Animal Liberation at 30
AMONG THE BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
by Roger Scruton
London: Metro, 206 pp., $9.95
by Paola Cavalieri, translated from the Italian by
Catherine Woollard
Oxford University Press, 192 pp., $22.00
by David DeGrazia
Cambridge University Press, 314 pp., $90.00; $32.00
(paper)
by Matthew Scully
St. Martin's, 434 pp., $27.95
1.
The phrase "Animal Liberation" appeared in the press for the first time on
the April 5, 1973, cover of The New York Review of Books. Under that
heading, I discussed Animals, Men and Morals, a collection of essays on
our treatment of animals, which was edited by Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch and
John Harris.[1] The article began
with these words:
We are familiar with Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, and a
variety of other movements. With Women's Liberation some thought we had come
to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said,
is the last form of discrimination that is universally accepted and practiced
without pretense, even in those liberal circles which have long prided
themselves on their freedom from racial discrimination. But one should always
be wary of talking of "the last remaining form of discrimination."
In the text that followed, I urged that despite obvious differences between
humans and nonhuman animals, we share with them a capacity to suffer, and this
means that they, like us, have interests. If we ignore or discount their
interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the
logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists or sexists
who think that those who belong to their race or sex have superior moral status,
simply in virtue of their race or sex, and irrespective of other characteristics
or qualities. Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or in other
intellectual capacities to nonhuman animals, that is not enough to justify the
line we draw between humans and animals. Some humans—infants and those with
severe intellectual disabilities—have intellectual capacities inferior to some
animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we
inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to
test the safety of household products. Nor, of course, would we tolerate
confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them.
The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is
therefore a sign of "speciesism"—a prejudice that survives because it is
convenient for the dominant group— in this case not whites or males, but all
humans.
That essay and the book that grew out of it, also published by The
New York Review,[2] are often
credited with starting off what has become known as the "animal rights
movement"—although the ethical position on which the movement rests needs no
reference to rights. Hence the essay's thirti-eth anniversary provides a
convenient opportunity to take stock both of the current state of the debate
over the moral status of animals and of how effective the movement has been in
bringing about the practical changes it seeks in the way we treat animals.
2.
The most obvious difference between the current debate over the moral status
of animals and that of thirty years ago is that in the early 1970s, to an extent
barely credible today, scarcely anyone thought that the treatment of individual
animals raised an ethical issue worth taking seriously. There were no animal
rights or animal liberation organizations. Animal welfare was an issue for cat
and dog lovers, best ignored by people with more important things to write
about. (That's why I wrote to the editors of The New York Review with the
suggestion that they might review Animals, Men and Morals, whose
publication the British press had greeted a year earlier with total
silence.)
Today the situation is very different. Issues about our treatment of animals
are often in the news. Animal rights organizations are active in all the
industrialized nations. The US animal rights group called People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals has 750,000 members and supporters. A lively intellectual
debate has sprung up. (The most comprehensive bibliography of writings on the
moral status of animals lists only ninety-four works in the first 1970 years of
the Christian era, and 240 works between 1970 and 1988, when the bibliography
was completed.[3] The tally now
would probably be in the thousands.) Nor is this debate simply a Western
phenomenon—leading works on animals and ethics have been translated into most of
the world's major languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
To assess the debate, it helps to distinguish two questions. First, can
speciesism itself—the idea that it is justifiable to give preference to beings
simply on the grounds that they are members of the species Homo sapiens
—be defended? And secondly, if speciesism cannot be defended, are there
other characteristics about human beings that justify them in placing far
greater moral significance on what happens to them than on what happens to
nonhuman animals?
The view that species is in itself a reason for treating some beings as
morally more significant than others is often assumed but rarely defended. Some
who write as if they are defending speciesism are in fact defending an
affirmative answer to the second question, arguing that there are morally
relevant differences between human beings and other animals that entitle us to
give more weight to the interests of humans.[4] The only argument
I've come across that looks like a defense of speciesism itself is the claim
that just as parents have a special obligation to care for their own children in
preference to the children of strangers, so we have a special obligation to
other members of our species in preference to members of other species.[5]
Advocates of this position usually pass in silence over the obvious case that
lies between the family and the species. Lewis Petrinovich, professor emeritus
at the University of California, Riverside, and an authority on ornithology and
evolution, says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral
imperatives—and then lists "children, kin, neighbors, and species."[6] If the argument
works for both the narrower circle of family and friends and the wider sphere of
the species, it should also work for the middle case: race. But an argument that
supported our preferring the interests of members of our own race over those of
members of other races would be less persuasive than one that allowed priority
only for kin, neighbors, and members of our species. Conversely, if the argument
doesn't show race to be a morally relevant boundary, how can it show that
species is?
