Animal Ethics

MARCH 13, 2013

According to the Guardian , the new pope (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) took his name from Saint Francis of Assisi (depicted above), who is the patron saint of animals. billion adherents, to drive home the point that animals are not resources for human use but fellow denizens of the planet, with lives, a good, and a dignity of their own.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 10, 2012

I'm a longtime proponent of animal rights, but this suit is ridiculous. First, the 13th Amendment was designed to abolish human chattel slavery. Applying it to nonhuman animals is a stretch. Nonhuman animals can suffer. The right is defeasible, of course, as it is in the case of humans. Dentists make people suffer.)

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 24, 2012

With regard to wild animals, the general policy recommended by the rights view is: let them be! Since this will require increased human intervention in human practices that threaten rare or endangered species (e.g., Too little is not enough. (

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 10, 2008

It would only be surprising to one who assumes that my case for animal liberation is based upon rights and, in particular, upon the idea of extending rights to animals. I make very little use of the word 'rights' in Animal Liberation , and I could easily have dispensed with it altogether. But this is not my position at all.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 6, 2009

Here is a crisp (but badly edited) essay by philosopher Nathan Nobis. I like Nathan's distinction between "Oh yeah?" and "So what!" as replies to an argument. Suppose you claim that proposition C follows, logically, from propositions P1 and P2. There are two mistakes you can be making. First, one or more of your premises may be false.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 18, 2017

Yesterday, the world lost its most powerful voice for animal rights, Tom Regan. No one has done more to explain what "animal rights" means and why animals have rights than Tom Regan. As Regan expressed so simply and straightforwardly, what animal rights advocates want is for "people to stop doing terrible things to animals."

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 3, 2012

My friend Mylan Engel spoke at a conference on human use of animals. Here is a report.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 18, 2007

Since a number of "Animal Ethics" readers reside in the northern Illinois area, I thought I would call your attention to an exciting lecture that is taking place on Northern Illinois University's campus. She specializes in Environmental Ethics, Human-Animal Ethics, and Moral Psychology. Jenni, Ph.D.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 12, 2012

That individuals can be harmed without knowing it has important implications for the proper assessment of the treatment of animals. Modern farms (so-called factory farms), for example, raise animals in unnatural conditions. Those animals who are raised intensively, then, let us assume, do not know what they're missing.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 12, 2016

See here.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

There are also some things we cannot learn by using humans, if we respect their rights. Tom Regan , The Case for Animal Rights , updated with a new preface [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004], 388 [first edition published in 1983]) If that means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 30, 2012

The legal rights of nonhuman animals might first be achieved in any of three ways. For example, the Treaty of Amsterdam that came into force on May 1, 1999, formally acknowledged that nonhuman animals are “sentient beings” and not merely goods or agricultural products. Wise , “ The Evolution of Animal Law Since 1950 ,” chap.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

The problem of the unjust use of farm animals is large, growing, historical, institutionalized, governmentally encouraged, and fundamentally unregulated at either the state or federal level. Farm animals are treated essentially as raw materials. Instead it aids industry boards that exist solely to sell animal products.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 17, 2008

The plea that animals might be killed painlessly is a very common one with flesh-eaters, but it must be pointed out that what-might-be can afford no exemption from moral responsibility for what-is. Henry S.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

It is simply projustice, insisting only that the scope of justice be seen to include respect for the rights of animals. The animal rights movement is not for the faint of heart. How we change the dominant misconception of animals—indeed, whether we change it—is to a large extent a political question.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 10, 2009

Does my proposal as to what makes killing another human being generally a major moral wrong in any way help us with deciding what, if anything, is wrong with killing non-human animals and foetuses? I believe it does help. This is not to say that other instrumentalist considerations (e.g.

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Animal Ethics

OCTOBER 23, 2009

I will conclude with some remarks about the rights of animals. When it is asked whether animals have rights, and whether human beings have duties to them, the question, I think, is partly moral and partly verbal. It is this latter view, I believe, that is in the minds of some of those who deny that animals have rights.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 20, 2008

A few years ago, philosopher David Oderberg published an essay entitled " The Illusion of Animal Rights " in The Human Life Review. A few months ago, having belatedly discovered Oderberg's essay, I wrote a critique entitled " Oderberg on Animal Rights ," which I duly submitted to The Human Life Review for publication.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 6, 2008

Here is a common argument in favor of animal rights: 1. If babies have rights, then animals have rights. Animals have rights. Frey, "Animal Rights," Analysis 37 [June 1977]: 186-9.) Frey, "Animal Rights," Analysis 37 [June 1977]: 186-9.) Babies have rights. Therefore, 3. In 1977, philosopher R. Potentiality.

