Philosophy - Animal rights & liberation article by Peter Singer Essay

Philosophy - Animal rights & liberation article by Peter Singer - Essay Example Singer points out that when humans alter nature, they tend to only take the costs and benefits for humans into consideration; and the effects of such actions on other animals are often given no moral significance. To illustrate, according to Singer, when a ‘reservoir’ is constructed, though it is pointed out that it would drown a valley teeming with wildlife, the reason behind this concern often lies in the fact that the valley has value as a place for recreation like hunting, shooting, and bush walking. In other words, the hardships caused by the reservoir to the lives of the nonhuman beings in the valley are not of any moral concern. Thus, the claim is that while lamenting on the negative impact of such human encroachments, the concern is not about the direct hardship caused by the alteration to the nonhuman beings there, but about the possible losses to humans themselves as a result of the alteration. In other words, the sustainability of a human interference in nature is often decided by weighing its benefits to humans against its negative impacts on humans. The lives of other species are not given any value other than the usefulness of those animals to humans. According to Singer, not giving attention to the sufferings of nonhuman things for the mere reason that they do not belong to human species is not justifiable. In order to justify this claim, Singer provides the example of the history of slavery. The White slave owners never took the sufferings of the Black slaves into consideration because their moral concerns were limited to White people (135). However, later on, the society realized the fact that the ideology was terribly wrong. Very similar is the case of nonhuman things too. The only difference is that in the former, ‘race’ was the boundary of morality, and in the latter case, ‘species’ is the boundary. Thus, the argument culminates in the