Animal Liberation, "is a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of one's own species and against those of members of another species." 1 He argues that it is wrong in a way that parallels racism and sexism: All three practices involve discrimination according to a characteristic that is not morally relevant. In an article that has been regularly anthologized with Singer's writings, Bonnie Steinbock objects: "There is . . . an important difference between racism or sexism and 'speciesism.' We do not subject animals to different moral treatment simply because they have fur and feathers, but because they are in fact different from human beings in ways that could be morally relevant." 2 More people share Steinbock's view than Singer's: Speciesism is not taken as seriously as racism or sexism. Consider the following from a recent book entitled Social Ethics: A Student's Guide: "Students influenced by personist philosophy teachers do not . . . consider the possibility that [speciesism] is a good 'ism' like (perhaps) egalitarianism and patriotism." 3 The book's author, Cambridge philosopher Jenny Teichmann, rejects what she calls "personism" (citing Singer as a paradigm "personist") and endorses what she calls "humanism" instead. Although Teichmann implies herself to be in the minority in the philosophical community, I think it safe to say that for many it is viewed as trivializing the wrong of racism to compare speciesism with it. Certainly Teichmann's humanism is shared by the vast majority of nonphilosophers.In this paper, I shall argue that humanism is an indefensible moral position, and that speciesism, once properly analyzed, is indeed directly analogous to racism and sexism. The main reason why speciesism is not held to be as serious a wrong as racism or sexism, is, I think, because we now automatically assume that women and nonwhites are moral persons, on an equal footing with white males (in the sense of being entitled to the same basic set of rights and liberties) but assume that nonhumans are not persons in this sense. That is, the central disagreement between humanists and their critics is over the membership criteria for personhood. My paper reflects this concern, as I focus on issues of criteria of personhood to the exclusion of other issues that concern chauvinisms.A simplifying assumption that I operate under is that personhood is an all-or-nothing concept: that is, that either one has the basic set of rights accorded all persons or one does not. While this view is widely shared, it can certainly be challenged: One might argue that there are a range of categories

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Over the past ten years or so, the position of Liberal Nationalism has progressed from being an apparent oxymoron to a widely accepted view. In this paper I sketch the most promin�nt liberal defenses of nationalism, focusing first on the difficulties of specifying criteria of nationhood, then criticizing what I take to be the most promising, culture-based defense, forwarded by Will Kymlicka. I argue that such an approach embroils one in a pernicious conservatism completely at odds with the global justice concerns that I take to be central to liberalism with its core values of equality and liberty.

Perry Hendricks’ ‘impairment argument’, which he has defended in this journal, is intended to demonstrate that the generally conceded wrongness of giving a fetus fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) shows that abortion must also be immoral, even if we allow that the fetus is not a rights-bearing moral person. The argument fails because the harm of causing FAS is extrinsic but Hendricks needs it to be intrinsic for it to show anything about abortion. Either the subject of the wrong of causing FAS is a person who does not exist in the case of abortion or the wrong is negligible.