A Defence of the Species Membership Approach

Abstract This article responds to challenges raised by John Olusegun Adenitire, Alasdair Cochrane, and Maneesha Deckha in this special issue on my book More Equal Than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals , specifically targeting my theory of the Species Membership Approach (SMA). According to the SMA, legal rights and other legal entitlements should be granted to non-human animals on the basis of their species membership, not their individual capacities. The article first takes on a principal competitor to the SMA: Adenitire's and Cochrane’s sentience-based theories. I argue that these theories are unlikely to satisfy many human rights proponents because: they exclude some human beings from rights protection, they do not do enough to show that sentience is a binary capacity that can provide a solid foundation for basic equality, and they justify rights by, and proportion them to, the properties of individual beings. As a result, they are unlikely to satisfy many human rights proponents. Second, I address Deckha’s challenge that the SMA manifests a problematic human-first mindset which reinforces existing species privileges. I respond by demonstrating that the SMA does not, in fact, adopt a human-first mindset, and that even my book’s more specific discussion of how human rights could be temporarily prioritised does not make my theory problematically anthropocentric.