Peter Singer & Dignity

I’d like to limit my discussion of Peter Singer’s article A Utilitarian Defense of Animal Liberation to his considerations of dignity, in particular to his claim that “Philosophers frequently introduce ideas of dignity, respect and worth at the point at which other reasons appear to be lacking” (80). Here, Singer doesn’t actually persuade me very much that arguments on dignity are so misguided or expendable.To me, it seems that Singer is claiming that appeals to dignity fail in explaining why humans (even bad or deficient humans) are more significant morally than animals because questions of dignity only take “the problem back one step” in that it would complicate the question of justifying human/animal inequality by seeking “relevant capacities or characteristics that all and only humans possess” (80). Later Singer claims that Benn’s discussion of research on an imbecile versus a dog is deficient since he “find[s] it hard to see anything in this argument except a defense of preferring the interests of members of our own species because they are members of our own species” (81). I don’t want to be misunderstood as disagreeing with Singer’s overall claim about speciesism, but I can’t help but think that his criticism of Benn’s argument suggests a possible counterclaim to the problem of dignity. If we were to choose between “feeding a hungry baby or a hungry dog” as Benn discusses, we would naturally chose the baby first. True, it seems that we choose the baby because we view it from our own perspective as human beings. And though I won’t argue it here (because of both space, and my hesitation to make such a large claim), it feels to me like morality is a human enterprise or endeavor or capacity, etc. (I can’t think at the moment of any other species that practices morality in the way humans do.) So while it is a claim for speciesism (which I’m not sure I want to condone), I think that there is a link between dignity and the capacity for moral thought, and if one were to grant that human beings are naturally endowed with a moral capacity (similar to Kant’s view on rationality) then dignity is still a factor in the discussion of inequality and not simply a rhetorical diversion.