Philip Wollen

This is an extract from the intelligence squared debate 'Should Meat Be Off the Menu?' Philip Wollen's emotionally charged argument touches on the basic case for animal rights. Though animals may not have the cognitive capacity of humans, and even if we can rightly accord them lower beings because of this, they have the same essential capacity to suffer that makes them morally relevant. It is a simple moral law that those with the capacity to suffer must be included in the moral sphere, it is wrong to think not that if we can make agreements with a being or that some circumstance of birth puts us in a position of power over them that this amounts to a moral privilege to dispense with them as we may. There was once a time where it was universally moral for those 'better' humans to be accorded the power and moral right to power over other humans as we assume for ourselves the right to power over non-human animals. It is an arrangement repugnant to every egalitarian ideal, and it's a gross oversight by a humanity that is struggling to move beyond a dark past of human slavery.

It is our capacity for empathy that is our most unique human capacity, if we fail to exercise it we also fail to be more than any other animal.