Richard D. Ryder

Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder (born 3 July 1940) is a British psychologist, philosopher, and animal-rights campaigner. A central figure in the “Oxford Group” of academics who reshaped animal ethics in the early 1970s, he coined the term speciesism and later developed the ethical theory of painism.

Speciesism

In 1970, while working as a clinical psychologist at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, Ryder printed and distributed a leaflet titled Speciesism — arguing that discrimination on the basis of species was morally analogous to racism and sexism. The term was picked up by Peter Singer and popularised in Animal Liberation (1975), entering mainstream ethical vocabulary.

The Oxford Group

Ryder was part of a loose circle of Oxford-based writers — including Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch, John Harris, and later Singer — whose 1971 anthology Animals, Men and Morals announced a new, rigorous case against human use of animals. His own contribution, “Experiments on Animals,” drew on his clinical training to indict laboratory practice.

Books and campaigning

Victims of Science (1975) became a standard reference on vivisection. Animal Revolution (1989) traced the historical arc of changing attitudes toward other species. Ryder chaired the RSPCA Council (1977–1979) and helped steer the organization toward a stronger anti-cruelty stance, and he has been active in political campaigning on animal protection.

Painism

In Painism: A Modern Morality (2001), Ryder proposed an ethics centered on the individual experience of pain rather than aggregate utility or abstract rights. Because pain cannot be meaningfully summed across beings, the morally relevant question is always: who is the maximum sufferer? — a framework he sees as avoiding the pitfalls of both utilitarianism and rights theory while grounding obligations toward all sentient life.