Search Results

The way being open to reconsider in an impartial way the moral status of the members of other species, I offer a critical survey of the main attempts to do so within the field of animal liberation ethics. After distinguishing between obligations concerning welfare and obligations concerning the continuation of life, I examine Peter Singer's utilitarian stance, Tom Regan's deontological view, and David DeGrazia's mixed approach. Though agreeing with these authors as far as equal consideration for the interest in welfare is concerned, I raise doubts about their settling on unequal consideration for the interest in life, and I point to difficulties with formulating an acceptable theory of overall moral status. I end the survey with a discussion of the notion of personhood, which is found unable to overcome such difficulties.

This chapter explores the limitations that a few philosophers would place on the human use of animals, and how these restrictions have formed the foundation of the modern animal rights and liberation movement. It also reports a description of the origins of this movement. It concentrates on Peter Singer and Tom Regan, the two largely uncontested philosophical leaders of the animal rights movement, with examples from writings by a few of the others brought in at appropriate points. Animal rightists usually think they have an obligation to avoid sport hunters from killing nonhuman animals. Humans are not invaders in the world but a part of it, and humans have as much right to make their way in it as any other species.

This chapter explores the issues of ecology, animal rights and the poverty of humanism in the context of Luc Ferry's book “New Ecological Order.” It analyzes Ferry's humanist frame which shows how radical environmentalism and animal rights emerge as distinct problematics and his discussion of the relation between radical ecology and liberal democracy. This chapter also provides an overview of animal rights philosophy as expounded by Tom Regan and Peter Singer.

This chapter asks the question of whether it is permissible for human beings to raise animals for food and clothing. In deontology, animals are left out of moral consideration. In moral rights thinking, there exists a strand that grants animals roughly the same moral standing as the one given to human beings. Finally, according to utilitarianism, most humans and many non-human animals share moral standing. Yet for reasons to do with side effects, it is not permissible to kill and eat human beings (in ordinary circumstances), while it is in fact considered morally acceptable to kill and eat non-human animals.

The idea that it is okay to eat meat can seem like a bit of ethical common sense. This chapter examines the attempt to adapt one of the most influential philosophical defenses of common sense—G. E. Moore’s case against the skeptic and the idealist—in support of the omnivore. First, Moore’s argument is introduced and explained against the skeptic. Then, the chapter explains how that argument can be adapted to address two influential philosophical arguments against the omnivore, due to Tom Regan and James Rachels. The chapter proposes a set of principled criteria that can be used to test Moorean arguments on a case-by-case basis. The chapter concludes that the Moorean omnivore’s argument has potentially uncomfortable implications for all sides in debates about ethical vegetarianism and illuminates important and neglected questions about the force of philosophical arguments in applied ethics.

This final chapter explores the range of ideas current in the contemporary animal ethics debate. Much of the chapter is devoted to documenting the critique of the animal welfare ethic, which holds that, while animals have moral standing, humans, being persons, have a superior moral status. Three different strands of this critique—based on utilitarian, rights, and contractarian approaches—are identified and explored. The final part of the chapter documents the fragmentation of the animal ethics debate in recent years. This has included a more nuanced position which seeks to decouple animal rights from abolitionism, accounts of animal ethics from virtue ethics and capabilities perspectives, and a relational turn associated with the feminist care ethic tradition and, more recently, the utilization of citizenship theory by Donaldson and Kymlicka.

The reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought on offer in this book is novel in three main ways. First, it views Schopenhauer as a more faithful Kantian than most commentators have been apt to recognize. Second, it sees Schopenhauer’s philosophy as an evolving rather than static body of thought. Third, it claims that there are really two Schopenhauers—The Knight of Despair and the Knight with Hope—and this distinction helps to capture the real incompatibilities between the resignationist and the compassionate moral realist sides of Schopenhauer’s ethical thought. This reconstructed version of Schopenhauer’s ethical theory—compassionate moral realism—provides an interesting option for the contemporary ethical-theoretical landscape. A Schopenhauerian value ontology of degrees of inherent value puts this theory into the animal rights camp, but in a more moderate way—closer to Mary Anne Warren’s “weak animal rights” position, rather than Tom Regan’s strong theory of animal rights.

Many philosophers endorse utilitarian arguments against eating meat along the lines of Peter Singer’s, while others endorse deontological arguments along the lines of Tom Regan’s. This chapter suggests that both types of arguments are too quick. Empirical reasons are outlined for thinking that when one eats meat, that doesn’t make a difference to animals in the way that it would have to for either type of argument to be sound—and this chapter argues that this is true notwithstanding recent “expected utility” arguments to the contrary. The chapter then identifies a general puzzle: given that almost everything we do in modern society has some footprint of harm, how does one properly distinguish acts that are permissible among these from those that are not? The chapter explains why this is more difficult than it may initially appear, and it proposes a solution.