What if everyone was human?

Speciesism is discrimination based on species, where species membership is identified with moral community membership (i.e. where species membership determines someone’s moral status and rights). Like all kinds of discrimination, speciesism is a kind of unwanted arbitrariness: the victims of discrimination cannot want their arbitrary exclusion from the moral community. The exclusion is arbitrary, because there is no justifying rule to select species instead of one of the many other possible groups (e.g. races, genera, families, biological orders,…), and the precise boundary of a species is not well-defined and therefore inherently arbitrary. We cannot always determine who belongs to a species. If you consider all your ancestors, you cannot always tell who was human. There was no human ancestor whose parents were clearly non-human.

If we do not want to avoid all kinds of unwanted arbitrariness, we acknowledge that unwanted arbitrariness is morally permissible, and we would no longer be able to give valid arguments why we should not be the victims of unwanted arbitrariness. Therefore, we must avoid all kinds of unwanted arbitrariness, including speciesism.

The best way to avoid speciesism in our moral judgments, is to consider everyone as a human being. Everyone includes everyone who has personal experiences and preferences. Some humans are not able to talk with words or walk on their two hind legs. They are smaller, have more hair, a longer nose, bigger ears, another skin color, a tail. We normally call them dogs, but let’s call them humans such that we consider them as humans. Some humans have wings to fly, some humans have an IQ less than 50, some humans have a very good sense of smell, some can run fast, some can breathe under water, some are not able to understand moral rules, some are not able to understand the law or the far future, some require special diets,… One could even consider plants, computers and other non-sentient objects as humans, but because these objects lack any consciousness, they are as conscious as non-existent humans, so it doesn’t matter if we do not consider them as humans.

Now let’s look at the world full of humans. What do we see? We see small humans entering the bodies of bigger humans (parasitism). We see some humans hunting and killing many other humans (predation). We see some humans dying of starvation if they are not able to take body parts (e.g. muscle tissue) of other humans. We see some humans breeding, slaughtering and eating other humans merely for their taste pleasure (livestock farming). And we see that the vast majority of humans have brothers and sisters that are suffering and dying at a very early age (the so-called r-selection reproductive strategy of wild animals, where those animals have many offspring that have very short lives). That is what we see with antispeciesist glasses. Most of those humans are mentally disabled, which means they do not have any understanding of ethics or mathematics. Luckily, a minority of humans have high levels of IQ, are able to understand ethics and are able to invent new ways to improve the well-being of other humans. Unfortunately, those smart humans do not always see the world through antispeciesist eyes, although they are able to understand that unwanted arbitrariness is unwanted. So it’s time for those humans to put on antispeciesist glasses, to see everyone as a human, with their own capacities, desires and experiences. Then they will figure out what they’ll have to do with all the other humans in the world.