The late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick argued that we can't
infer much from the fact that we do not yet have a theory of the moral
importance of species membership. "No one," he wrote, "has spent much time
trying to formulate" such a theory, "because the issue hasn't seemed
pressing."[7] But now that
nearly twenty years have passed since Nozick wrote those words, and many people
have, during those years, spent quite a lot of time trying to defend the
importance of species membership, Nozick's comment takes on a different weight.
The continuing failure of philosophers to produce a plausible theory of the
moral importance of species membership indicates, with increasing probability,
that there can be no such thing.
That takes us to the second question. If species is not morally important in
itself, is there something else that happens to coincide with the human species,
on the basis of which we can justify the inferior consideration we give to
nonhuman animals?
Peter Carruthers argues that it is the lack of a capacity to reciprocate.
Ethics, he says, arises out of an agreement that if I do not harm you, you will
not harm me. Since animals cannot take part in this social contract we have no
direct duties to them.[8] The difficulty
with this approach to ethics is that it also means we have no direct duties to
small children, or to future generations yet unborn. If we produce radioactive
waste that will be deadly for thousands of years, is it unethical to put it into
a container that will last 150 years and drop it into a convenient lake? If it
is, ethics cannot be based on reciprocity.
Many other ways of marking the special moral significance of human beings
have been suggested: the ability to reason, self-awareness, possession of a
sense of justice, language, autonomy, and so on. But the problem with all of
these allegedly distinguishing marks is, as noted above, that some humans are
entirely lacking in these characteristics and few want to consign them to the
same moral category as nonhuman animals.
This argument has become known by the tactless label of "the
argument from marginal cases," and has spawned an extensive literature of its
own.[9] The attempt by
the English philosopher and conservative columnist Roger Scruton to respond to
it in Animal Rights and Wrongs illustrates both the strengths and
weaknesses of the argument. Scruton is aware that if we accept the prevailing
moral rhetoric that asserts that all human beings have the same set of basic
rights, irrespective of their intellectual level, the fact that some nonhuman
animals are at least as rational, self-aware, and autonomous as some human
beings looks like a firm basis for asserting that all animals have these basic
rights. He points out, however, that this prevailing moral rhetoric is not in
accord with our real attitudes, because we often regard "the killing of a human
vegetable" as excusable. If human beings with profound intellectual disabilities
do not have the same right to life as normal human beings, then there is no
inconsistency in denying that right to nonhuman animals as well.
In referring to a "human vegetable," however, Scruton makes things too easy
for himself, for that expression suggests a being that is not even conscious,
and thus has no interests at all that need to be protected. He might be less
comfortable making his point with respect to a human being who has as much
awareness and ability to learn as the foxes he wants to continue being permitted
to hunt. In any case, the argument from marginal cases is not limited to the
question of what beings we can justifiably kill. In addition to killing animals,
we inflict suffering on them, in a wide variety of ways. So the defenders of
common practices involving animals owe us an explanation for their willingness
to make animals suffer when they would not be willing to do the same to humans
with similar intellectual capacities. (Scruton, to his credit, is opposed to the
close confinement of modern animal raising, saying that "a true morality of
animal welfare ought to begin from the premise that this way of treating animals
is wrong.")
Scruton is in fact only half-willing to acknowledge that a "human vegetable"
may be treated differently from other human beings. He muddies the waters by
claiming that it is "part of human virtue to acknowledge human life as
sacrosanct." In addition, he argues that because in normal conditions human
beings are members of a moral community protected by rights, even deeply serious
abnormality does not cancel membership of this community. Thus even though
humans with profound intellectual disability do not really have the same claims
on us as normal humans, we would do well, Scruton says, to treat them as if they
did. But is this defensible? Certainly if any sentient being, human or nonhuman,
can feel pain or distress, or conversely can enjoy life, we ought to give the
interests of that being the same consideration as we give to the similar
interests of normal human beings with unimpaired capacities. To say, however,
that species alone is both necessary and sufficient for being a member of our
moral community, and for having the basic rights granted to all members of that
community, requires further justification. We return to the core question:
Should all and only human beings be protected by rights, when some nonhuman
animals are superior in their intellectual capacities, and have richer emotional
lives, than some human beings?
One well-known argument for an affirmative answer to this question asserts
that unless we can draw a clear boundary around the moral community, we will
find ourselves on a slippery slope.[10] We may start by
denying rights to Scruton's "human vegetable," that is, to those who can be
shown to be irreversibly unconscious, but then we may gradually extend the
category of those without rights to others, perhaps to the intellectually
disabled, or to the demented, or just to those whose care is a burden on their
family and the community, until in the end we have reached a situation that none
of us would have accepted if we had known we were heading there when we denied
the irreversibly unconscious a right to life. This is one of several arguments
critically examined by the Italian animal activist Paola Cavalieri in The
Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights, a rare
contribution to the English-language debate by a writer from continental Europe.
Cavalieri points to the ease with which slave-owning societies were able to draw
lines between humans with rights and humans without rights.
