ABSTRACT
Study of the relations between animals and humans in the humanities is split between the analysis of the representation of animals in history and culture, or animal studies, and the philosophical consideration of animal rights. While much of this chapter will focus on animal studies, which is close kin to ecocriticism proper, it will begin with the ethical questions, ancient debates that were given renewed impetus by Peter Singer's revolutionary Animal Liberation (1975). Singer draws upon arguments first put forward by Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who suggested that cruelty to animals was analogous to slavery and claimed that the capacity to feel pain, not the power of reason, entitled a being to moral consideration. Singer gives the label speciesism’ to the irrational prejudice that Bentham identifies as the basis of our different treatment of animals and humans. Just as women or Africans have been mistreated on the grounds of morally irrelevant physiological differences, so animals suffer because they fall on the wrong side of a supposedly insuperable line’ (cited in Singer 1983: 8) dividing beings that count from those that do not. Yet it turns out to be impossible to draw that line in such a way that all animals are excluded and all humans are included, 147 even if we appeal, as many have, to the faculties of ‘reason’ or ‘discourse’: for Bentham ‘a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old’ (ibid.: 8). The boundary between human and animal is arbitrary and, moreover, irrelevant, since we share with animals a capacity for suffering that only ‘the hand of tyranny’ (ibid.) could ignore.
