Animal Ethics

MARCH 23, 2009

There are intractable practical differences between environmental ethics and the animal liberation movement. Very different moral obligations follow in respect, most importantly, to domestic animals, the principal beneficiaries of the humane ethic. I hope you enjoyed them and learned from them.

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Animal Ethics

JANUARY 28, 2007

This journal should be of interest to readers of this blog.

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Critter News

NOVEMBER 27, 2008

Both by saving individual animals and also by economic sabotage we make it harder and less profitable to continue to torture and kill animals. For the animals! DBF (Swedish Animal Liberation Front)"

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 19, 2009

If so, then he is to be excused; but nobody today can think that any particular moral theory has an advantage over the others based on the status it accords animals. Peter Singer, like Smart, is a utilitarian, but he told me personally several years ago that his argument for animal liberation is independent of utilitarianism.

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Animal Ethics

OCTOBER 13, 2008

One of the more distressing aspects of the animal liberation movement is the failure of almost all its exponents to draw a sharp distinction between the very different plights (and rights) of wild and domestic animals. Domestic animals are creations of man. But this distinction lies at the very center of the land ethic.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 12, 2010

If there has been progress in ethics recently it has been through the realization of some ethicists that animal happiness and suffering has to be considered equally with that of human beings. I should draw attention here to the remarkable book Animal Liberation by Professor Peter Singer of Monash University.

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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.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 21, 2008

The net result would be fewer nonhuman beings and more human beings, who, of course, have requirements of life far more elaborate than even those of domestic animals, requirements which would tax other "natural resources" (trees for shelter, minerals mined at the expense of topsoil and its vegetation, etc.)

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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

AUGUST 4, 2008

For the record, I am opposed to violence in behalf of animals. I can't think of anything that does more harm to the cause of animal liberation. In the long run, the best thing we can do for animals is engage in rational persuasion. I leave you this fine evening with a column by Debra Saunders.

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Animal Ethics

DECEMBER 10, 2009

ones to do with the painfulness of the methods of rearing and killing.) It is worth noticing that my proposal does not rule out killings which have the effect overall of fostering the wants of the largest subset of some group like a wild herd where otherwise the wants of an even larger subset will be thwarted.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 3, 2009

Baird Callicott , "Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair," Environmental Ethics 2 [winter 1980]: 311-38, at 335-6 [italics in original]) Note from KBJ: My "outrage at vivisection and factory farming" has nothing to do with "the transmogrification of organic to mechanical processes."

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Animal Ethics

AUGUST 1, 2008

Baird Callicott , "Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair," Environmental Ethics 2 [winter 1980]: 311-38, at 326 [ footnote omitted])

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Animal Ethics

NOVEMBER 12, 2008

Concern for animal (and plant) rights and well-being is as fundamental to the land ethic as to the humane ethic, but the difference between naturally evolved and humanly bred species is an essential consideration for the one, though not for the other. (

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 6, 2008

Michael Fox , "'Animal Liberation': A Critique," Ethics 88 [January 1978]: 106-18, at 116-7)

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 20, 2008

If, in other words, any genuine ethic is possible, if it is possible to value people for the sake of themselves, then it is equally possible to value land in the same way. (

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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. His book on atheism is among the best I have read on that topic, which is why I used it in my Philosophy of Religion course many years ago. (I

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Critter News

JANUARY 11, 2012

I had suspected Animal Liberation Front may have been involved and now they are in fact claiming responsibility for it with multiple details," Harris wrote. He called it a terrorist action. "I

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 6, 2007

As Peter Singer so aptly put it in Animal Liberation : The people who profit by exploiting large numbers of animals do not need our approval. The purchase of the corpses of the animals they rear is the main support the factory farmers ask from the public. They need our money.

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Animal Ethics

FEBRUARY 15, 2009

KBJ: Nobody in the animal-rights or animal-liberation movement views intelligence as a morally significant property, at least intrinsically. What should our moral attitude be toward eating members of these species? This problem becomes crucial when the notion of consent is brought in.

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Animal Ethics

JUNE 4, 2009

As he puts it, “Until we boycott meat we are, each one of us, contributing to the continued existence, prosperity, and growth of factory farming and all the other cruel practices used in rearing animals for food” ( Animal Liberation, 167).

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