Animal Inconsistencies

  • Siobhan O’Sullivan
Chapter
Part of the The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series book series (PMAES)

Abstract

So wrote Peter Singer, the so-called father of the animal rights movement, in his 1975 classic Animal Liberation. The passage appears under the heading ‘All Animals are Equal…’ Yet Singer was not talking about just any old sort of equity, he was using the equity principle in a very particular way, whether he was aware of it or not. Singer’s concern was with a type of inequity or bias, which I have termed the ‘external inconsistency’. The external inconsistency is an inconsistency in the way we treat animals compared to humans. The external inconsistency is the inconsistency that animal protection theorists, writing since the current wave of interest in animal protection developed in the mid-1970s, have most commonly addressed. The external inconsistency stands in contrast to the internal inconsistency, which is the type of inequity this book is primarily concerned with. The internal inconsistency is an inconsistency in the way we treat nonhuman animals in relation to other nonhuman animals.

Keywords

Moral Status Legal Theorist Nonhuman Animal Animal Protection Moral Concern 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Siobhan O’Sullivan 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  • Siobhan O’Sullivan
    • 1
  1. 1.University of MelbourneAustralia

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