Is it speciesist to value humans over animals?

The objection

“Of course humans matter more than animals, we’re more intelligent, we use language, we have plans for the future. Favouring our own species isn’t prejudice; it’s natural loyalty, the same instinct that makes us care more for family than strangers. Calling that ‘speciesism’ is an abuse of the word.”

The answer

State the charge precisely, because it’s narrower than it sounds. Speciesism, the term coined by Richard Ryder and developed by Peter Singer, is bias in favour of one’s own species and against others, granted on species membership alone [1]. Species do, of course, differ in morally relevant ways. The point is that bare membership of a species, like bare membership of a race or a sex, is not itself one of those ways [2]. To weigh a being’s interests by which group it belongs to, rather than by what it can experience, is the same logical move whether the group is racial, sexual or biological.

Now comes the natural reply: “but humans really are different, intelligence, rationality, language.” Good. Now name the trait. Choose the single capacity that supposedly justifies a wall between all humans and all animals, and watch what happens. This is the argument from marginal cases. Whatever trait you pick, there are humans who lack it (a newborn, a person in late dementia, someone with a profound cognitive disability) and by the measure you named they may have less of it than an adult pig, itself a strikingly complex and emotional animal [3]. Yet we’d never accept farming or eating those humans. So the trait you named can’t be doing the moral work. We already protect humans who fail the test and exploit animals who pass it.

Loyalty to family is no rescue. We may prefer those close to us, but preference doesn’t extend to killing strangers for our convenience. Loving your own child doesn’t entitle you to harm someone else’s.

What remains, once every candidate trait collapses, is simply “they are not us.” And that, exactly, is the definition of speciesism. Name the one trait, present in every human and absent in every animal, that justifies the difference. If you can’t, what is your position resting on but the very prejudice you’d condemn in any other form?