Equality And Equality In John Singer's All Animals Are Equal

“The state of being equal, especially in status, rights, and opportunities.” These 11 words are the most basic definition of equality. This all-encompassing ideal has been redefined as many times as generations which have fought for it, and thus, teaching us that equality is and ever-evolving ideal. From suffrage and women’s rights to civil rights, freedom of speech, property rights, health equality, economic equality, and social equality, have been in a constant state of evolution, being redefined by each group, and while we as a society constantly work towards more equal terms, one group has remained almost regularly marginalized - the diversity of animal life with which we are surrounded. While Singer takes a more direct approach to the

Rather than taking his position at face value, based on title alone, meaning equality in a totalitarian view, Singer goes on to analyse the criteria from a utilitarian view. Within the paper, he states that one of the biggest challenges to any equal rights movement is the fact that the movement comes off as appalling because it disturbs the status quo that is in favor of the dominant group. Examples of this has been shown time and time again throughout our recent history - women voting and female liberation was considered appalling by men, and the black rights movement received an incredible amount of pushback by whites, going so far as segregation and Jim Crow

Current events and even a simple observation of people show that all people are not equal, in it’s purest sense. Most recently, the black lives matter/all lives matter has shown us that the phrase alone misses the point that as a social entirety, not all lives matter in the sense of understanding all lives to be of equal value. As individuals, no two people are alike - “Like it or not, we must face the fact that humans come in different shapes and sizes; they come with differing moral capacities, differing intellectual abilities, differing amounts of benevolent feeling and sensitivity to the needs of others, differing abilities to communicate effectively, and differing capacities to experience pleasure and pain” (Singer 173). We’re all different, and in being different, we’re not equal. Accepting this idea, Singer concludes that equality is a moral idea, and not a universal one. It can be argued that morality itself is not equal, but a product of nature vs. nurture. Examples of the variation in morality can be seen in everything from capital punishment, where we accept the right to kill one person but not another, to deforestation for human benefit while destroying resources and animal ecosystems. If morality were universal and equal then there would be no difference between the Pope and a