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Debate in animal ethics needs reenergizing. To date, philosophers have focused on a relatively limited number of specific themes whilst leaving metaphilosophical issues that require urgent attention largely unexamined.
This timely collection of essays brings together new theory and critical perspectives on key topics in animal ethics, foregrounding questions relating to moral status, moral epistemology and moral psychology. Is an individualistic approach based upon capacities the best way to ground the moral status of non-human animals or should philosophers pursue relational perspectives? What does it mean to "know" animals and "speak" for them? What is the role of emotions such as disgust, empathy, and love, in animal ethics and how does emotion inform the rationalism inherent in analytic animal ethics theory?
The collection aims to broaden the scope of animal ethics, rendering it more inclusive of important contemporary philosophical themes and pushing the discipline in new directions.
List of contents
Notes on Contributors / Introduction: Questioning the Orthodoxy, John Hadley and Elisa Aaltola/ Part I: Intrinsic Value and Moral Status: Rethinking Sentience/ 1. A Meta-level Problem for Animal Rights Theory, John Hadley / 2. Against Moral Intrinsicalism, Nicolas Delon / 3. Beyond Sentience: Biosemiotics as Foundation for Animal and Environmental Ethics, Morton Tonnesen and Jonathan Beever / 4. Animal Agency: What It Is, What It Isn't, and How It Can be Realized, Zipporah Weisberg / Part II: Epistemology: Knowing and Speaking for Nonhuman Animals / 5. Enchanted Worlds and Animal Others, Wayne Williams / 6. 'The Flesh of My Flesh': Animality, Difference, and 'Radical' Community in Merleau-Ponty's Late Philosophy, Jonathan D. Singer / 7. The Problem of Speaking for Animals, Jason Wyckoff / 8. Doing Away with Rights, Elizabeth Foreman / Part III: Moral Psychology: Emotions and Metaethics / 9. Disgust and the Collection of Bovine Foetal Blood, Robert Fischer / Hume on Animals and the Rest of Nature, Angela Coventry and Avram Hiller / 11.The Politicization of Animal Love, Tony Milligan / 12. The Sentimentalism Revival and Animal Philosophy, Elisa Aaltola / Further Reading / Index
About the author
Edited by Elisa Aaltola and John Hadley
Summary
Bringing together new theory and critical perspectives on a broad range of topics in animal ethics, this book examines the implications of recent developments in the various fields that bear upon animal ethics. Showcasing a new generation of thinkers, it exposes some important shortcomings in existing animal rights theory.
