An Analysis Of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation Theory

Peter Singer is a famous contemporary ethicist,the former chairman of society in international bioethics,also plays an important role in the history of western ecological ethics.He proposed the theory of animal liberation,which had a large influence in the contemporary and also was a controversial issue.He wrote "the theory of animal liberation",known as the "bible" of the theory of animal protection,which is a major attempt expanding the scope of moral concern from human to animal.Singer found that under the consumption demand,the animal consumption significantly increased the burden of the ecological environment.He found the expanding of animal farms and the continued misuse of animal experiments caused the large increase in cruel behavior for animal.He thought that it is necessary to break the boundary of the traditional ethics and put forward the theory of animal liberation.In Singer's opinion,"liberation of animals is the liberation of mankind again".First of all,basing on the human and animal genetic similarity in a natural science.Singer found that there is no impassable gap between humans and animals.On the contrary,there is constant relationship.He based on the relationship as the theoretical premise of the animal liberation theory,so that the moral concern expanded from humans to animals and made possibility in the theory deduction.Second,basing on the principle of utilitarianism and equality,he put forward two principles of the theory of animal liberation--hybrid utilitarian principle and double factors egalitarianism principle.What's more,as the extending inference of animal liberation theory,Singer advocated vegetarianism actively.This paper expounded the necessity of practice vegetarianism in the ethical considerations,environmental protection purpose,consol needing,encouraged people to establish a new kind of relationship with nature.On the discussion the problemabout animal protection,Mr Singer's animal liberation theory about animal welfare(represented by bentham)and the theory about animal rights(represented by Ronald Reagan's strong animal rights theory and the weak form of animal rights theory represented by warren),there were both connections and differences.Manmohan Singer,inherited and developed the theory of bentham as pioneer of animal welfare,but his defense of animal liberation is not based on rights.The representative figure of the conflicts on Animal rights theory--warren Reagan and Mr Singer also foiled Singer from another side to animal liberation theory.Although Mr Singer's animal liberation theory was controversal,but he did made significant attempt to expand the scope of ethics,explored a new perspective for ecological ethics relationship between man and nature.In reality,he also influenced more and more people to choose vegetarianism for moral consideration,and indirectly changed the mode of the European treating animal breeding farms,and so on.But Mr Singer's theory of animal liberation has obvious limitations.The anthropocentrism from the animal liberation theory is backward,the second is the extending inference from the theory of animal liberation-vegetarianism as the main practice to solve the problem,its feasibility is still small.