Abstract

The views of Peter Singer, and various authors in the Singer and Regan anthology Animal Rights and Human Obligations, are explored. Their case against „speciesism”, that only members of the human species are eligible for moral considerations, is accepted, but the further inference that a1nimałs have strong rights, especially not to be killed for food, is questioned. Utilitarianism would, for example, seem to have room for the eating of animals, though rather precariously. However, the general view of morality which is argued to make best sense of our inclination to think that eating animals is permissible is a contractarian/egoist one. This makes it obvious that we have no obligations to animals, since we need incur none ; at the same time it