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Singer's main thesis is that while non-human animals are not the same as human beings, there seems to be no philosophical reason to treat them as if they had no rights. He doesn't claim that animals necessarily have the same rights as humans, but he does believe that they can possess rights.
He refutes several common arguments that people use to dismiss animal rights:
To this argument, Singer replies in effect that there are no morally relevant dimensions in which all animals differ from all humans. To take the example of speech, we see that some animals can talk (or at least communicate with us through various devices) while some humans are so retarded or brain-damaged that they cannot. (Singer notes that many of the same arguments used to dismiss the rights of animals were earlier used to dismiss the rights of women and of Blacks.)
Singer's general argument is that arguments for restricting rights to homo sapiens wind up, in the end, as being tautological (circular), as in: "Human beings have rights, and non-human animals don't, because human beings are human beings and non-human animals aren't."
The only morally relevant dimension seems to be, as Jeremy Bentham put it, "not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" [p.406A; emphasis in original]. To this question, we can only answer, "Yes."
To this argument, Singer asks whether the same argument could be applied to the use of (say) human babies in experiments. Since people recoil from the idea of such a practice, Singer argues that animals should be treated with at least some consideration here. Note that he does not say that animal experiments need be entirely stopped; his point is that they are currently being conducted without the slightest consideration for the animals. He is objecting to this denial of any rights, any moral consideration to animals.
Note that the title comes, somewhat mockingly, from George Orwell's (1954) fable, Animal Farm, where the dominant pigs create the slogan, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." In that novel, the pigs were claiming animals' equality with humans (and with each other) at the same time that they were denying the principle of equality. This was Orwell's criticism of the Soviet Union, and especially the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, both of which were then suffering under Stalin's terrible rule. (It was also, less obviously, a criticism of certain tendencies in Western culture.)
In the case of Singer's title, Singer seems to be saying that all animals really are equal, letting us supply the conclusion he obviously opposes — "but humans are more equal than others", just as Orwell did the latter half of his slogan.
Argument is like Corvino's: take philosophical objections and show they're illogical.
Key questions: Are (all) animals unlike (all) humans in any morally relevant way? Otherwise, the argument is irrelevant or even circular. [Let class suggest criteria.]
Start with the argument: "Can they suffer?" Yes, though perhaps not in the existential ways humans do. But existential suffering is not what animal advocates are talking about.
Ex: What about speech? Here are the three issues to consider:
Ex: What about vivisection, i.e., "human need" as an excuse?
Does this persuade you? Will you stop hunting? Will you stop eating meat? List reasons why not.
Note that many of these reasons for inferior treatment have been applied to minority groups.
The dialectical relationship between intuitionism vs. rationalism. [Note Freud.]
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