Inherent Value

In this week’s readings, an excerpt that stood out to me came from Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation or Animal Rights?” He writes, “It may be argued, the borderline between those who have moral rights and those who do not will become blurred…If the decision to grant such courtesy status is to be decided by weighing up the consequences of granting or denying it, we must include in the calculation the way in which this enables us to put a fictitious [divide] between ourselves and other animals.” I feel that both the rights of humans as well as animals are equally important and should not be placed in a hierarchy. Instead of “weighing the consequences” for what constitutes giving animals rights or which social issue has more importance, we should look at these issues with multiple lenses/perspectives and understand the interconnectedness between human rights and animal rights. Then we can look past the so-called “fictitious gulf” between humans and animals. Equal consideration is important for gaining respect of a being’s inherent value.