Abstract
Animal Ethics rejects (i) “moral anthropocentrism,” by which we mean the assumption that human needs, wants, or desires should have absolute or near absolute priority in our moral calculations, (ii) “instrumentalism”, by which we mean the assumption that animals exist for human beings, to serve their interests and wants, and (iii) “reductionism”, by which we mean the way in which our moral obligations to animals are reduced to other (non-moral) terms or subsumed under other categories. Animal ethics embraces 4 contrary positions: (i) the first is that animals have worth in themselves, what may be termed “inherent” or “intrinsic” value. Sentient beings, or sentients, are not just things, objects, machines, or tools; they have their own interior life that deserves respect. This view extends worth to sentients as individuals, not just as collectivities or as part of a community. (ii) The second is that given the conceding of sentience, there can be no rational grounds for not taking animals’ sentience into account or for excluding individual animals from the same basic moral consideration that we extend to individual human beings. (iii) The third is that causing harm to individual sentients (except when it is for their own individual good—for example, in a veterinary operation) requires strong moral justification, if it can be justified at all. And (iv) it follows from the preceding that there must be profound moral limits to what humans are entitled to do to animals. Precisely what these limits are, and how they apply in specific situations, is the subject of practical animal ethics, but that there are such limits (as there are with our treatment of fellow humans) cannot be doubted. But the key thing is that we are in the middle of a welcome and necessary paradigm shift. The paradigm shift can be easily described: it is the move away from the idea that sentient animals are things, tools, commodities, means to human ends, and resources here for our use to the idea that animals have intrinsic value, dignity, and rights.
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Notes
- 1.
B. Brophy, Hackenfeller’s Ape (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1968), 46–47.
- 2.
B. Brophy, “The Rights of Animals,” in Animal Rights: A Historical Anthology, ed. A. Linzey and P. B. Clarke (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 156–62.
- 3.
J. G. Lawler, “The Rights of Animals,” Anglican Theological Review, April 1965.
- 4.
S. Godlovitch, R. Godlovitch, and J. Harris, eds., Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-Humans (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971).
- 5.
P. Singer, “Animal Liberation,” New York Review of Books, April 5, 1973.
- 6.
R. D. Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 5ff.
- 7.
P. Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976).
- 8.
R. D. Ryder, Victims of Science: The Use of Animals in Research (London: Davis-Poynter, 1975).
- 9.
A. Linzey, Animal Rights: A Christian Assessment (London: SCM Press, 1976).
- 10.
S. R. L. Clark, The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
- 11.
D. Paterson and R. D. Ryder, eds., Animals’ Rights—A Symposium (London: Centaur Press, 1979), viii.
- 12.
B. Brophy, “A Darwinist’s Dilemma,” in Animals’ Rights—A Symposium, ed. D. Paterson and R. D. Ryder (London: Centaur Press, 1979), 63–72.
- 13.
Ibid., 68.
- 14.
See A. Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22–25.
- 15.
The following sections on anthropocentrism and instrumentalism come from A. Linzey and C. Linzey, eds., Normalising the Unthinkable: The Ethics of Using Animals in Research (Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, March 2015), which has subsequently been published in A. Linzey and C. Linzey, eds., The Ethical Case Against Animal Expereiments (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
- 16.
Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross (London: Oxford University Press, 1915), vol. 9, 1161a–b.
- 17.
Ibid., original emphasis.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
T. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. the English Dominican Fathers (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1918), part 1, question 65.3, our emphases.
- 20.
A. Schweitzer, Civilisation and Ethics, trans. C. T. Campion (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923), 119.
- 21.
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1985), 1, viii, 79.
- 22.
T. Aquinas, “Summa Contra Gentiles,” in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. A. C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), vol. 2, 221–22.
- 23.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, question 64, article 1.
- 24.
A. Pope, “Of Cruelty to Animals,” in A Hundred English Essays, ed. R. Vallance (London: Thomas Nelson, 1950), 159–65.
- 25.
Brophy, Hackenfeller’s Ape, 47.
- 26.
A. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).
- 27.
Ibid., 217.
- 28.
T. Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 362.
- 29.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 94.
- 30.
Ibid., 94.
- 31.
Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 243.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
A. Linzey, “Foreword: Voyage to the Animal World,” in On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals, ed. S. H. Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xi.
- 34.
See, for example, D. DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); B. E. Rollin, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, Chaps. 1 and 2.
- 35.
See page 249.
- 36.
Much of this is adapted from Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters, Chap. 1.
- 37.
C. S. Lewis, Vivisection (Boston: New England Anti-Vivisection Society, 1947), 3.
- 38.
See, for example, Linzey and Linzey, Normalising the Unthinkable.
- 39.
See, for example, M. Bekoff with C. A. Meaney, eds., Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998); S. J. Armstrong and R. G. Botzler, eds., The Animal Ethics Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008).
- 40.
Brophy, “The Rights of Animals,” 161–62.
- 41.
See, for example, G. A. Jónsson, The Image of God: Genesis 1:26–28 in a Century of Old Testament Research (Lund, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1988).
- 42.
See A. Linzey, Animal Theology (London: SCM Press, 1994), 126.
- 43.
See, for example, A. W. Moss, Valiant Crusade: The History of the R.S.P.C.A (London: Cassell, 1961).
- 44.
See, for example, F. R. Ascione and P. Arkow, eds., Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999); P. Beirne, “For a Nonspeciesist Criminology: Animal Abuse as an Object of Study,” Criminology 37, no. 1 (1999): 117–47; A. Linzey, ed., The Link between Animal Abuse and Human Violence (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009); E. Gullone, Animal Cruelty, Antisocial Behaviour, and Aggression: More Than a Link (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 45.
M. Rowlands, Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 46.
See Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters.
- 47.
A wide range of practical topics are also addressed in A. Linzey, ed., The Global Guide to Animal Protection (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
- 48.
A. Arluke and C. R. Sanders, Regarding Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). We are grateful to Peggs for this reference.
- 49.
See pages 373–394 in this volume.
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Acknowledgements
Since this is an introductory essay, it inevitably utilizes and adapts some material found in previous writings by the editors over a period of twenty years (and in much the same language). We have indicated our indebtedness to our previous work in the text.
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Linzey, A., Linzey, C. (2018). Introduction: The Challenge of Animal Ethics. In: Linzey, A., Linzey, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36671-9_1
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