Species and Speciesism

Abstract

The permissibility of ‘speciesism’, broadly construed as belief in the moral relevance of species membership, has remained a central topic of debate within animal ethics, ever since the sub-discipline’s emergence some fifty years ago. However, in all this time, animal ethicists have paid relatively scant attention to the nature of species membership itself. This seems potentially regrettable, since species membership’s precise nature is, presumably, highly pertinent to its moral relevance, and its nature is, according to most philosophers of biology, radically different to what many animal ethicists appear to have assumed. Thus, much of what animal ethicists have written regarding speciesism’s permissibility may be unsound. Here, I attempt to redress this problem, by advocating for, and pursuing, a ‘species-focused’ approach to assessing speciesism, an approach which centres the nature of species membership, and consults philosophers of biology. Via said approach, I argue that many popular defences of speciesism assume accounts of intraspecific and interspecific variation incompatible with Darwinism, and for this reason should be rejected. I here refrain from making any specific applied ethical pronouncements regarding how, in light of a thoroughly Darwinian metaphysics of species, we ought to treat our non-human cousins. My concern here is only with the higher order question of whether species membership is a morally relevant property. However, my conclusion that Darwinism undermines many traditional defences of speciesism almost certainly does have profound practical moral implications.

Date of Award	18 Mar 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Samir Okasha (Supervisor) & Fiona Woollard (Supervisor)