HISTORICAL AND METAPHYSICAL ANTISPECIESISM. NINE THESES.
1. Common antispeciesism (metaphysical) and the antispeciesism we need (historical)
Metaphysical antispeciesism, i.e. the most common one, knows only the abstract opposition between man and animal, it is unhistorical and considers the human being as an individual. Historical antispeciesism, on the contrary, has a concrete and dialectical understanding of the man-animal relation and knows that man is essentially a social being.
2. The fallacy of metaphysical antispeciesism
Metaphysical antispeciesism is carachterized by the following way of reasoning: 1) it looks at the human history from the point of view of the “dominion” on animals; 2) it turns this concept into an objective reality and places it over history; 3) it considers this phantom (“the speciesism”) as cause of all violence inflicted on animals up to the present. As a matter of fact, speciesism – our belief that man is something other than and superior to every other animal – is the cause of nothing; it is rather the effect of something that the metaphysical antispecesists have not yet explained.
3. How the fable of metaphysical antispeciesism was born (Singer)
Metaphysical antispeciesism is Peter Singer’s biggest and not amendable mistake: according to Singer, specism is the “ideology of our species”, the attitude that we “dominant animals” have in respect of the other animals. Man is not at all in itself a dominant animal. His physical minority in comparison to other animals says exactly the opposite. Man becomes a dominant animal and it becomes a dominant animal only as social collective, not as a species.
