Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Motivated Science: What Humans Gain From Denying Animal Sentience, Uri Lifshin

Animal Sentience

Resistance to the idea that non-human animals are sentient resembles erstwhile resistance to the theory that the earth is not the centre of the universe, or that humans evolved from “apes”. All these notions are psychologically threatening. They can remind people of their own creatureliness and mortality and might make them feel guilty or uncertain about their way of life. An honest debate over animal sentience, welfare and rights should consider the human motivation to deprive animals of these things in the first place. I briefly review empirical evidence on the psychological function of denying animal minds.

Animals & Ethics 101: Thinking Critically About Animal Rights, Nathan Nobis

Moral Standing and Animal Rights Collection

This book provides an overview of the current debates about the nature and extent of our moral obligations to animals. Which, if any, uses of animals are morally wrong, which are morally permissible (i.e., not wrong) and why? What, if any, moral obligations do we, individually and as a society (and a global community), have towards animals and why? How should animals be treated? Why? We will explore the most influential and most developed answers to these questions – given by philosophers, scientists, and animal advocates and their critics – to try to determine which positions are supported by the …

Animals & Ethics 101: Thinking Critically About Animal Rights, Nathan Nobis

eBooks

This book provides an overview of the current debates about the nature and extent of our moral obligations to animals. Which, if any, uses of animals are morally wrong, which are morally permissible (i.e., not wrong) and why? What, if any, moral obligations do we, individually and as a society (and a global community), have towards animals and why? How should animals be treated? Why? We will explore the most influential and most developed answers to these questions – given by philosophers, scientists, and animal advocates and their critics – to try to determine which positions are supported by the …

Tom Regan On ‘Kind’ Arguments Against Animal Rights And For Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Tom Regan argues that human beings and some non-human animals have moral rights because they are “subjects of lives,” that is, roughly, conscious, sentient beings with an experiential welfare. A prominent critic, Carl Cohen, objects: he argues that only moral agents have rights and so animals, since they are not moral agents, lack rights. An objection to Cohen’s argument is that his theory of rights seems to imply that human beings who are not moral agents have no moral rights, but since these human beings have rights, his theory of rights is false, and so he fails to show that …

Environmental Challenge And Animal Agency, Marek Špinka, Françoise Wemelsfelder

Sentience Collection

Challenges are there to be overcome – seen usually as problems to avoid rather than as opportunities to enjoy. However, for humans a life without challenge would be likely to be dull and boring, lacking the enthusiasm and satisfaction that come with individual development. Could this also be true for animals? This chapter looks at the positive value of engaging with environmental challenges for animal welfare, proposing that this value lies in an animal’s expression of agency and the enhanced functional competence that it gains through this. It explores the different facets of agency, and provides more detailed discussion of …

Animal Cognition, Kristin Andrews, Ljiljana Radenovic

Sentience Collection

Debates in applied ethics about the proper treatment of animals often refer to empirical data about animal cognition, emotion, and behavior. In addition, there is increasing interest in the question of whether any nonhuman animal could be something like a moral agent.

Reasonable Partiality And Animal Ethics, Bernard E. Rollin

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship -philia in Aristotle's term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emerging in society, its full expression is severely limited by our exploitative uses of animals. At this historical moment, only the animals with whom we enjoy philia - companion animals - can be treated with unrestricted moral …

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Animal Welfare Collection

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …

A Case Against Animal Rights, Jan Narveson

Animal Welfare Collection

Down through the past decade and more, no philosophical writer has taken a greater interest in the issues of how we ought to act in relation to animals, nor pressed more strongly the case for according them rights, than has Tom Regan, in many articles, reviews, and exchanges at scholarly conferences and in print. It is a pleasure to join him on this symposium, to explore this interesting and important set of issues.

I shall begin by outlining, as fairly as I can, Regan's view of the matter, and then sketch my alternative. Regan has in fact criticized certain aspects …

The Case For Animal Rights, Tom Regan

Animal Welfare Collection

In the space I have at my disposal here I can only sketch, in the barest outline, some of the main features of the book Its main themes-and we should not be surprised by this-involve asking and answering deep, foundational moral questions about what morality is, how it should be understood, and what is the best moral theory, all considered. I hope I can convey something of the shape I think this theory takes. The attempt to do this will be (to use a word a friendly critic once used to describe my work) cerebral, perhaps too cerebral. But this …

Humane Ethics And Animal Rights, Michael W. Fox

Animal Welfare Collection

While the primary goal of the animal welfare movement is to eliminate suffering in those animal species that are exploited by humans, this goal, although exemplary, is narrow sighted. Notwithstanding the practical difficulties of proving animal suffering, especially psychological, suffering could conceivably be eliminated, as in confined farm animals, through the use of tranquilizers, or even brain surgery. A goose being made to eat compulsively, following selective partial destruction or stimulation of its brain to cause hypertrophy of its liver for the liver pate trade, may not suffer. But it is being harmed. Likewise, to selective breed a farm animal, …