About this item
Animal Ethics has long been a highly contested area with debates driven by unease about various forms of animal harm, from the use of animals in scientific research to the farming of animals for consumption. Animal Ethics: The Basics is an essential introduction to the key considerations surrounding the ethical treatment of animals. Taking a thematic approach, it outlines the current arguments from animal agency to the emergence of the 'political turn'. This book explores such questions as: Can animals think and do they suffer? What do we mean by speciesism? Are humans special? Can animals be political or moral agents? Is animal rights protest ethical? Including outlines of the key arguments, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of key terms, this book is an essential read for philosophy students and readers approaching the contested field of Animal Ethics for the first time.
About the Author
Anyone who reads "Beyond Animal Rights" (Continuum, 2010) will recognize that my sympathies are very much with animals. But I also hold that we need a rich moral vocabulary, one that doesn't reduce everything down to one big concept such as rights or consequences or even goodness. We need lots of moral concepts to do lots of different jobs. My second book "Love" (Acumen, 2011) draws upon this same background assumption. As humans, we need to see ourselves not just as the bearers of rights or as rational agents but as beings who are loveable. An appreciation of this is central to our grasp of our own worth. The love book is out in the autumn and in its final chapter I return to the question of what is at stake in our love for the non-human, for other creatures, for places, and for nature. Currently, I'm writing a book on civil disobedience for Continuum. My feeling is that we need a new account of civil disobedience, one that is not modelled around the protests of decades ago but which will, instead, help us to understand contemporary protests. In particular, we need to understand protests over the environment (including ecosabotage or monkey-wrenching) as, in many instances, civil disobedience. Similarly with prostests over the treatment of animals (particularly animal rescue and to some extent hunt-sabbing) .
