacy of developing vaccines. The slaughter aimed to eradicate the entire population of farmed mink in the country (a population that would have been largely killed within the span of a year otherwise, farmed as they were for their fur). Less than three weeks later, more than 10 million mink had been culled. In the rush to eradicate so many millions of lives, shallow trenches were dug from which the bodies of these many slaughtered animals were rising as they began to decompose.

In my home in North America, these events were but a blip on the radar while, in Denmark, debates raged about the ethics of the cull. Speaking on behalf of Humane Society International/Europe, Joanna Swabe called the deaths of these mink “an animal welfare tragedy”, while also noting that “fur farmers will now have a clear opportunity to pivot away from this cruel and dying industry and choose a more humane and sustainable livelihood instead”. In a recent article in The New York Times, the consequences for farmers and fur auctioneers, more than the minks, were the principle subject of concern. More than 5000 farmers were put out of work by the slaughter and the world’s largest fur auction house is slated to close its doors next year.

Regardless of what moral conclusions are reached about the mink slaughter, ‘speciesism’ seems an essential concept to employ in the process of getting there. In 1975, Peter Singer, winner of the 2021 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, introduced the world to this idea. First called out by Richard Ryder in a leaflet distributed at Oxford, speciesism, Singer argued in Animal Liberation, is a form of prejudice analogous to racism or sexism. Where racism and sexism exclude some human beings from equal moral consideration on the basis of irrelevancies such as race and sex, speciesism excludes other beings from equal moral consideration on the basis of species membership—a difference that Singer claimed to be equally morally irrelevant. The vast privileging of the interests of the human species over all others and gross indifference to nonhuman animal suffering in our midst (and often for our explicit benefit) are deep moral atrocities of our times, ones which we far too frequently ignore. The bodies of millions of slaughtered mink rising out of shallow graves was a vivid reminder of the horror of these present-day realities.

Yet while ‘speciesism’ has become a popular term of critique, enshrined in the lexicon of activist groups such as PETA and having earned a place in standard dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster, the degree to which Singer has interwoven his own critiques of speciesism with ableism is less frequently noted. In 2008, Eva Kittay and Licia Carlson organized a conference at Stony Brook University at which Singer was an invited speaker. In “Speciesism and Moral Status”, the published version of his conference talk in the collection Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, Singer makes clear that, on his assessment, speciesism is not just inherent in the view that all human interests are more important than all non-human interests or even in the view that all human beings are vastly superior to all non-human ones. Rather, according to Singer, the belief that all human beings are equal is a suspect assumption. Overcoming speciesism, he insists, demands “abandon[ing] the idea of the equal value of all humans” and replacing it “with a more graduated view in which moral status depends on some aspects of cognitive ability”.

When it comes to issues of cognitive disability, ableism, so it seems, isn’t necessarily a suspect ‘ism’ in Singer’s vocabulary for, unlike racism, sexism, or speciesism, ‘ableism’, in some contexts, does not seem to strike Singer as a prejudice at all. Instead, he seems to believe, it is the perfectly justified outcome of a process of moral consideration that grants each being their due on the basis of sentience but also self-awareness and other cognitive abilities. “It’s unfortunate”, as he recently put it in an interview in The New Yorker, that “I get associated with these so-called ‘ableist’ views”.

But ableism in this context does involve prejudice! Assessments of the cognitive capabilities of people with disabilities are often made with a shallow to non-existent grasp of their abilities. Lack of care, attention, and appropriate accommodations restrict the potential for these abilities to come to light and lead to mistaken assumptions about their absence. Likewise, the privileging of neuro-typical norms of communication, self-expression, and more leads to diminished appreciation for non-neurotypical variations of such capacities. The extent to which people with disabilities—a group to which anyone can come to belong at any point in their lifetime through illness or injury—have been warehoused, pushed to the margins of the human community, and made the targets of euthanasia campaigns is deeply troubling and only worsens the widespread lack of appreciation for the capacities of people with cognitive disabilities today. Combine these issues with a hubristic attitude that assumes knowledge without having it and makes moral judgements on the basis of such assumptions and the problem becomes even more egregious.

 Certain human capacities are also profoundly relational: I cannot fully express love if I have no one to receive that love; I cannot fully show care unless others respond to and reciprocate that care; I cannot experience friendship but for another seeing me in the same light; I cannot show respect to others or be respected in isolation, and I cannot compose and maintain a persistent sense of selfhood unless others hold me in that sense of selfhood by maintaining ongoing relationships with me. Human beings, like so much of our fellow creatures, are highly social animals and many of the capabilities and capacities we express are deeply dependent on supportive relationships with others.

Hence, my opening question: Can critiques of speciesism today be disentangled from the ableism inherent in Singer’s own take on the term? Can we productively deploy the term ‘speciesism’ to critique the grave harms and injustices committed against nonhuman animals while also calling out the dehumanizing stance with which Singer himself has coupled it—that not all human lives are equal and, specifically, that those that fall below a certain threshold of cognitive ability do not merit the same moral status as others?

In response to a recent talk I gave on these issues that was highly indebted to her ground-breaking work, Eva Kittay made the crucial point that “to insist that all humans have equal moral worth says nothing about the moral worth of any other beings. The claim that all human beings have equal moral worth is a sufficiency condition, not a necessity condition for the equal moral worth we accord or ought to accord to all human beings who are born and whose condition is compatible with life.” She argues for this position in the open-access, inaugural issue of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability.

If Kittay is right, and I believe she is, her insight can be enlisted in the effort to decouple critiques of ‘speciesism’ from ableism. It may well be ethically beneficial for the concept of ‘speciesism’ to continue to be employed in efforts to call attention to the wrongness of vastly prioritizing human concerns over the interests of other-than-human animals, of giving trivial human comforts and desires more weight than vital nonhuman ones, and more. But critiques of ‘speciesism’ must cease to serve as a gateway to enforcing and enacting ableism. In applauding the good that some aspects of Singer’s work have done in the world, it is utterly crucial to refuse to sanction, brush aside, or excuse the dehumanization with which his work has also been complicit. Indeed, it is imperative to recognize that the rejection of ‘speciesism’ requires respecting the sameness and the otherness of human and other-than-human beings alike. That seeking moral equality for other-than-human animals and those living with cognitive disabilities have been treated as oppositional, rather than complimentary, goals has only furthered the world’s injustices. Rethinking ‘speciesism’ beyond ableism may be one of many steps needed to begin to correct such wrongs.

Katharine Wolfe

St. Lawrence University

Katharine Wolfe is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Lawrence University, a small liberal arts college perched just north of the Adirondack mountains. Her work considers contemporary topics in environmental ethics, bioethics, and more from a feminist and relational approach and often blends analytic and continental approaches.