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2.5.1: Virtue and Difference in Animal Ethics

  • Page ID
    90148
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    Philosophical questions concerning animals are so ubiquitous that they virtually go unnoticed. We take their presence and moral status for granted. However, our kinship with and bondage of animals situates us within a very peculiar and problematic relationship. Once recognized, moral questions concerning the treatment of animals present us with a deep dilemma: we view animals as extensions of our families and friends because of how similar they appear to us; and yet we also slaughter them for food, conduct painful experiments on them, and utilize them as simple material resources because of how different they appear. As a consequence, our thinking about animals results in contradictory views and practices. As we proceed in our discussion concerning animal ethics, it is important to keep in mind the following two questions: What is animality or animal nature? How should we understand and relate to animals? The significance of these questions is not to dictate answers, but to explore and reflect on the relation between humans, animals, and animality.

    In general, philosophers tend to denigrate animality as inferior to human nature or disregard it altogether. However, some have reworked the notion of animality and posit that it plays a central role in defining human nature. For those rethinking animal nature, animality refers to dynamic characteristics that unite but also separate animal from human nature: the bodily, instinctual, biological, and determined, to name a few. To some degree, humans share these with animals, but humans express them in different ways. As such, the notion of animality makes us feel uncomfortable because it reveals how proximal humans teeter between natures. It makes us anxious because of the ambiguity, fluidity, and continuity that it presents in characterizing seemingly disparate life forms or species. Animality poses a challenge and threat to our traditional hardline distinctions between human versus animal. Considering the moral status of animals, then, forces us to address this contradiction, discomfort, anxiety, and threat. Philosophically, it forces us to clarify and justify the views we hold regarding animals. Ethically and pragmatically, it forces us to reconsider the nature of our relationship with them in terms of their moral value, status, and rights.

    In what follows, I present a very brief historical account of animal ethics and argue why we should extend moral consideration to animals on the basis of re-envisioning the notion of dominion and developing an ethical sensibility to difference (of life forms). But we begin by first outlining some objections against extending moral consideration to animals. Responses to these objections will be interwoven throughout the discussion.


    2.5.1: Virtue and Difference in Animal Ethics is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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