blomborg11

A misquoting of philosopher Peter Singer

this page was created by me, Jeff Opal, on 19-FEB-2004, and was last updated on 19-FEB-2004

The words for note 66, on page 355, almost explicitly attribute this belief in "equal rights for animals" to the famous philosopher Peter Singer:

66. I do not generally buy the argument that animals should have equal rights, cf. Singer 1977.

Counting lives lost from different problems also emphasizes a central assumption in my argument: that the needs and desires of humankind represent the crux of our assessment of the world. This does not mean that plants and animals do not also have rights but that the focus will always be on the human evaluation.66

On page 11 Lomborg says:

    The first of these two sentences says something that is so commonly accepted that Lomborg should have imposed a burden of proof upon himself to convincingly show that some portion of the persons his book complains about really don't believe that the needs and desires of humankind should dominate the needs and desires of other living things in our decision-making.
    Notice his wording: he doesn't say what my bold-faced paraphrase explicitly states as a prescriptive statement expressing a value. Instead, the first sentence nonsensically is expressed as a descriptive statement. However, a careful reading of it shows that it can't be: he must mean something else It doesn't make sense as a descriptive statement. Lomborg has left the "should" out. The actual claim being expressed by implication is a prescriptive statement like my boldfaced paraphrase, not about what "is" but rather about what "should be".
     Lomborg here seems to be attempting to issue some innuendo that suggests that some of his opposition believe animals and/or plants be given rights equivalent to what humans have. Had he clearly stated the prescriptive claim, however, the innuendo claim would have become too obvious, and its bizarreness would have forced Lomborg to reveal to readers who doesn't believe that the needs and desires of humankind should dominate the needs and desires of other living things in our decision-making.

I regard this as, definitely, a misquoting of Peter Singer. The book referenced on p. 492 ofthe bibliography ("Singer, Peter 1977 Animal Liberation. New York: Avon Books.") empathically argues that animals should not be given "equal rights". Singer says animals should be given "equal consideration", which is very different from "equal rights". He points out that many of our rights, such as to speech and to voting, wouldn't make any sense for animals to have because they aren't smart enough to use them.