Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Singer takes ethics seriously. As a philosopher he provides a cut that separates the abstraction from its application. This is a compelling argument. While he shows us, in book form, much of the widely known (and unknown) atrocities that come with how we treat animals, for our gut level, animal reaction, he emphasizes that as human beings we have a choice we can make about how to be in the world. Suffering is suffering, and the cut off between human dignity and animal dignity is one that overlaps. The only difference that would block this overlap would be due to ideological weight we put on valuing humans over animals.
His argument can also rightly be distilled into various levels of agency. Eating vegetables is better for the environment, which means better for humans. Human digestion can survive without animal tissue to digest. Dignity is due to the capacity of the bearer to suffer, and animals do suffer. If we prevent the suffering of other humans due to their capacity to feel and think, there remains very little room for debate to not extend this to animals as well. Truly, our inability to extend this to animals can only be due to how we ourselves are irrational and unwilling to change our habits. Going against the grain is difficult, but if you see only a neutral situation in the face of suffering then you have chosen the side of the oppressors.
