It Is A Mistake To Assume That

There Are Some Circumstances, For Example, Where The Newborn Baby Is Severely Disabled And Where The Parents Think That It's Better That Child Should Not Live, When Killing The Newborn Baby Is Not At All Wrong ... Not Like Killing The Chimpanzee Would Be.

People Tend To Care About Dogs Because They Generally Have More Experience With Dogs As Companions; But Other Animals Are As Capable Of Suffering As Dogs Are. Few People Feel Sympathy For Rats. Yet Rats Are Intelligent Animals, And There Can Be No Doubt That Rats Are Capable Of Suffering And Do Suffer From Countless Painful Experiments Performed On Them. If The Army Were To Stop Experiments On Dogs And Switch To Rats Instead, We Should Not Be Any Less Concerned.

My Aim Is To Advocate That We Make This Mental Switch In Respect Of Our Attitudes And Practices Towards A Very Large Group Of Beings: Members Of Species Other Than Our Own - Or, As We Popularly Though Misleadingly Call Them, Animals. In Other Words, I Am Urging That We Extend To Other Species The Basic Principle Of Equality That Most Of Us Recognize Should Be Extended To All Members Of Our Own Species.

If A Being Suffers There Can Be No Moral Justification For Refusing To Take That Suffering Into Consideration. No Matter What The Nature Of The Being, The Principle Of Equality Requires That Its Suffering Be Counted Equally With The Like Suffering - Insofar As Rough Comparisons Can Be Made - Of Any Other Being. So The Limit Of Sentience Is The Only Defensible Boundary Of Concern For The Interests Of Others. To Mark This Boundary By Some Other Characteristic Like Intelligence Or Rationality Would Be To Mark It In An Arbitrary Manner. Why Not Choose Some Other Characteristic, Like Skin Color?

The Pentagon Said That These Prisoners Were Kept In Accordance With The Geneva Convention, And Of Course I Was Not Reassured By That, But I Couldn't Prove That That Was Wrong; So We're Clearer About That.