An Analysis of the Animal Rights Debate from an Ethics Perspective - Essay Example

Roger Scruton’s “The Moral Status of Animals” follows a similar line of argument that defends all life forms on the face of the earth and reveals his intense convictions in ideological and environmental thought. Singer’s comprehensive analysis brings to light many aspects of what Richard D. Ryder has termed ‘speciesism’. Drawing comparisons to the liberations movements of the sixties and the debate around the concept of equality among human beings, Singer emphasizes on the need to take animals too into consideration in such debates.

He attacks the norm that animals can be excluded from the debate on equal rights because they lack the moral, rational powers than humans possess. Singer points out that there exists an essential difference among human beings based on race, gender and demographical specifics, but the equal rights theorists overcome this by stressing on the basic human qualities. The equal rights theories also highlight the individual differences among human beings on which the concept of personal rights is based.

Singer uses a systematic analytical strategy to break down these arguments one by one. Singer alludes to the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s monumental treatise, Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 and how “they were satirized in an anonymous publication entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes”, actually written by Thomas Taylor, a Cambridge philosopher. Taylor refuted Wollstonecraft’s by trivializing her demands for the equal treatment of women on moral, philosophical and social realms by proposing that in fact one should go another step further and treat dogs, cats and horses in the similar manner.

This argument was an absurd one at that time, and Taylor’s attempt was to prove that Wollstonecraft’s arguments regarding the rights of women were also absurd, as it questioned a specific order in nature. Singer’s overview of Taylor’s argument