Metaphysical or Practical Humanism: the Specificity of Antispeciesism

The criticism against the metaphysics of the humanism does not necessarily involve the dismissal of the humanism itself, which can be rehabilitated from a practical standpoint. In this article two positions are discussed: that of Peter Singer’s animal liberation and that of Jacques Derrida. Despite their diversity, they are united by the search for an egalitarian ground: a biologistic continuism in the former case, and a phenomenological primitivism in the latter. Both put in brackets the difference between the human being and the animal due to their different practical capabilities, the fact, namely, that the human being, as Heidegger writes, is world-forming. The latter is a discriminating capacity consisting in the understanding of the other and its suffering. An antispecisist ethics is possible only on the basis of this specificity of the human being.