Animal Ethics

JULY 7, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. The Argument from Animal Rights A stronger argument is made by people who maintain that animals have rights. In particular, it has been argued that animals have a right to life. The subject is a large and controversial one.

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Animal Person

JULY 1, 2009

Angus directed me to a story about the Calgary Stampede (rodeo) and the Calgary and Vancouver Humane Societies which had me asking: Whose side are they on? The Calgary Humane Society works with the Stampede to make sure the animals are safe (and by the way that's impossible if the animals are being used in the rodeo. Not the rodeo.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 9, 2009

A third of a century ago, when the modern animal-liberation movement was in its infancy, Martin published an essay entitled “A Critique of Moral Vegetarianism,” Reason Papers (fall 1976): 13-43. You will, therefore, agree with Martin about moral vegetarianism but not about Christianity. Another reason is moral. One is health.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 21, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. SOME PROBLEMS OF MORAL VEGETARIANISM With respect to traditional moral vegetarianism some problems immediately come to the fore. What animals is it morally wrong to eat? But what is the extent of the universal moral principle?

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 30, 2011

But when a moral being is feeling a pleasure or pain that is deserved or undeserved, or a pleasure or pain that implies a good or a bad disposition, the total fact is quite inadequately described if we say 'a sentient being is feeling pleasure, or pain'. Pleasure is good when, and only when, it is deserved.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 4, 2008

There is no inconsistency in rejecting plant rights while accepting animal rights. If Smith thinks that plant rights and animal rights stand or fall together, then he is confused, for there is a morally relevant difference between plants and animals, namely, that only the latter are sentient.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 16, 2011

Hal Herzog’s “ Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat ” (Harper 2011), though fascinating, is ultimately depressing for vegans and animal rights activists. Over at Animal Rights and AntiOppression , we’ve been discussing tactics and sharing our thoughts and experiences about what works and doesn’t work when it comes to advocacy.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 14, 2012

In issuing its condemnation of established cultural practices, the rights view is not antibusiness, not antifreedom of the individual, not antiscience, not antihuman. It is simply projustice, insisting only that the scope of justice be seen to include respect for the rights of animals. Might does not make right; might does make law.

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Animal Ethics

MARCH 27, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. ARGUMENTS FOR MORAL VEGETARIANISM A variety of arguments have been given for vegetarianism. Sometimes they take such a sketchy form that it is not completely clear they are moral arguments. Tags: Moral Vegetarianism.

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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. Let us consider the moral question first. Hominum causa omne ius constitutum.)

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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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10,000 Birds

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

They may be about bird eggs ( The Most Perfect Thing: The Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg , 2016), or a 17th-century ornithologist ( Virtuoso by Nature: The Scientific Worlds of Francis Willughby, 2016), or How Bullfinches learn songs from humans ( The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology.

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Animal Ethics

SEPTEMBER 30, 2009

For an explanation of this feature, click on “Moral Vegetarianism” at the bottom of this post. The Argument from Human Grain Shortage All of the clearly moral arguments for vegetarianism given so far have been in terms of animal rights and suffering.

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 19, 2009

I assumed that Hume was right in thinking that ultimately morality depends on how we feel about things. Many prominent animal-rights advocates (such as Tom Regan ) are deontologists rather than consequentialists. I now think that the "perhaps of all sentient beings" should be much more uncompromising.

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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

JANUARY 30, 2012

The legal rights of nonhuman animals might first be achieved in any of three ways. In 2002 the German Parliament amended Article 26 of the Basic Law to give nonhuman animals the right to be “respected as fellow creatures” and to be protected from “avoidable pain.” Unlike legislators, judges are at least formally bound to do justice.

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Animal Ethics

APRIL 23, 2008

For every person, being a subject of interests, has rights, i.e., has a claim to respect of his interests under the law of equality of persons. Under the moral law, all beings who have interests are subjects of rights, while all those who in addition to having interests, are capable of grasping the demands of duty, are subjects of duties.

