The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men.
- Emile Zola

Despite Rousseau and Bentham, the idea that animals did or ought to have rights remained ridiculous. When the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), a Cambridge philosopher, responded with an anonymous tract called Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, intended as a reductio ad absurdum. Taylor took Wollstonecraft's arguments, and those of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1790), and showed that they applied equally to animals, leading to the conclusion that animals have "intrinsic and real dignity and worth," a conclusion absurd enough, in his view, to discredit Wollstonecraft's and Paine's positions entirely.

Although Singer rejects rights as a moral ideal independent from his utilitarianism based on interests, he accepts rights as derived from utilitarian principles, particularly the principle of minimising suffering. Singer allows that animal rights are not the same as human rights, writing in Animal Liberation that "there are obviously important differences between human and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have." He began his book by defending Mary Wollstonecraft's 18th-century critic Thomas Taylor, who argued that if Wollstonecraft's reasoning in defense of women's rights were correct, then "brutes" would have rights too. Taylor thought he had produced a reductio ad absurdum of Wollstonecraft's view; Singer regards it as a sound logical implication.

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[Link to concept and other pieces in the series.]