The Human Factor

Abstract

The dissertation explores the ethical significance of our humanity and our relations to animals. In it, I present a novel defense of a commonplace thought: that we are morally permitted to favor human interests over nonhuman interests. It defends this thought against two competing views. The first view construes our favoring of human lives as merely a prejudice, speciesism. Speciesism, on this view, is an illicit group-based prejudice akin to racism and sexism. The second view does not assume there is anything illicit about our favoring of human beings. Rather, it justifies our privileging of human beings by appeal to the differential moral statuses human beings and animals enjoy. Against these two views, I argue that we should understand our privileging of human interests as a form of partiality. In the same way that parents may favor their children and yet still affirm the moral equality of all children, so too humans may favor other humans and still maintain that all the animals, including human beings, are equally morally considerable.