Many philosophers accept both of the following claims: (1) consciousness matters morally, and (2) species membership doesn’t matter morally. In other words, many reject speciesism but accept what we might call 'sentientism'. But do the reasons against speciesism yield analogous reasons against sentientism, just as the reasons against racism and sexism are thought to yield analogous reasons against speciesism? This paper argues that speciesism is disanalogous to sentientism (as well as racism and sexism). I make a case for the following (...) asymmetry: (a) some non-humans clearly have interests, but (b) no non-conscious entities clearly have interests. This asymmetry, I argue, renders sentientism resistant to the standard argument against speciesism. (shrink)

Humanists argue for assigning the highest moral status to all humans over any non-humans directly or indirectly on the basis of uniquely superior human cognitive abilities. They may also claim that humanism is the strongest position from which to combat racism, sexism, and other forms of within-species discrimination. I argue that changing conceptual foundations in comparative research and discoveries of advanced cognition in many non-human species reveal humanism’s psychological speciesism and its similarity with common justifications of within-species discrimination.

Progressive social movements correctly presume that justice demands treating people with humane regard: combining respect for human agency with concern for human vulnerability to suffering. Promoting humane regard is a critical means of acknowledging the moral claims of humanity. Some critics reject the underlying concept of a universal humanity, in virtue of which human beings form a distinct community of reciprocal moral obligation. Critics charge that the concept presumes indefensible dualisms (of mind and body, and humanity and nature); that it (...) wrongly assigns a privileged status to reason; and that it involves an unsupportable belief in human exceptionalism. I argue that we can assert the moral claims of humanity without privileging reason, repudiating nature, or denying that there are many valuable ways to be human. I also defend an account of human moral exceptionalism that does not imply human moral superiority, to show that we can meet morally weighty obligations to humans while affirming morally substantive connections to non-human communities and domains. (shrink)