What do we owe animals?  Eating our (non-human) friends is, after all, a complicated matter.  Being conscious, members of other species have interests, endure suffering, and are aware of their existing over time – which in turn implies that they have future-directed ambitions.  According to Darwin, non-human species possess these attributes in varying degrees, from strongly among close relatives of Homo sapiens (such as apes) to weakly among distant ones (such as plankton).

But should we infer from this that they deserve rights?

Peter Singer, a distinguished Australian utilitarian currently based at Harvard, believes so.  He bases his morality on the principle of equal consideration of equal interests.  Singer asserts that if a non-human can somehow be shown to have greater interests than a mentally retarded or immature human – such as a foetus, an infant, or a severely disabled person – greater sympathy should be directed at the non-human, if we are forced to choose.  Singer's inference is logical.  But his premise is filth.  It is an attempt to destabilise and overthrow the foundation on which our morality rests.  This foundation is a belief in human exceptionalism.

The distinctions between humans and non-human animals are differences not just of degree but of kind.  Humans are acutely self-conscious; being members of a moral community, in which duty and practical reason are exchanged through reciprocity, we have moral experiences.  Our advanced facility with language enables the creation of culture and art; we have 'I'-thoughts, 'you'-thoughts, 'he', 'she', 'we' and 'they'-thoughts.  We laugh, sing and grieve by inheriting rituals and innovating upon them.  Other animals, even our closest relatives, are incapable of doing these things.  If this is 'Speciesism', a term coined by Richard Ryder but popularized by Singer, let us rejoice in it. 

If, then, we feel sympathy for animals, it is not fellow-feeling that motivates us.   Rather it is a combination of distaste for suffering in sentient beings, and our own ingrained piety.  What we owe animals is therefore not some spurious form of justice – there is no logical link between interests and rights – but compassion.  This should be granted not through rights (which animals cannot defend themselves), but limited protections – i.e. a mechanism for ring-fencing those incapable of bearing rights.

Alas, as Alexander Boot argues, Singer's Great Ape Project, which invokes utilitarian reasoning to grant our near relatives rights, is soon to be enacted as law in Spain (the country of matadors and bull-fighting).  There is no end of absurd impracticalities to consider.  Nevertheless, the real threat is moral.   Utilitarianism is a kind of hollowing-out process:  It reduces humanity to a checklist of competences and subtracts from us that which makes our species special.  And it apportions merit to actions according to a crude felicific calculus that ought to have died with Jeremy Bentham.  Singer's eminence says much more about the degraded, debased view of humanity gripping the Western imagination as it does about the man himself.

The resulting anxiety has many political offshoots.  One is the embarrassing mess that has been made of wars fought in the name of the West.  In Afghanistan today, as Charles Bennett explains, hopes for democracy and the rule of law – two principally Western inventions – are receding.   Seven years after the Taleban were overthrown, corruption has flowered in tandem with a rampant narcotics trade.

Closer to home, civic society is virtually defined by the crisis of authority afflicting our most sacred institutions – whether it be the family as Patricia Morgan argues - the monarchy as AW Purdue notes - or our remaining few citadels of learning as Alistair Miller relates in his article on Private Schools.   They fight for survival in the shadow of an unprecedented financial crisis.  As Theodore Dalrymple explains, our parents knew that what you borrow now, you pay back later.  A generation has grown up thinking otherwise, so that indebtedness is now the central economic fact of our times.  Fiscal conservatism has never been more needed.

What salvation might there be in science?   Russell Lewis explains how, at the bottom of the seas, there lies a glimpse of our future resources.  The deeper we dig, the more encouragement we find.  It's just a question of who gets there first.  Perhaps it will be those of best breeding.  Stripped of superstition, eugenics is making a comeback, as David Ashton notes.  Eliminating disabilities from potential victims is not to be confused with victimising or eliminating humans with disabilities.   If it is compassionate to treat illness, it is compassionate to prevent its occurrence.  Science may soon allow this.  There's hope yet.