Online research in philosophy

This volume provides a general overview of the basic ethical and philosophical issues of animal rights. It asks questions such as: Do animals have moral rights? If so, what does this mean? What sorts of mental lives do animals have, and how should we understand welfare? By presenting models for understanding animals' moral status and rights, and examining their mental lives and welfare, David DeGrazia explores the implications for how we should treat animals in connection with our diet, zoos, and research. Animal Rights distinguishes itself by combining intellectual rigor with accessibility, offering a distinct moral voice with a non-polemical tone.

'Animals sell papers' : the value of animal stories -- Media and animal debates : welfare, rights, 'animal lovers' and terrorists -- Stars : animal performers -- Wild : authenticity and getting closer to nature -- Experimental : the visibility of experimental animals -- Farmed : selling animal products -- Hunted : recreational killing -- Monsters : horrors and moral panics -- Beginning at the end : re-imagining human-animal relations.

Since important legal victories against racial discrimination and other forms of discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s, many legal scholars and lawyers have been increasingly attracted to the "romance of rights." For these scholars and lawyers, analogies to the civil rights movement seem especially appealing as vehicles for achieving societal change in new fields. Animal Law is perhaps the fastest growing field of study in American legal education and scholarship, and calls for legal rights for some or all animals are rapidly expanding. This Article critiques comparisons between rights sought for animals and rights assigned to infant humans,mentally incapable adult humans, and corporations. It argues that legal and societal reforms regarding animals are better suited to social contract - contractualist - ideals than to creation of new rights. Contrary to the increasingly frequent assertions of some animal rights theorists, appropriate treatment of animals in a manner that benefits society's overall interests is attainable through focusing on human responsibility for animal welfare under social contract principles. Developing an artificial construct of formal rights for animals would be harmful both to humans and, ultimately, to animals.

Human moral rights place justified limits on what people are free to do to one another. Animals also have moral rights, and arguments to support the use of animals in scientific research based on the benefits allegedly derived from animal model research are thus invalid. Animals do not belong in laboratories because placing them there, in the hope of benefits for others, violates their rights.

Discusses the history of animal rights; laws about how animals are treated; moral issues involved in using animals in such fields as medical research and ...

Even if animal liberation were to be adopted, would rights for animals be redundant – or even deleterious? Such an objection, most prominently voiced by L. W. Sumner and Paul W. Taylor, is misguided, risks an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic conception of autonomy and freedom, overly agent-centered rights conceptions, and an overlooking of the likely harmful consequences of positing rights for humans but not for nonhuman animals. The objection in question also stems from an overly pessimistic construal of autonomy-infringements thought to result from extending rights to animals, and also, of confusions that supposedly may ensue from ascribing animal rights. Whether or not a case for animal liberation and/or animal rights can cogently be made, the redundancy-or-worse objection to animal rights need pose no barrier.

This paper argues that due to considerations of proximity of particular humans to particular (nonhuman) animals, and to the impact this proximity has on the obligations felt by those humans to those animals, an animal rights strategy as a means of specifying what obligations humans really do have toward animals cannot be successful. The good news, however; is that it is out of these proximity relations that we can begin to understand just what obligations humans properly do have toward animals.

The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals—and other people—as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of difference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals.

Animal rights and moral theories -- Arguing for one's species -- Utilitarianism and animals : Peter Singer's case for animal liberation -- Tom Regan : animal rights as natural rights -- Virtue ethics and animals -- Contractarianism and animal rights -- Animal minds.

In On Their Own Terms (Darien, CT: Nectar Bat Press, 2010), Lee Hall articulates a theory that wild animals, due to their autonomous nature, are endowed with rights, but domesticated animals lack rights because they are not autonomous. Hall then argues that the rights of wild animals require that humans let them alone, and that, despite the fact that domestic animals lack rights, humans are required to take care of them because it is humans who brought them into existence. While sympathetic to Hall's aims, this review concludes that Hall’s theory denies rights to domestic animals only by employing theoretical means that are uncomfortably analogous to how others have denied rights to all nonhuman animals.