This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
Some philosophers change the world.
Peter Singer's writings helped 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 little 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.