What’s Wrong with “Speciesism?”: Toward an Anti-Ableist Reimagining of an Abused Term

Abstract

Peter Singer has long contended it is “speciesist” to regard all human life as of equal moral worth, maintaining that the moral value of life itself hinges on certain intellectual and psychological capacities. I argue that “speciesism” can be wrested from the ableism with which Singer aligns this term of critique and reclaimed as an important term of ethical analysis serving the interests of both animal ethics and disability bioethics alike, but the term must be extracted from capacity-based moral reasoning to do so. I turn to Eva Kittay, Sunaura Taylor, and Emmanuel Levinas to advance this argument.