book Animal Liberation was a “philosophical bombshell” when it came out in 1975, according to activist Ingrid Newkirk, who says it “made people – myself included – change what we ate, what we wore and how we perceived animals”.
Singer, now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, provided a philosophical argument for overhauling humanity’s treatment of animals, condemning practices such as animal testing and meat eating on the grounds that animals had as much right to live free from pain and suffering as humans.
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Although it helped inspire the modern animal-rights movement, Singer’s views on animal ethics were, for a long time, far from mainstream. For decades, vegetarians and vegans were treated by many other people with equal parts bemusement and exasperation. Factory farms flourished.
Now, we have a deeper understanding of the intelligence of many animals, from pigs to octopuses, as well as evidence to show that veganism – which is more popular than ever – is good for our health and the environment. And yet global meat and fish consumption is still rising, plans are afoot for the world’s first octopus farm and escalating climate change is driving many animals to extinction. Against this backdrop, Singer has revised Animal Liberation for a 21st-century audience.
He tells 91av how his thinking on animal rights has changed, why beef should be taxed to help the people affected by climate change and what an ethical life looks like now.
Madeleine Cuff: For those who aren’t familiar with your arguments, where do you stand on humanity’s treatment of animals?
Peter Singer: I think the core arguments I made in 1975 have stood up very well to the test of time. I argued that we should give equal weight to similar amounts of pain and pleasure, irrespective of species. It’s just as bad if pain is inflicted on a human or a dog or a pig.
Why did you feel the need to update your book?
I did a reasonably thorough revision in 1990, but I hadn’t touched the body of the text since then. If you looked at the chapter on factory farming, it was describing conditions in the 1980s or earlier. The same was true about the chapter on the use of animals in research. I thought that people reading this book would no longer feel it is relevant. They would want to know, are we still doing these things to animals? Has it got better? Has it got worse? Also, climate change is obviously a big issue now and it is relevant to what we ought to eat. There wasn’t much discussion of that even in the 1990 edition.
How has your thinking around the eating of animals evolved since 1975?
I’ve become a little more open to the idea that if we rear animals in ways that give them good lives and take care to make sure that they do not suffer when they are killed, then that’s a defensible ethical position.
In the first edition, I rejected that. But I have thought about the whole issue more since then. It relates to some difficult philosophical questions about bringing new beings into existence and giving them good lives. Is that a plus? Or once they come into existence, maybe you can’t justify ending their lives, even if it’s the case that if you didn’t there would be no more beings after that, because a farmer is not going to rear animals and wait for them to die a natural death before trying to sell their bodies.
It’s still not my view, but I now see some of the difficulties in rejecting it. I regard it as a kind of unsolved philosophical problem.
So, it may be that not all killing of animals for food is wrong?
Exactly. That’s possible. I’m not saying that I accept that, but I’m saying that it’s a defensible position. I think people who are conscientious about ensuring that any meat they buy comes from animals who have had good lives – they hold a position that I’m not prepared to say flatly is immoral or wrong.
How much should climate change be a factor in people’s diets? Eating ethically to maximise animal welfare and eating ethically to minimise climate change aren’t always the same thing.
That’s absolutely correct. They are in conflict. If you were to follow what I was just saying about animals who have good lives, then you might say that the best meat to eat is beef because it’s possible to get beef from animals who have lived all of their lives on grass. Generally, I would say that quality of life is OK.
But the greenhouse gas emissions are very high from ruminant animals because they produce methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. By comparison, chickens don’t produce methane and so there’s much less of a climate change implication in eating chicken. But most chicken is factory-farmed.
So, if people simply switch from beef to chicken for climate reasons – OK, they are reducing their greenhouse gas footprint, but they’re causing a lot more suffering to animals. I think it’s better to avoid both and to follow a plant-based diet. Then you don’t have to worry about inflicting harm on animals and your greenhouse gas footprint will be much lower.
Proposals for an octopus farm in the Canary Islands, Spain, where octopuses would be bred for food, were recently revealed. We are learning a lot about the intelligence of these animals. What are your thoughts on this?
I am totally appalled by the plans and the idea of 1 million of these intelligent, sentient beings being closely confined and then killed. I hope it can be stopped.
Can you rely on people to make changes to their diet on ethical grounds solely or do governments need to get involved?
I think it would be perfectly reasonable for governments to impose taxes on beef, lamb and dairy – the products that are doing most damage to the climate. Because, really, any economist would acknowledge that it’s a failure of the market that the price people pay for those products does not include the harm done to third parties. It’s what economists call negative externalities. And it’s doing harm to a lot of people – particularly to some of the poorest people in the world, who have the lowest greenhouse gas footprints, but also the least ability to overcome the problems of climate change. That’s just wrong, and governments should recognise it’s wrong. They should add to the price of these products so that people buy less of them. The tax revenue should be used to help people in those countries in need of assistance.
Do you see a future in which eating meat and dairy will become morally unacceptable?
The long-term development of ethics and morality will expand the circle of moral concern. I think that will, in the long run, lead to the inclusion of non-human animals in an ethical framework that means that we cannot treat them as we are now treating them. But it’s very hard to put a time frame on it. It’s a really big change. It might be 50 years, but it might be over a century. If we get products that taste and chew like meat and have the nutritional qualities of meat, but don’t come from animals, then we may get there a lot faster.
There’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence at the moment. Can AI help us live a more ethical life?
I see AI as relieving us of a lot of mundane tasks. But it’s only going to be a good thing if the benefits are really distributed to everyone. If it just means that some people become unemployed and wealthy people become even wealthier, it’s clearly not a good thing.
It’s also important that AI should not have the kind of species biases that we have. The problem is, in part, that AI is being trained on existing literature. AI like ChatGPT is reading and absorbing attitudes from billions of pages of text and often that leads to perpetuation of particular views that people have now.
Most of the AIs, if you say: ‘Can you give me some recipes for cooking pork?’, they will do it immediately. But if you say: ‘Can you give me some recipes for cooking dogs?’, most of them will say: ‘No, it’s wrong to cook dogs.’ Why is it wrong to cook dogs and not wrong to cook pigs?
There is a concern that AI is perpetuating the biases that we humans have. A lot of work is going into correcting racist and sexist biases in AI and that’s good, but it should also go into correcting species biases.
And finally, what does it mean to live an ethical life in the context of climate change?
We need to consider what we can do to reduce the damage that climate change is doing and will do in future. Our children and grandchildren are going to ask us, what did we do to stop the problems they are going to have to live with? I think we want to be able to give them an honest and serious answer that we did a great deal, that we did everything we could to prevent this damage. We can’t just go on with business as usual and think that we are an ethical person.
Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation Now is out on 8 June.
Madeleine Cuff is an environment reporter at 91av
