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Suffering In Peter Singer's Essay All Animals Are Equal

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Imagine choosing between causing harm to a human being and an animal. In order to prevent the human from being wounded, you would have to cause a greater amount of pain in the animal. Most likely, you would choose to spare the human, thus injuring the animal. According to Peter Singer in his article “All Animals are Equal”, the welfare of animals must be considered equally with that of humans in part because of their ability to feel pain and joy as humans do (1972). His approach is utilitarian, as it judges actions based on the amount of suffering or joy brought about by an action. Therefore, in the aforementioned situation, one following Singer’s approach would choose to allow the human to be harmed because the total amount of suffering caused …show more content…
He states that since humans differ among themselves, if equality was based on ability or sentience, individuals would have lesser or greater moral standing depending on their condition. For example, a patient in a coma would be viewed as having less of a moral standing than a conscious person due to their current lack of sentience. Instead, equality gives equivalent consideration to all humans regardless of their current state or any impairments they may have. Singer believes this courtesy should be extended to animals. Animals obviously are not capable of rational or abstract thought as humans are, yet many humans are also not capable of this and are given equal sensitivity to those that are. However, if you consider all of humanity, overall humans are capable of greater intelligence and thought than any animal, and therefore are deserving of more moral consideration than animals. A large part of human interaction depends on reciprocity – we expect others to respect our rights as we comply with theirs. For example, we refrain from interfering with others’ right to live, and we expect they will not interfere with our right to live by killing us. However, animals, being incapable of rational thought, cannot consider the rights of others in their actions. Therefore, there is no reciprocal respect between animals and humans, meaning granting animals equal rights to humans would not promote both humans and

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