The question of the legitimacy of the founding of the state of Israel has no necessary connection with the judgements that we can make about the policy pursued by this state today, particularly with regard to the Palestinian populations with which it interacts; any more than we feel obliged, in judging French policy today, to question the legitimacy of the birth of this country. Yet, more than 70 years after the founding of Israel in 1948, the legitimacy of this event remains at the centre of debate. For many, Israel is by nature – i.e.

Anti-Semitism in Europe since the War

In France, for several decades now3, anti-Semitism has officially been banned, both by law in its public expression, and de facto in the minds of most of our fellow citizens. This situation may suggest that the Holocaust was a one-time historical event, born of Hitler's barbarism and totalitarianism, and that the flight of the Jews after the War was therefore unjustified.

Conclusion

Europe is still a long way from being cured of anti-Semitism; perhaps it can only happen when Christianity, and a certain idea of progressivism as an expectation of the Grand Soir, have lost their grip on our minds.

However, it will be objected that there was no great massacre of Jews after the War comparable to those carried out by Nazi Germany. More Jews died in Israel itself, in the fighting and attacks, than as a result of the few sporadic pogroms and anti-Semitic acts committed in Europe during the same period. However:

Le 1er août dernier, M. Martin, conservateur de la BM de Lyon, m'a aimablement reçu pendant une heure, mais pour m'expliquer, sur tous les tons, que le livre de Peter Singer, Le mouvement de libération animale*, ne serait pas, en raison de son contenu trop sulfureux, mis à la disposition du public sur les rayons de sa bibliothèque ; qu'au plus il serait accessible sur demande écrite et ainsi réservé aux personnes déjà averties.

La conférence que retrace cette page est celle que j'ai donnée aux Estivales de la question animale 2021 pour rappeler la définition à mon sens fondamentale de la notion de spécisme. Elle permet de montrer, en particulier, de manière convaincante le caractère injustifiable de cette discrimination.

Introduction

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La transcription

Merci. J'ai une demi-heure en principe pour faire cette présentation sur la question de ce qu'est le spécisme. Je vais essayer de faire vite parce qu'on a un peu de retard sur le programme.

Je vous remercie tous d'être là, ici dans la salle, et qui nous regardez en direct. Je remercie aussi les Estivales de m'avoir invité pour faire cette présentation de cette notion du spécisme, qui est, je pense, centrale, même si on peut très bien être animaliste sans se dire antispéciste – il y en a, et l'antispécisme n'est pas un credo.

Anti-speciesism is certainly revolutionary, if by that we mean implying a profound change in human thought and action and in our visions for the world's long term futre. In my opinion, anti-speciesism also implies, in a certain sense, a progressive attitude. Lastly, one of the central themes of anti-speciesism is equality, and on this basis anti-speciesists claim a kinship, or convergence, with antiracism, antisexism and other struggles for equality and justice. These reasons, and others, seem enough to place antispeciesism among what might be called, broadly speaking, left-wing ideas.

“✓I have called this principle (...) by the term of Natural Selection1”.

Adherence to the words of the Master can sometimes be a betrayal of his spirit, of the meaning of his work, since the said Master, working as an innovator and confronting initially hostile mentalities, often chooses his words at least as much for their pedagogical, conciliatory and transitional qualities as for their clarity.

Our life appears to us as a glass-walled, one-way tunnel. We have, it appears, direct knowledge of the inner reality of our tunnel, of our “inner world”. Outside the walls lies the “outer world”: another reality the existence of which we acknowledge, because we see it; or rather, because we see part of it and try to guess the rest.

Among the things we see outside, there are other glass tunnels, which we assume to contain other inner worlds each doubly cut off from us as we are from them.

Continuity relations

Our personal identity, one might think, is just the identity of our body over time. This latter identity, however, does not hold true, and, more importantly, is not really what makes up our belief in personal identity.

It is true that we are identified with our bodies in our daily interactions. This identification is operationally possible because each body describes a continuous spatial trajectory over time, which in theory allows it to be tracked moment after moment and thus unambiguously assigned an invariant identity.

Teleportation

The concept of teleportation, as it appears in science fiction and is taken up by Parfit,19 involves the transfer not of the matter of our body, but of information about its instantaneous physical state. On Earth, the traveller enters a cabin and presses a button. A “scanner” then records the position and state of every molecule in her body, brain included, and beams this information to another cabin on Mars, where it serves to create an identical copy out of locally available matter.

The tunnels disappear

We have seen that the descriptions (1) and (2) above are, in substance, identical. Let us see what makes (1) identical to (2), but different from the following proposition:

(3) The traveller is killed, and no copy is created.

Further consequences

The consequences of the critique of personal identity are many and profound. I will consider a few.

Upon its publication in 1992, Ferry's “very modest”1 book, The New Ecological Order2, was a big hit – Médicis Award, interviews on every French television network, etc. It is essentially an apologia for humanism and therefore an attack on the animal liberation movement and environmentalism, both of which he accuses of being naturalist movements.

First comment

I have started reading both parts of Magnus Vinding's essay. I must say that I already feel that it fails to prove that “happy meat” is wrong in principle, though I do agree that it is wrong in fact, within the framework of the speciesist society we live in.