page_title: Speciesism
section_title: "Discontinuous mind"
hierarchical_section_title: Speciesism / Arguments against / "Discontinuous mind"
caption_attribution_description: English: Bust-length cropped portrait photograph of Richard Dawkins in 2008
context_page_description: Speciesism or specism refers to the differing treatment or moral consideration of individuals based on their species membership. Such discrimination involves treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species, despite the individuals having similar interests.
  The term first appeared during a protest against animal experimentation in 1970. Philosophers such as Peter Singer argue that speciesism plays a role in the practice of factory farming, the use of animals for entertainment such as in bullfighting and rodeos, the taking of animals' fur and skin, experimentation on animals. Others, including Oscar Horta, argue that the refusal to aid animals suffering in the wild due to natural processes, is a form of speciesism.
  Singer and other philosophers assert that speciesism only occurs when the interests of different beings are similar.
context_section_description: Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, stated against speciesism in The Blind Watchmaker (1986), The Great Ape Project (1993), and The God Delusion (2006), elucidating the connection with evolutionary theory. He compares former racist attitudes and assumptions to their present-day speciesist counterparts. In the chapter "The one true tree of life" in The Blind Watchmaker, he states that it is not only zoological taxonomy that is saved from awkward ambiguity by the extinction of intermediate forms but also human ethics and law. Dawkins states that what he calls the "discontinuous mind" is ubiquitous, dividing the world into units that reflect nothing but our use of language, and animals into discontinuous species:
  The director of a zoo is entitled to "put down" a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might "put down" a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! ... The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.
  Dawkins elaborated in a discussion with Singer at The Center for Inquiry in 2007 when asked whether he continues to eat meat: "It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery."
caption: Richard Dawkins argues that speciesism is an example of the "discontinuous mind"
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