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Animal Person

JUNE 1, 2009

But " Minding the Animals: Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism " is a great look back at how we humans have managed to always find a way to consider ourselves unique, despite what the reality of the nonhuman world tells us. Here are some of my favorite passages. [S]ince

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Critter News

OCTOBER 26, 2008

I came across this 2005 book from the Society & Animals Journal titled Confronting Cruelty Moral Orthodoxy and the Challenge of the Animal Rights Movement. Readership: This book will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the animal rights movement in England, the United States and Australia. Sounds interesting.

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Animal Person

AUGUST 5, 2009

The animals on farms are created for the sole purpose of human consumption. Finally, people who object to our moral stance jump species and say we should object to the lion killing the gazelle. I can, however, question the motives of a human who has no need to kill a sentient being or have someone kill for him, yet does so anyway.

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Animal Person

APRIL 1, 2010

Meanwhile, "new speciesism" is the notion that within a paradigm where rights are included for nonhuman animals, some are more deserving of rights than others for any of a variety of reasons (e.g., No nonhuman alive today belongs to the same species as some ancestor of humans. No frog, toad, or salamander ever was our forebear.

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Animal Ethics

MAY 25, 2008

One restriction on the absolutism of man's rule over Nature is now generally accepted: moral philosophers and public opinion agree that it is morally impermissible to be cruel to animals. That, on the whole, is the Christian tradition. Controversies no doubt remain.

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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. Only acts in category 1 are morally worthy. All of God's acts are worthy as well as right.)

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Critter News

APRIL 26, 2009

Last night, I watched "Milk," the film about assassinated gay rights activist Harvey Milk. I not only learned about Harvey Milk, but about the early stages of the gay rights movement (which is ongoing today when one looks at all the right-wing flutterings over gay marriage.) The Humane Society? Animals can't do that.

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Animal Person

NOVEMBER 24, 2009

It might reflect the values of the majority in some ways (and in other ways not), but its function is not as a moral statement, said that professor. And as if there are humans who don't judge. However that doesn't make it right to use them. Abortion is legal in this country, yet millions of people don't think it's right.

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10,000 Birds

APRIL 29, 2017

When we factor in a precarious trip punctuated with such hazards as stalking, demon-flight Peregrines , trigger happy humans, missing habitats, and other nasty situations, maybe those non-breeders are the smart ones? Seeing that few birds were around, we didn’t tarry at Chomes and instead, made our way over to Punta Morales.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 10, 2008

Why is it surprising that I have little to say about the nature of rights? 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 have little to say about rights because rights are not important to my argument.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 17, 2008

What the utilitarian who defends human carnivorousness must say, then, is something like this: that the amount of pleasure which humans derive per pound of animal flesh exceeds the amount of discomfort and pain per pound which are inflicted on the animals in the process, all things taken into account. Is this plausible?

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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. We can, of course, with consistency treat animals as mere pests and deny that they have any rights; for most animals, especially those of the lower orders, we have no choice but to do so.

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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

JULY 24, 2012

The initial attractiveness of utilitarianism as a moral theory on which to rest the call for the better treatment of animals was noted in an earlier context. But utilitarianism is not the theory its initial reception by the animal rights movement may have suggested. Because animals are sentient (i.e., Because animals are sentient (i.e.,

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 11, 2013

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

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

All that the rights view prohibits is science that violates individual rights. There are also some things we cannot learn by using humans, if we respect their rights. The rights view merely requires moral consistency in this regard. ( If that means that there are some things we cannot learn, then so be it.

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Animal Ethics

JULY 30, 2007

A general discussion of right or duty would hardly be com­plete without some discussion, even if only a brief one, of the closely related subject of rights. It is commonly said that rights and duties are correlative, and it is worth while to inquire whether and, if at all, in what sense this is true.

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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 Person

NOVEMBER 18, 2009

Because I've been thinking about the evolution of my own thinking--and languaging--regarding animal rights. Both animal rights groups and animal welfare groups use "compassion" frequently. No matter how they are treated, is it right to use them? Why all the quotation marks? Then again, so do people who kill animals for a living.

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Animal Ethics

OCTOBER 31, 2009

The only real cure for the evil is the growing sense that the lower animals are closely akin to us, and have Rights. Salt , The Logic of Vegetarianism: Essays and Dialogues [London: The Ideal Publishing Union, 1899], 109-10 [italics in original])

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