[Ads-l] Antedating of "Speciesism"

[Shapiro, Fred]

speciesism (OED 1975)

Wikipedia gives the following information about Richard D. Ryder's coinage of "speciesism."

Fred Shapiro



He first used the term "speciesism" in a privately printed leaflet by the same name, which he distributed in Oxford in 1970 in protest against animal experimentation[9]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Ryder#cite_note-Waldau2001p5-9> – he wrote that he thought of the word while lying in the bath in the Old Manor House in Sunningwell<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunningwell>, Oxfordshire.[10]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Ryder#cite_note-10> Paul Waldau<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Waldau> writes that Ryder used the term in the pamphlet to address experiments on animals that he regarded as illogical, and which, he argued, a fully informed moral agent would challenge. Ryder was also addressing the general attitude that excluded all nonhumans from the protections offered to humans, now known as the anti-speciesism critique. Waldau writes that this original definition of the term – in effect, human-speciesism – has been extended by others to refer to the assignment of value to any being on the basis of species membership alone, so that, for example, prioritising the value of chimpanzees over other animals (human-chimpanzee speciesism) might be seen as similarly illogical.[9]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Ryder#cite_note-Waldau2001p5-9>

Ryder used the term again in his contribution to the Godlovitches/Harris book, in an essay called "Experiments on Animals" (1971). He wrote in the essay that animal researchers seek to have it both ways: they defend the scientific validity of animal experiments on the grounds of the similarity between humans and nonhumans, while defending the morality of it on the grounds of the differences.[11]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Ryder#cite_note-Ryder1971-11> He argued that speciesism is as illogical as racism, writing that "species" and "race" are both vague terms, and asked: "If, under special conditions, it were one day found possible to cross a professor of biology with an ape, would the offspring be kept in a cage or in a cradle?"[11]<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Ryder#cite_note-Ryder1971-11>


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