ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the view that the interests of nonhuman animals should not count as much as human interests. Some defenses of this view are merely definitional. This means they don’t provide any further argument to back it. Accordingly, they can be easily dismissed. Others claim that humans possess higher intellectual abilities or special relations of sympathy, or that they are in a relation of power above other animals. The chapter indicates that not all humans can satisfy these conditions. In addition, such conditions are not what really matters when it comes to considering someone. Rather, the capacity to have positive and negative experiences is. The chapter considers other defenses of the priority of human interests based on criteria whose fulfillment is unverifiable, including religious ones. It argues that these views are already assuming in their premises the very conclusion they want to reach. As a result, the chapter argues that our attitudes toward nonhuman animals are a form of speciesism, a discrimination against those who don’t belong to a certain species. Support for speciesism may be due to the fact that we like its implications but not because we have stronger reasons to support it.
