speciesism

alternative species-ism · alternative speciesm · alternative specism

1. uncountableethicsAn ethical stance that assigns different worth or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership, such as assigning greater rights to human beings than to other animals.First known use 1970

   Sometimes speciesism is also used to describe a positive rather than a negative attitude as when dolphins are alleged to have rescued humans from danger while ignoring other species in peril.

   2017, Richard D. Ryder, Speciesism, Painism and Happiness: A Morality for the Twenty-First Century, Andrews UK Limited, →ISBN

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   Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees

   1996 [1986], Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., →ISBN

   This human chauvinism is one form of a general type of discrimination known as speciesism. What is speciesism? Think of racism. The term “speciesism” has been strategically used by animal rights activists from the 1970s onward precisely […]

   2013, John Huss, Planet of the Apes and Philosophy: Great Apes Think Alike, Open Court, →ISBN, page 84

2. uncountableliteraturePrejudice or discrimination based on membership in a particular sapient species, especially between humans and extraterrestrial species; interspecies bigotry analogous to racism.

   The speciesism in relation to imagined aliens operates according to a logic of radical otherness within proximity.

   2006, Gabriele Schwab, “Ethnographies of the Future: Personhood, Agency, and Power in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis”, in Bill Maurer, Gabriele Schwab, editors, Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 141

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   This is a relatively common trope in science fiction, as these examples suggest. Some mode of racial discrimination is displaced onto a relation between different species, and frequently between humans and humanoid aliens. Speciesism allows for the exploration and maybe resolution of racial discrimination.

   2008, Thomas LaMarre, “Speciesism, Part I: Translating Races into Animals in Wartime Animation”, in Mechademia, volume 3, number 1, →DOI, archived from the original on 12 Jul 2022, page 91 of 75–95

   The Horta ascent to the stars succeeds because of their eugenic antagonist, an instance of the Trek principle that insularity, racism, and speciesism, driven by the urge to master nature, are ultimately self-defeating.

   2016, Anthony Lioi, “Stellar Cosmopolitans: Star Trek and a Federation of Species”, in Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture, Bloomsbury Academic, →ISBN, pages 79–80