Concept
Animal ethics
Overview
Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.
Some ethicists use the term speciesism to describe discrimination against beings on the basis of species, in a way that is morally analogous to racism or sexism. This usage holds that differences in species membership alone do not justify differential moral consideration if the beings in question share morally relevant capacities such as sentience.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
1. The nature of animals and their mode of reproduction has now been described. Their actions and mode of life also differ according to their disposition and their food. For almost all animals present traces of their moral dispositions, though these distinctions are most remarkable in man. For most of them, as we remarked, when speaking of their various parts, appear to exhibit gentleness or ferocity, mildness or…
Aristotle, Aristotle's History of Animals In Ten Books
The author is tied to Animal ethics in the knowledge graph.
The beautiful arts and the sciences which, by their universally-communicable pleasure, and by the polish and refinement of society, make man more civilised, if not morally better, win us in large measure from the tyranny of sense-propensions, and thus prepare men for a lordship, in which Reason alone shall have authority; whilst the evils with which we are visited, partly by nature, partly by the intolerant…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
The author is tied to Animal ethics in the knowledge graph.
We may then, as we affirm, perceive in an animal the first principles of herile and political government; for the soul governs the body as the master governs his slave; the mind governs the appetite with a political or a kingly power, which shows that it is both natural and advantageous that the body should be governed by the soul, and the pathetic part by the mind, and that part which is possessed of reason; but to…
Aristotle, Politics
The author is tied to Animal ethics in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Animal ethics
Related ideas
- Galen
- Immanuel Kant
- Justice
- Sentience
- Environmental ethics
- Anthropocentrism
- Physiology
- Peter Singer
- Pharmacology
- Rome
- Virtue ethics
- Speciesism
- Deontology
- Aristotle
- Utilitarianism
- Personhood
- Greeks
- Animal Liberation (book)
- Jeremy Bentham
- Oxford University Press
- Virtue
- Consequentialism
- Ancient Greece
- Anatomy
Place in the tradition
Part of Bioethics.