"This paper defends ‘‘moral individualism’’ against various arguments
that have been intended to show that membership in the human species or participation
in our distinctively human form of life is a sufficient basis for a moral status higher than
that of any animal. Among the arguments criticized are the ‘‘nature-of-the-kind
argument,’’ which claims that it is the nature of all human beings to have certain higher
psychological capacities, even if, contingently, some human beings lack them, and
various versions of the idea that there is a special form of life that allhuman beings share
but of which no animal can be a full participant. The paper concludes that none of these
arguments succeeds in demonstrating that there are moral reasons to permit animals to
be treated less well than members of our own species whose psychological capacities
and potential are no higher than those of the animals."...