This paper examines the challenges posed by confronting the topic of animal suffering in animal husbandry. The predominant positions within animal ethics mainly focus on the moral status of humans and animals, arguing that killing farm animals is morally wrong due to specifiable intrinsic properties that grant farm animals significant moral status. Such positions are derived from a detached perspective that advocates for rational consistency. This paper opposes this detached perspective. By drawing on Cora Diamond’s concept of a difficulty of (...) reality, it contends that facing animal suffering, including changing one’s habits and attitudes towards this suffering, is instead best accomplished by adopting a situated perspective. Being affected by animal suffering is mediated by our own existential condition as an embodied being exposed to vulnerability. This embodied perspective, which more generally informs our encounters with the world, is derived not from rational principles, but from our immersion in a specific worldly context. Effectively criticizing norms of animal treatment requires engaging with the world with all of our moral capacities, such as imagination and emotional response, from a non-detached perspective. (shrink)

“A dog is man’s best friend” is a well-known and widely used phrase, but are we right in thinking that dogs are our friends? If so, do we owe our dogs what we owe our friends? Aristotle recognized three different kinds of friends: friends of utility, friends of pleasure, and friends of virtue. I suggest that dogs can meet the conditions necessary for entering into the first two kinds of friendship, but that there is a potential moral hazard in thinking (...) about our relationship with dogs in these terms. It is unclear whether dogs can meet the more stringent conditions necessary to enter friendships of virtue. Furthermore, the moral responsibilities that animal companion caregivers take on appear to be different than those of friendship. For these reasons, I challenge the notion that a neo-Aristotelian conception of friendship best captures the relationship we have with dogs. (shrink)

Trophy hunting is probably bad. Timothy Hsiao (2020), however, thinks that it isn’t bad. This is because he thinks that animals lack moral status. Other philosophers have tried to argue against the theoretical grounds upon which Hsiao denies moral status to animals. I suggest that Hsiao’s arguments for trophy hunting should be rejected simply because they have extremely unintuitive implications. They imply that it would be fine to play ‘panda-ball,’ a variation of baseball where players use panda cubs as bases (...) and balls, or even to blow up planets full of panda cubs just for the fun of it. As I suggest, these implications alone give us sufficient grounds to reject Hsiao’s arguments. (shrink)