Supporting brain experiments on 100 monkeys to benefit 40,000 humans does not entail a break on Singer’s part with his overall utilitarian philosophy. Still, it is a far cry from Singer’s previous statements decrying animal experimentation. In his 1990 update of Animal Liberation, for example, Singer called medical research with animals an odious form of “speciesism” and urged that “the interests of animals” be “given equal consideration with similar interest of human beings.” The consequences of this paradigm shift, he wrote, would “mean the end of the vast industry of animal experimentation” and the replacement of animals in experiments with human volunteers…