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

On the one hand, it improves the lives of many farm animals. On the other hand, it entrenches the idea that they may be used as mere means to human ends. In the long run, measures such as this may make things worse for farm animals. I'm ambivalent about the proposition.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 11, 2013

How, then, shall we sum up in a sentence the principle of our duties to the lower animals? I do not know that it can be better done than in the words of George Nicholson, one of those early pioneers to the influence of whose writings, though now almost forgotten, the cause of humaneness owes so much. "In

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Animal Ethics

JULY 24, 2015

Forty years ago, the suggestion that nonhuman animals have moral rights—indeed, many of the same rights as human beings—would have been met with incredulous stares, if not outright ridicule. Fast forward to the present. Other results from this Gallup poll can be found here.

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Animal Ethics

OCTOBER 29, 2008

Once a definite social movement got under way in the West with its objective the restricting of man's treatment of animals, it moved with relative rapidity. Moral philosophers began to regard it as an obvious truth that it is wrong to treat animals cruelly. But not so far as seriously to limit man's domination of the world.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 11, 2008

So far McCloskey is on solid ground, but one can quarrel with his denial that any animals but humans have interests. I should think that the trustee of funds willed to a dog or cat is more than a mere custodian of the animal he protects. The animal itself is the beneficiary of his dutiful services.

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Animal Ethics

MARCH 12, 2009

It was, I suggest, to a large extent because he felt that the noblest feature of humanity is the capacity to be self-governing, to adopt principles without being influenced by sensuous motives and then to live by them whatever the contingencies. Kant's ethics is as much an ethics of self-esteem as it is an ethics of duty.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 7, 2016

In light of this horrible incident, is it right for the zoo to carry on a breeding program that subjects more animals to such unnatural lives? It is estimated that due to conflicts with humans, the bushmeat and body parts trade, disease and habitat destruction, large mammals in Africa may be extinct by the end of this century.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 11, 2008

One aspect of the question of whether animals have rights may now be treated. If animals have rights, then these are welfare rather than option-rights. Whether animals have welfare-rights depends upon the very perplexing question, which I shall not discuss, of their inclusion in the community and their relation to the social ideal.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 20, 2007

By disguising anthropomorphic (in other words, pre-scientific) ways of thinking as science, Wise rediscovers the enchanted world of childhood, in which animals live as Beatrix Potter describes them, in an Eden where “every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.” And that explains, in part, the appeal of the animal-rights movement.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 4, 2008

If, for instance, it is determined that gravely mentally defective human beings and monsters born of human parents are not the kinds of beings who may possess rights, this bears on how we may treat them. Similarly, important conclusions follow from the question as to whether animals have rights.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

According to a great many philosophers and jurisprudents, animals do not have rights for the simple reason that they are not the kinds of beings who can have rights. In respect to having rights, animals are more like pebbles and sunbeams than they are like full-fledged human beings.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 23, 2008

I can't be sure, since the editorial opinion is so jumbled, but the board seems to be arguing that people should continue to eat meat, provided the animals whose flesh they consume are not made to suffer. Would the board say the same thing about humans?

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Animal Ethics

MAY 28, 2008

How many of you think this experiment is justified? If you think it's justified, would it be justified if the experimental subjects were orphaned children?

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 25, 2008

"The French have already discovered," Bentham wrote, "that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. " Observe the transition from slave to animal. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of legs.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 19, 2009

It is a merit of utilitarianism, with its stress on happiness and unhappiness, that lower animals must be considered along with human beings, so that they are not debarred from full or direct consideration because they are not "rational." Perhaps Smart was still thinking (in 1980) of Kant versus Bentham, rationality versus sentience.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 28, 2008

From this perspective, the animal-rights debate seems considerably less urgent and a relatively "safe" area of controversy. One wonders why here (as elsewhere) there is so much concern for the plight of animals and evidently so little for that of humans.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 3, 2008

In setting out to write this paper, my intention was to fill a gap in my book Animal Liberation. There I argued that the interests of animals ought to be considered equally with our own interests and that from this equality it follows that we ought to become vegetarian.

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Animal Ethics

MARCH 6, 2007

As I explained to him in e-mail, murderers are guilty of the most heinous offense, namely, taking innocent human life, whereas animals are not guilty of anything. Phillip Barron submitted this blog post for your consideration. That difference makes all the difference.

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