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Animal Liberation (book)

Overview

Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals is a 1975 book by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. It is widely considered within the animal liberation movement to be the founding philosophical statement of its ideas. Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to human and nonhuman animals. Following Jeremy Bentham, Singer argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to experience suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. He popularized the term "speciesism" in the book, which had been coined by Richard D. Ryder to describe the exploitative treatment of animals.

A revised edition, Animal Liberation Now, was released in 2023.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Philosophers who discussed Animal Liberation (book)

• Roger Scruton
• Peter Singer

Related ideas

• Roger Scruton
• Human rights
• Richard Posner
• Grief
• Peter Singer
• Speciesism
• The New Yorker
• Utilitarianism
• Martha Nussbaum
• Jeremy Bentham
• Animal rights
• Capability approach

Place in the tradition

Part of Analytic philosophy.

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