Popular Media and Animals

Broadview Press, 2009

Can animals be regarded as part of the moral community? To what extent, if at all, do they have moral rights? Are we wrong to eat them, hunt them, or use them for scientific research? Can animal liberation be squared with the environmental movement? Taylor traces the background of these debates from Aristotle to Darwin and sets out the views of numerous contemporary philosophers – including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Anne Warren, J. Baird Callicott, and Martha Nussbaum – with ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to eco-feminism. The new edition also includes provocative quotations from some of the major writers in the field. As the final chapter insists, animal ethics is more than just an “academic” question: it is intimately connected both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to pressing current issues such as food shortages, environmental degradation, and climate change.

1998

A couple of decades after becoming a major area of both public and philosophical concern, animal ethics continues its inroads into mainstream consciousness. Increasingly, philosophers, ethicists, professionals who use animals, and the broader public confront specific ethical issues regarding human use of animals as well as more fundamental questions about animals' moral status. A parallel, related development is the explosion of interest in animals' mental lives, as seen in exciting new work in cognitive ethology 1 and in the plethora of movies, television commercials, and popular books featuring apparently intelligent animals. As we approach the turn of the twenty-first century, philosophical animal ethics is an area of both increasing diversity and unrealized potential-a thesis supported by this essay as a whole. Following up on an earlier philosophical review of animal ethics (but without that review's focus on animal research), 2 the present article provides an updated narrativeone that offers some perspective on where we have been, a more detailed account of where we are, and a projection of where we might go. Each of the three major sections offers material that one is unlikely to find in other reviews of animal ethics: the first by viewing familiar territory in a different light (advancing the thesis that the utility-versus-rights debate in animal ethics is much less important than is generally thought); the second by reviewing major recent works that are not very well-known (at least My thanks to Tom Beauchamp, Maggie Little, and Barbara Orlans for their comments on a draft of this paper.

This paper examines the claim that our moral commitments to non-human animals (henceforth, “animals”) are best captured in terms of a framework of political, rather than ethical, theory – or, at the very least, that the former provides an essential antidote to the failings of the latter. In particular, I shall focus on what I take to be a canonical statement of this view: Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. In this book, Donaldson and Kymlicka (henceforth, D&K) argue that standard ethical animal rights theory (henceforth, following them, ART) is importantly incomplete, and requires supplementation with a political theory of animal rights (henceforth, PTAR). I going to argue that while ART, as it has standardly perceived, has shortcomings, these are more perception than reality, and are certainly not intrinsic or essential features of ART. Consequently, the supplementation of ART with PTAR is not necessary. The distinction between ART and PTAR is a disguised, and somewhat misleading way, of talking about another distinction: the distinction between animals as objects of moral concern and animals as subjects of motivation and action.

Political Quarterly, 2010

Animal Studies Journal, Vol. 6/1 (2017), pp. 175-181.

In the 40 years since Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, philosophers have developed a rich and sophisticated literature on the ethics of how we treat animals. Much of this literature has implicitly assumed that our ethical duties to animals are a matter of public responsibility, not merely personal ethics. While modern societies operate with a division of moral labour -leaving some ethical responsibilities to individuals while others fall upon the state -animal ethicists have typically assumed that our most important ethical responsibilities to animals are indeed a legitimate matter for public regulation and state law.

presented at Minding Animals International Conference, Utrecht, July 2012.

Ethical issues are per definition issues of public concern and interest. Media plays a vital role in presenting and shaping them. From the beginnings of modern animal ethics, paradigm cases -e.g. factory farming, laboratory animal science and fur farming -were used in the public debate and presented offensively. The moral wrong of these paradigm cases has a high plausibility in the wider public. Of course, nobody is against respectful treatment of animals. However, these paradigm cases do not raise the question of moral duties towards animals only. Further, they implicitly conflict with a wide range of values and provide the platform for the societal debate about values. Under this perspective, the character of the ongoing debate can be much better understood. Ethics can help to address moral issues in human-animal relations with explicit respect to conflicting (morally relevant) values. To focus solely on the moral status of animals in animal ethics loses sight of the related societal problem at stake. This position runs the risk of putting forward a perspective under which ethical issues in human-animal relations appear to be problems of the real world where moral outlaws mistreat animals for unworthy reasons. If our duties towards animals were the only duties we had, this view would be justified. However, this is not the case and a number of other values are at stake. Animal protection is an important value but other values like human welfare, gaining knowledge, etc. are equally important. Therefore, the moral issues of animal ethics should not be framed irrespectively of conflicting values and under the perspective of 'the right treatment of animals' only. In a wider sense animal ethics should use the frame of 'normative orientation of societies' in general. This shifts the role of animal ethics within society. I will argue in favor of a 'healthy social distance' or in other words 'academic freedom' that provides the basis for trustworthy mediation of societal conflicts without losing sight of practical demands. There is no stepping back into the ivory tower. However, looking at these issues from a distance can serve as a powerful source of philosophical insights that can be used in future practice-oriented animal ethics.

2016

Animals and Ethics 101 helps readers identify and evaluate the arguments for and against various uses of animals, such: - Is it morally wrong to experiment on animals? Why or why not? - Is it morally permissible to eat meat? Why or why not? - Are we morally obligated to provide pets with veterinary care (and, if so, how much?)? Why or why not? And other challenging issues and questions. Developed as a companion volume to an online "Animals & Ethics" course, it is ideal for classroom use, discussion groups or self study. The book presupposes no conclusions on these controversial moral questions about the treatment of animals, and argues for none either. Its goal is to help the reader better engage the issues and arguments on all sides with greater clarity, understanding and argumentative rigor. Nathan Nobis, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA USA. NathanNobis.com Nathan Nobis. Animals & Ethics 101: Thinking Critically About Animal Rights. Open Philosophy Press, 2016. Buy the book on Amazon in paperback for $5.99 or Kindle for $2.99, or download the book for free. Reviews on Amazon and the Open Textbook Library. Available through www.AnimalEthics101.com