Peter Singer: Animal Liberation (1973 Review)

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, historical figures, philosophical arguments, and definitions from Peter Singer's 1973 review essay 'Animal Liberation'.

Animals, Men and Morals

A book edited by Stanley Godlovitch, Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris described by Peter Singer as a manifesto for an Animal Liberation movement.

Liberation movement

A collective demand for the expansion of moral horizons so that practices previously regarded as natural and inevitable come to be recognized as intolerable.

Speciesism

A term used by Richard Ryder to describe the belief or prejudice that humans are entitled to treat members of other species in a way in which it would be wrong to treat members of their own species.

Moral equality

A principle distinct from factual equality, establishing that the demand for equal consideration of interests does not depend on intelligence, IQ, or actual abilities.

Jeremy Bentham's formula of equality

The formula stating 'Each to count for one and none for more than one,' establishing that the interests of every being with interests must be taken into account and weighted equally.

Bentham's criterion for moral consideration

The standard stating that the essential question for nonhuman moral status is not 'Can they reason?' or 'Can they talk?' but 'Can they suffer?'

LD50 test

A standard toxicity test for foodstuffs and other substances designed to find the dosage level at which $50$ percent of the test animals succumb and die.

Factory farming

An intensive agricultural system driven by business methods aimed at securing the highest ratio of output to input by confining animals under extreme restrictions.

Battery cage

A confinement cage for poultry—measuring twenty by eighteen inches for four or five hens under British practice—featuring a sloping wire floor that prevents natural bird activities.

Beauty without Cruelty

An organization founded by Muriel the Lady Dowding that campaigns against the use of animals for furs and cosmetics.

Patrick Corbett

A Professor of Philosophy at Sussex University who concluded in Animals, Men and Morals that the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity must be extended over animal lives to consign animal slavery to the past.

Richard Ryder

A clinical psychologist who coined the term 'speciesism' in Animals, Men and Morals and provided an account detailing the scale and pain involved in academic and commercial vivisection.

Ruth Harrison

An animal welfare campaigner and author of the $1964$ book Animal Machines whose essay 'On Factory Farming' documented modern intensive farming abuses.

Roslind Godlovitch's extermination argument

A philosophical critique arguing that pairing 'animal suffering is to be avoided' with 'there is nothing wrong with killing animals' logically forces the absurd duty to exterminate all animal life.

Treating nonhumans as means

The instrumental view that regards nonhuman animals as mere utilities or tools for human ends—such as palate gratification or testing—rather than respecting them as ends in themselves.

Leonard Nelson

An unjustly neglected German philosopher who died in $1927$, whose ethical writings on nonhumans were included in Animals, Men and Morals.