Seminar Summary

Speciesism
Summary of talk given by Dr Richard D Ryder
30 January 2007 Mansfield college, Oxford

We have heard a lot recently about the controversy over "chimeras" — the production of combined human and cow or rabbit eggs. I am actually on the side of the scientists on this one. As usual the ethical pundits in this country get hot and bothered about phoney issues. The current chimera controversy is, in my opinion, a moral red-herring, for the simple reason that no additional suffering is involved. Experimenting upon animals is an altogether different matter. Eggs and day-old embryos do not suffer, whereas fully formed animals can and do suffer.

I think I first spoke publicly about speciesism some 37 years ago, here in Oxford. Over the next few years I wrote and spoke about the idea repeatedly, sometimes on radio and television. I had coined the word one day as I lay in my bath at the Old Manor House in the village of Sunningwell which nestles in a valley below Boars Hill. I mention this for reasons of nostalgia, as I know there is at least one distinguished academic here today who remembers that beautiful old Tudor house and the happy times we all had there.

I thought up speciesism really as a slogan. I was not a trained philosopher but a psychologist, and it was chiefly the psychological aspects of the word speciesism that appealed to me. It seemed at that time that we had all gone to sleep on the issue of animals. On the one hand we all accepted Darwinism and therefore its message that we are all animals, and yet the moral implications of Darwin were still being denied. (They still are!)

Some people in those days seemed to think that the species-boundary was like a cast-iron bulkhead. I asked various zoologists about this, including a young man called Richard Dawkins whom I met on the late train back from London to Oxford one night. Few could give satisfactory definitions of the term species. Some pointed out that it used to be said that part of the definition was that species couldn't interbreed. That, of course, was no longer considered to be the case. I followed this up and discovered that not only lions and tigers could interbreed, sometimes producing viable and fertile offspring, but that there were scores of cases of Primate species interbreeding. Well, humans are a Primate species, so could we ourselves, I asked, possibly interbreed with chimpanzees or gorillas or orang utangs? People did not know the answer. There had been rumours that this might have already happened. If that indeed did happen one day, I asked, how would we treat the humano-chimp babies? Would they have birth certificates and be looked after by the welfare state or would they be handed over to a professor at Oxford for experimentation? Of course today it happens. Unlike the chimera eggs that are 99 per cent human, however, today’s living transgenic animals only have small amounts of human genetic material — so far that is. But how many human genes do transgenic animals need to have before they are given human rights? Are there such things as “transgenic rights”? If so, how do we work them out? Only one thing is certain: modern genetic engineering is making a nonsense of speciesism!

So way back in 1970 1 began to realise that the concept of species is not particularly clear-cut. It is mainly a taxonomic convenience. We all like to have things neatly labelled, after all. Originally, so it seems, the word species did not have any cast-iron quality — the word applied merely to appearances — it derives from the Latin specere, to look or behold. So a species was just a group of plants or animals that looked alike. Then, as the origin and mutability of the species became matters of controversy in science, so the Victorian layman began to believe, paradoxically, that species really are separated one from another in an absolute kind of way. A hundred years ago many people held similar beliefs about human races and sexes. They, too, were seen as being significantly different one from another, overlooking their overwhelmingly important similarity of sentience — or more precisely, painience.

As I looked around me in the 1960s I was shocked. Everywhere there was evidence of violence and injustice to the other animals whether in factory farms, the hunting field or in laboratories, and yet nobody seemed to be complaining about it. Why not? Who said that morality should be limited to the treatment of only one species — the species that happens to be our own? To me it sounded like some sort of special pleading... species snobbery... zoological elitism. If morality is to be taken seriously then, surely, it must apply to all sentient species. To draw the line at one species or another is artificial, spurious and thoroughly unDarwinian.

I can't be sure now whether that fateful bath time was in 1969 or 1970. I do remember, however, that I thought speciesism worth writing about. For years, and especially since I had seen a lot of cruelty to animals in laboratories where I worked in Cambridge, New York and California, the subject had been troubling me. I had got involved with all the issues of the 1960s — the attacks upon racism, classism and sexism and yet nobody, as far as I was aware, had completed the process and piped up for the nonhuman animals. Yet, as a scientist I knew that there was good evidence that many species other than my own could also suffer pain and fear and misery. They had similar nervous systems to mine and behaved remarkably similarly to me when hurt or exposed to noxious stimuli. Even that supremely hardheaded — one might almost say autistic — science of Behaviourism — accepted that experimental animals could experience pain and fear and, indeed, it based thousands of cruel experiments using 'punishments' upon this very premise. Behaviourists often called such punishments "negative reinforcements" but nobody still supported Descartes in denying the animals their basic subjective experiences.

