This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Some philosophers change the world.

Peter Singer's writings help launch the animal welfare movement, sometimes called the animal rights movement.

Singer believed that we need to take animal suffering seriously,

that to dismiss animal pain, merely because it was animal and not human,

was what he called speciesism.

Gary Francione of Rutgers University argues that Singer and those like him who want to

improve animal welfare are utterly misguided, but not because they're too radical quite the

contrary. Gary Francione welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you very much for

having me. We're going to talk about animal abolitionism.

Perhaps you could just begin by explaining what that is.

Well, a bit of history.

For the past 200 years, our approach to animal ethics has been the animal welfare approach,

the notion that it's all right to use animals

as long as we treat them humanely. This goes back to Bentham. Bentham said

look animals can suffer the suffering is morally relevant but animals aren't

self-aware they don't care that we use them, they only care about

how we use them, and we need to use them in a humane way.

The modern animal movement really is still stuck in that sort of paradigm.

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