Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder (born 1940) is a British psychologist. He is a former Mellon Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans. He served as chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Council from 1977 to 1979, and is a past president of Britain's Liberal Democrat Animal Protection Group.[1] He has also worked as parliamentary consultant to the Political Animal Lobby.
Ryder came to public attention in 1969 when, having worked in animal research laboratories, he began to speak out against the use of animals in experiments, and became one of the pioneers of the modern animal liberation movement. It was Ryder who in 1970 coined the term "speciesism."[2]
He is the author of Victims of Science (1975), Painism: A Modern Morality (2003), and Putting Morality Back into Politics (2006). He was also a contributor to the influential Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1972) edited by Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch and John Harris. It was in a review of this book for the New York Review of Books that the philosopher Peter Singer famously put forward his early arguments in favour of animal liberation, which he expanded in Animal Liberation (1975).
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Ryder is the son of Major Dudley Ryder, great-grandson of the Hon. Granville Ryder, second son of Dudley Ryder, 1st Earl of Harrowby. He has an MA in Experimental Psychology and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Cambridge.[3]
Ryder coined the term "speciesism" in 1970 while lying in the bath, and first used it in a privately-printed leaflet published in Oxford that same year.[2]
He calls his current position on the moral status of non-human animals "painism," a term he coined in 1985, arguing that all beings who feel pain deserve rights.[4] Painism can be seen as a third way between Peter Singer's utilitarian position and Tom Regan's deontological rights view. It combines the utilitarian view that moral status comes from the ability to feel pain with the rights view prohibition on using others as a means to our ends. He has criticized Regan's criterion for inherent worth, arguing that all beings who feel pain have inherent value. He has also criticized the utilitarian idea that exploitation of others can be justified if there is an overall gain in pleasure, arguing that: "One of the problems with the utilitarian view is that, for example, the sufferings of a gang-rape victim can be justified if the rape gives a greater sum total of pleasure to the rapists."[2]