The Importance of Emotions in Animal Ethics

This article explores Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation thesis and examines the arguments against his work, particularly from certain moral philosophers in the late 1970s and 1980s who seriously engaged with his ideas. This article argues that due to the straightforward, minimalist nature of Singer’s preference utilitarianism, his arguments have remained highly defensible and persuasive. By advancing sentience, above characteristics like intelligence or rationality, as a sufficient criterion for possessing interests, Singer provides a justifiable principle for morally considering animal interests equal to those of humans. Numerous moral philosophers have challenged Singer, but they have struggled to seriously counter his core principle and to resolve the argument of ‘marginal cases’—that is, why do infants and intellectually disabled humans have moral status and animals do not. Ultimately, Singer broadly challenged prevailing anthropocentric views of animals and, in some instances, persuaded some of his most intransigent opponents.

2012

Recognizing Animal Studies his essay places in dialogue the work of Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher of animal liberation, and Patricia Highsmith, whose fiction of the early 1970s takes a curious interest in the topic of animal welfare. My argument will partly be that animals enter the ethical stage for Singer at a moment when utilitarianism comes under fire from a contract ethics that Singer rejects on the assumption that such ethics cannot be reconciled with our obligations to non-contractual creatures to whom we nonetheless owe consideration. For this reason, I argue, Singer has proved especially unwelcome among scholars of contemporary animal studies who insist that what matters in animal-human relations is an ethics of reciprocity. Highsmith's A Dog's Ransom (1972) and The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (1975) set in play a contest between utility and contract in regard to human-animal relations, and arrive at conclusions that look awfully close to Singer's. By way of her interest in animals as the subjects and objects of brute violence, Highsmith also allows us a novel vantage on the fascination among contemporary ethicists with fictive scenarios, not unlike the novelist's own, in which the crucial issue is whether the killing of other people is permissible or blameworthy. In this section, I consider the vexing role Singer occupies among contemporary theorists of what Kari Weil calls "the animal turn." 1 In the next section, I situate Highsmith's animal fiction in the context of the debate between utilitarian and contract ethics. In the essay's final section, I connect the murder weapon in Highsmith's most politicized animal story-a pulled lever in "The Day of Reckoning," which focuses on battery-farmed chickens-to the pervasive interest among many philosophers in the seeming non-agency, and dramatic outcomes, of actions like button-pushing. It may seem perverse to couple Singer (whose whole career might be said to comprise a reply to the question "Why be moral?") with Highsmith (whose whole career might be said to comprise a steadfast indifference to that question). Yet Singer is somewhat notorious for what many observers (and more than a few philosophers) take to be a calculating heartlessness reminiscent of Highsmith's vintage sociopaths. "We can't take our feelings as moral data, immune from rational criticism," he writes in his response to J.M. Coetzee's 1999 Tanner Lectures, The Lives of Animals. 2 This typically hardboiled comment is occasioned by Singer's encounter with the fictional Elizabeth Costello, who maintains that more recognition of our feelings toward animals affords a more nuanced sense of our duties to them. Thus "when we divert the current of feeling that flows between ourself [sic] and the animal into words," Costello asserts, "we abstract it forever from the animal." 3 For Singer by contrast, the proper tendency of ethics is away from feeling toward abstraction. All that matters in our moral obligations toward animals is that they feel-or, more exactly, that they are capable of feeling pleasure and pain. Singer's strictly utilitarian notion of "feeling" is something of an outlier within the emerging field of animal studies. For many scholars involved in that field, the crucial issue regarding our ethical relation to animals is not the simple or uncontroversial fact that animals feel, or even Coetzee's (or Costello's) less simple or more controversial point that we should take our feelings about animals into account, but rather how animals feel about us. This is perhaps too glib a way of putting the matter. What I mean to highlight is the large number of scholars in animal studies who, taking their lead for the study of ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, seek to assert the primacy of reciprocity in relations between humans and nonhumans. In "The Name of a Dog" (1975), Levinas records a wartime memory of his internment in a German P.O.W. camp, where "halfway through our long captivity," a "cherished dog" named Bobby "would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men." On account of his powers of recognition, Levinas dubs Bobby "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims." 4 And on account of his relegating Bobby's generosity to no more than instinct, it would be more accurate to say that for scholars of animal studies, Levinas is less the sponsor of their project than its point of departure, insofar as these thinkers infer from his story a more radical conclusion than Levinas himself was willing to reach. For Matthew Calarco, Levinas's story is "proto-ethical" but realizes "no politics or ethics proper"

2014

Relations Beyond Anthropocentrism, 2013

The Connection Between Animal Rights and Animal Liberation: A Reconsideration of the Relation Between Non-human Animal Autonomy and Animal Rights, 2014

More than forty years have passed since Peter Singer published his ground-breaking book Animal Liberation in 1975. It is often described as ’the Bible’ of the modern animal movement. But why did Animal Liberation become so influential and important? After all, it was neither the first nor the last book to reflect on the moral status of animals, factory farming, or vegetarianism. Drawing on the previously unexamined Papers of Peter Singer archive and a range of other materials, this article explores the creation, spread and influence of Peter Singer’s ideas. Situated in a period of women’s, gay and black liberation, this article examines the ideological framework that mobilised people to campaign for the wellbeing and rights of animals.

In this paper, I will question Peter Singer’s position on the moral equality of all species. In order to highlight how mistaken he is, I will apply this issue on the use of animals in medical research. Lastly, I will offer a softer position compared to Singer that advances animal well-being without Singer’s prejudice against the other members of the human species.

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.