No, it seemed to me that the moral revolution of the 1960s had got stuck. It was stuck at the species boundary. I started asking people why it was that they considered that morality only applied to members of their own species. How would they treat aliens from out of space? How would they treat Neanderthalers if some turned up in the Himalayas? Just because they are a different species would they experiment on them in laboratories in Oxford? Or would Neanderthalers and intelligent aliens be subject to human rights legislation? I got no satisfactory answers to these questions. Even allegedly intelligent members of the University seemed not to have thought about these issues. They just assumed that the human species was supremely important, but they could offer no rational explanation for this outlandish view. It was simply prejudice.

Anyway, the more I thought about all this it became plain to me that we were prejudiced against members of other species in the same way that we had been against individuals from other races and genders. The psychological advantage of using speciesism as a slogan, therefore, was that it drew attention to the similarity between racism and sexism on one hand and our almost total and irrational prejudice against individuals of other species. The neologism of speciesism would, I believed, force people to think — to address the moral questions.

Armed with these arguments and my new slogan I wrote a leaflet of that title and circulated it around shops and libraries in Oxford. I was determined to break down the conspiracy of silence. I got absolutely no response. However, I also wrote letters to the Daily Telegraph complaining about animal experiments. Much to my surprise, they gave my letters pride of place and I was, in response to them, contacted by the then well known novelist Brigid Brophy, who had been up here at St Hugh's in the 1950s. Together, we went on the first-ever televised debate about animal rights in December of that year, 1969. Brigid then put me in touch with three young Oxford philosophers who were thinking along the same lines — John Harris, Roslind Godlovitch and Stanley Godlovitch. Suddenly, I found my self part of a revolutionary clique! I felt so relieved that I was not the only one with these strange ideas! We used to meet off the Banbury Road in the Godlovitch's flat and later at their place in First Turn, Wolvercote. As I was working in an Oxford hospital rather than at the University, one of their friends, David Wood, agreed to put his name and university address with mine on a second edition of my Speciesism leaflet, so that we could circulate it around the colleges. Again, however, there was no response at all. Undaunted, we set about writing contributions to a book entitled Animals, Men and Morals. Thanks, I think, largely to Brigid, John and the Godlovitches got an agreement with the publishers Victor Gollancz to produce it, and it came out in 1971. John and the Godlovitches were the editors and I did the chapter on laboratory animals. It was the first serious book on the human-animal relationship since the First World War. Since that time there had not just been apathy there had been active hostility towards the subject. Why? Mainly because Socialists regarded animal welfare as a bourgeois distraction from human needs, while others regarded it as sentimental, effeminate, decadent and contrary to their own interests — especially if they were keen foxhunters!

Thanks perhaps to the hugely noisy demonstrations on behalf of animals before the First World War and to the fact that they had largely been led by women, the issue was, in 1969, still regarded as irrational and emotional and absurd. The press ignored the whole subject of animal welfare, reporting it only if they could make a joke of it. It was widely regarded as a subject fit only for "batty old ladies in hats”. What our new Oxford Group succeeded eventually in doing, along with the Hunt Saboteurs, was in altering this negative low-brow and contemptuous stereotype. Whatever else we might have been, we were patently NOT batty old ladies in hats! Not that the old ladies were wrong, of course, it was just that the hardheaded, war-scarred macho world of the early 1960s establishment, was prejudiced. It was thoroughly classist, racist, sexist and speciesist! Very much so. Furthermore, many subjects were considered to be taboo in those days. Indeed, I don't think I had even heard the phrase "animal rights" until about 1970. It was a suppressed issue and a dead one. The only intellectual contribution of note since 1918, as far as I am aware, had been Brigid Brophy's own article on Animal Rights in the Sunday Times in, I believe, 1965. I had missed it. Wonderful people like Margery Jones up in Headington had struggled on over the years, virtually ignored. There was also an old lady in Oxford called Muriel Chapman — a survivor of that pre First World War activist generation. To an extent I joined forces with them and later with the then teenage Andrew Linzey, a native of Oxford, but already keen to become a campaigner. Andrew and I organised one of the first street protests against vivisection for half a century here in Oxford High Street in 1970,1 believe. At about the same time, or a little earlier, I had started a campaign of demonstrations against otter hunts and several members of the University assisted me with these — such as Hugh Denman and David Mason. On one occasion the Godlovitches came along. Increasingly we began to get publicity and started waving placards with the word speciesism on them.

