Escaping Species Hierarchy

Anne Phillips

London School of Economics and Political Science

If you are an egalitarian, you will (should!) think of equality between humans as unconditional, applying to all regardless of wealth, rank, gender, race, ability, or behaviour. In truth, we rarely manage this. Grand proclamations of human equality long coexisted with the denial of women, the poor, the colonised, the enslaved, often on the basis that these lacked crucial ‘human’ characteristics like rationality or the capacity to become civilised. The specification of human characteristics continues today, though in the less overtly exclusionary form of a supposedly shared human dignity, capacity for moral agency, or ability to conceive of one’s own future. I have argued elsewhere that any way of marking out the qualifying characteristics still introduces a condition, and that we should refuse all of these in the name of a genuinely unconditional equality. The problem, then, is that this very unconditionality seems to make equality available only to humans. It seems to leave nonhuman animals out in the cold.

This dilemma is at the heart of Raffael Fasel’s important new book (More Equal Than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals, OUP 2024). He explores the tension between an egalitarianism that refuses any differentiation between humans, but in the process introduces a sharp divide between human and nonhuman animals (this is described in the book as the Aristocratic conception); and what he calls the Meritocratic conception, that sees rights as deriving from empirical characteristics, not therefore automatically shared by all humans, but extendable to whichever nonhuman animals also exhibit them. He includes a fascinating account of an Enlightenment debate between the naturalist Jean-Claude Delamétherie, who argued for a continuum between humans and animals but then also among humans (thereby anticipating Peter Singer), and the egalitarian Jean-Baptiste Salaville, whose pursuit of human equality went along with an almost complete disregard of the suffering or interests of animals. This is a great illustration of the problem, though the account doesn’t perhaps sufficiently bring out the sense in which neither was an egalitarian: neither, so far as I know, defending equal rights for women, nor insisting on equal rights for the poor, nor especially critical of slavery. I have one criticism and one query, but overall this is an important and thought-provoking book.

The criticism is about the overly simply division into two approaches: the Aristocratic conception that ‘considers human rights to be entitlements that all members of a high rank – the rank of human dignity – possess equally and to the exclusion of other beings’ (p 50), and the Meritocratic conception that sees rights as deriving from empirical characteristics, not therefore specifically attached to humans. First, the terminology. Some of the leading exponents of ‘aristocratic’ egalitarianism (Jeremy Waldron, George Kateb) do indeed explicitly endorse the high rank of human beings and make the claim about an intrinsically human dignity central to their argument. But what of other egalitarians (myself, for example, or Andrea Sangiovanni) who have explicitly rejected the idea that our possession of something termed human dignity - in effect, the modern equivalent of the soul - is what justifies treating us as equals?

The problem is not just that any attempt to bundle theoretical approaches into two ideal types distorts at least some of the material: Raffael Fasel acknowledges this and makes a reasonable case about the usefulness nonetheless of ideal types. The problem is that he takes it for granted that human rights, equality, and dignity always go together, ignoring the deliberate ways in which some egalitarians have teased these apart. And not just as regards dignity, for whether one focuses primarily on rights or equality also makes a difference. Rights can be attributed to nonhuman entities: to animals, of course, but also corporations, and perhaps arguably to nature. The claim to be regarded as an equal does however seem to be something peculiarly human. We now recognise the absurdity of many things said to mark fundamental differences between humans and animals: the idea that only humans use tools, or only humans plan in advance, or only humans experience grief and loss. The one species difference between human and nonhuman animals that I nonetheless see as significant is that humans repeatedly reject hierarchy and insist on their equality.

Not of course all humans all the time – history tells almost the opposite of this – but throughout history, humans have made a stand for equality, and it is at least plausible to think of human relations in a future world as regulated by principles of equality. This makes much less sense as regards nonhuman animals. What would it mean to insist on equality between animals, when some of them are predators and others are prey? What would it mean to insist on equality as a regulating principle for species that organise themselves with alpha males battling for access to multiple females? Species difference, in that sense, matters. This does not mean nonhuman animals have no right to life or bodily integrity or liberty. But it does mean that equality is not the appropriate governing principle for non-human life. When Fasel writes as if rights, equality, and dignity always go together, he obscures this important distinction.

My query is about species membership. Fasel argues that we should resist the idea that specific individuals within any species might qualify for rights denied to others of the same species; he argues instead for species membership as the basis for attributing rights. I very much share his insistence on species membership. Indeed, when I am asked what it is about humans that justifies treating all of us as of equal status, I say it is simply that we are members of the same species, nothing more, nothing less. But the implication of Raffael Fasel’s argument is surely that, depending on the species, different categories of animals will qualify for different combinations of rights, and this seems to return us to a hierarchy between species. So some get the right to life, liberty, and bodily integrity, maybe others only get the right to one of these? Since it will, moreover, be human animals who make these decisions, doesn’t that of itself already establish one very large kind of hierarchy? And when there are conflicts between species (like the right to life of the Indian villagers versus the right to liberty of the tiger threatening them), do the proposed judgments about proportionality mean the humans will always win out? This book makes a great case against the ‘aristocratic’ claims of high rank for humans. But the solutions it suggests cannot, it seems, escape some form of species hierarchy.

This blog post is part of the blog symposium on Raffael Fasel's book More Equal than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals (OUP 2024).

Anne Phillips is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Government of The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Suggested citation: Anne Phillips, ‘Escaping Species Hierarchy’ IACL-AIDC Blog (4 February 2025) Escaping Species Hierarchy — IACL-IADC Blog