'Race' and species in the post-WW2 United Nations discourse on human rights

Abstract

This chapter shows how, ironically, racism has often been combated on the basis of speciesist assumptions, in particular in the humanist post-WW2 United Nations discourse on human rights. It traces those assumptions to various roots - in biological and anthropological thinking of the period, European metaphysics, middle class cultural attitudes, and, ultimately, evolution. The subsequent Great Ape Project, which claimed moral respectability for all great apes, ran into a similar problem. The paperalso makes some observations on the ritual, performative character of various declarations of the rights of human and nonhuman beings.