Then, shortly before Animals, Men and Morals was published, I was contacted by a young Australian at University College called Peter Singer. He came over to meet me at Sunningwell on several occasions to discuss my ideas. He was going to review our book Animals, Men and Morals for the New York Review of Books and did so brilliantly, frequently referring to my term speciesism. Instinctively, I had always been worried about the word "rights" as it was used in the human context, feeling that it was a bit mystical to talk of rights as though they really existed "out there" as hard entities. That, I must confess, is another reason why I preferred to talk of speciesism. Peter, I think, latched onto speciesism for the same reason. As a good Utilitarian he, too, disliked the term "rights" although, as I discovered some years later, Jeremy Bentham does actually use the word "rights" in the animal context. Peter had, in fact, seen my Speciesism leaflet and had been impressed by it. Gradually we attracted some approval from distinguished Oxford people. I had a letter of support from Iris Murdoch. Desmond Morris invited me out to lunch several times and said he approved of what I was trying to do. Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, wrote that speciesism "has no proper basis in evolutionary biology" and roundly attacked it in The Blind Watchmaker. Twice I was asked to debate the issue in the OxfordUnion. By the mid 1970s, as I researched the subject more fully, I had discovered that, far from being original in our concern for animal liberation or the right of animals, the issue had been around since the days of Plotinus and Plutarch and had already been revived once in the eighteenth century by people like Voltaire, Addison, Pope, Dr Johnson and, of course, Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart Mill had continued this philosophical trend in the following century. In the 1870s a huge national row had erupted about vivisection and Oxford was at the centre of the storm when Charles Dodgson (the author Lewis Carroll) wrote from Christchurch that he feared "a new and more hideous Frankenstein — a soulless being to whom science shall be all in all". Convocation had to agree the funding for a new Waynflete Professor of Physiology, Burdon-Sanderson, who was clearly a vivisector. In 1883 the vivisectors were 88 against the anti-vivisectors' 85. In 1884 it ran 188 to 147. In 1885 it was 412 to 244. Ten days later John Ruskin resigned his chair as Slade Professor of Art here at Oxford in protest, he said, at the University's decision to fund vivisection. Nevertheless, the then Vice Chancellor put about the rumour that he had resigned for other reasons.

So, you see, we've all been here before! In Oxford debates on the vivisection issue it was Ruskin and Dodgson versus Burdon-Sanderson in the 1880s, what I call our Oxford Group versus William Paton and Jeffrey Gray in the 1970s and today – who shall I say? Well you can fill in the gaps yourselves! I don't believe the arguments have changed very significantly. The Victorians, of course, brought God into the argument, on both sides. Nevertheless, God or not, I have to say that I have never heard anyone rationally or convincingly defend their speciesism. It is simply bigotry and of the worst sort. Often it comes from scientists who, through their support of Darwinism should be on the other side. They should know better. They have only two logical and consistent positions open to them: either they support the vivisection of unconsenting human animals as well, or they should oppose the vivisection of all animals, nonhuman as well as human! After all, results of research beneficial to human beings would be far more likely from research on humans. Basically, most scientists are morally blind — that is why it is so important that society should keep a firm control over science. We fund it — and ultimately it affects us all.

Having said that, and no doubt having sounded rather extreme, I would like to add this: the vivisection question highlights some of the greatest difficulties in ethics generally. That is one reason why the anti-speciesism revival of the 1970s, based here in Oxford, also had the effect of reviving the whole field of secular ethics internationally. Within a few years some of the world's leading philosophers had published on the issue — Mary Midgely, Tom Regan, Peter Singer, Colin McGinn and Stephen Clark for example. About 90% of them were on the side of the animals, incidentally. In the 1960s philosophy in general was seen as being a dry, if not a moribund subject. By the 1980s it had come alive again — and due, in no small part, to the debate over speciesism.

I have not, today, gone into the details of the ethical argument. This is not, I believe, a Department of Ethics but a general forum. Suffice it to say that if anyone here thinks I am trying to dodge the issues, I refer them to the three further leaflets on the subject I published here in Oxford in the early 1970s, and to the half a dozen books I have published over the years. From these they will see that I have, I hope, developed a consistent moral theory that I call pianism. One of its tenets is a rejection of speciesism. Basically, it can be put like this: there is no good reason why morality should be restricted to the human species. Why should X amount of pain in a human animal matter more than X amount of pain in a cat or a duckbill platypus? Our moral concern should be with the pom of others, regardless of their race, their gender, their intelligence or whether they have hooves, claws or hands. Our focus is on the pain and not the species.

As to the current campaign here in Oxford I say this: I have worked in vivisection laboratories in this country and in America. I have also worked for many years with patients in the National Health Service. From all this experience I can tell you this: there is plenty of humane and ethical research of clinical material that is not being done that should be done, and there is plenty of cruel and useless research on animals being done that should not be. Animal experiments are usually far less useful than the scientists make out. So keep up the pressure! Strive to reduce cruelty to a minimum. Stop all experiments that are not for strictly medical purposes. They give science a bad name! Urge a greater emphasis on the development of humane alternatives and, above all, write letters to the University authorities. Then vote for a government with good animal policies at the next General Election — and for candidates who are not arrogant speciesists!

REFERENCES

Victims of Science : The Use of Animals in Research, Davis-Poynter, 1975; revised edition, Centaur Press, 1983. Dutch translation 1980, Norwegian 1984, Hungarian 1995. Russian 19%
Animal Revolution : Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism, Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989, revised edition Berg, Oxford, 2000
The Political Animal: The Conquest of Speciesism, McFarland, 1998
Painism : A Modern Morality, Opengate Press. 2001
Putting Morality Back into Politics, Imprint Academic, 2006