That slaves were human beings was acknowledged both in ancient
Greece and in the slaveholding states of the US—Aristotle explicitly says that
barbarians are human beings who exist to serve the good of the more rational
Greeks,[11] and Southern
whites sought to save the souls of the Africans they enslaved by making them
Christians. Yet the line between slaves and free people did not slip
significantly, even when some barbarians and some Africans became free, or when
slaves produced children of mixed race. So, Cavalieri suggests, there is no
reason to doubt our ability to deny that some humans have rights, while keeping
the rights of other humans as secure as ever. But she is certainly not
advocating that we do this. Her concern is rather to undermine the argument for
drawing the boundaries of the sphere of rights so as to include all and only
humans.
Cavalieri also responds to the argument that all humans, including the
irreversibly unconscious, are to be elevated above other animals because of the
characteristics they "normally" possess, rather than those they actually have.
This argument seems to appeal to a kind of unfairness in excluding those who
"fortuitously" fail to have the required characteristics. Cavalieri replies that
if the "fortuitousness" is merely statistical, it carries no moral relevance,
and if it is intended to suggest that the lack of the required characteristics
is not the fault of those with profound intellectual disability, then that is
not a basis for separating such humans from nonhuman animals.
Cavalieri states her own position in terms of rights, and in particular the
basic rights that constitute what, following Ronald Dworkin, she calls the
"egalitarian plateau." We want, Cavalieri insists, to secure a basic form of
equality for all human beings, including the "non-paradigmatic" ones (her term
for "marginal cases.") If the egalitarian plateau is to have a defensible,
nonarbitrary boundary that safeguards all humans from being pushed off the edge,
we must select as a criterion for that boundary a standard that allows a large
number of nonhuman animals inside the boundary as well. Hence we must allow onto
the egalitarian plateau beings whose intellect and emotions are at a level that
is shared by, at least, all birds and mammals.
Cavalieri does not argue that the rights of birds and mammals can be derived
from self-evidently true moral premises. Her starting point, rather, is our
prevailing belief in human rights. She seeks to show that all who accept this
belief must also accept that similar rights apply to other animals. Following
Dworkin, she sees human rights as part of the basic political framework of a
decent society. They set limits to what the state may justifiably do to others.
In particular, institutions like slavery or other invidious forms of racial
discrimination that are based on violating the human rights of some of those
over whom the state rules are, for that reason alone, illegitimate. Our
acceptance of the idea of human rights therefore requires the abolition of all
practices that routinely overlook the basic interests of rights-holders. Hence,
if Cavalieri's argument is sound, our belief in rights commits us to an
extension of rights beyond humans, and that in turn requires us to abolish all
practices, like factory farming and the use of animals as subjects of painful
and lethal research, that routinely overlook the basic interests of nonhuman
rights-holders.
On the other hand, the rights for which Cavalieri argues are not supposed to
resolve every situation in which there is a conflict of interests or of rights.
Her notion of rights as part of the basic political framework of a decent
society is compatible with specific restrictions of rights, as occurred for
example when "Typhoid Mary" was compulsorily quarantined because she carried a
lethal disease. A government may be entitled to restrict the movements of humans
or animals who are a danger to the public, but it must still show them the
concern and respect due to them as possessors of basic rights.[12]
My own opposition to speciesism is based, as I have already
mentioned, not on rights, but on the thought that a difference of species is not
an ethically defensible ground for giving less consideration to the interests of
a sentient being than we give to similar interests of a member of our own
species. David DeGrazia skillfully defends equal consideration for all sentient
beings in Taking Animals Seriously. Such a position need not rely on
prior acceptance of our current view of human rights—a view that, though
widespread, can be rejected, especially once its implications in regard to
animals are drawn out as Cavalieri draws them out. While the principle of equal
consideration of interests is therefore more solidly based than Cavalieri's
argument, however, it must face the difficulties that follow from the fact that
interests, not rights, are now the focus of attention. That requires us to
estimate what the interests are in an endless variety of different
circumstances.
To take one case of particular ethical significance: the interest a being has
in continued life—and hence, on the interests view, the wrongness of taking that
being's life—will depend in part on whether the being is aware of itself as
existing over time, and is capable of forming future-directed desires that give
it a particular kind of interest in continuing to live. To that extent Roger
Scruton is right about our attitudes to the deaths of members of our own species
who lack these characteristics. We see it as less of a tragedy than the death of
a being who is future-oriented, and whose desires to do things in the medium-
and long-term future will therefore be thwarted if he or she dies.[13] But this is not
a defense of speciesism, for it implies that killing a self-aware being like a
chimpanzee causes a greater loss to the being killed than does killing a human
being with an intellectual disability so severe as to preclude the capacity to
form desires for the future.
We then need to ask what other beings may have this kind of interest in
living into the future. DeGrazia combines philosophical insights and scientific
research to help us answer such questions about specific species of animals, but
there is often room for doubt, and the calculations required for applying the
principle of equal consideration of interests can only be rough approximations,
if they can be done at all. Perhaps, though, that is just the nature of our
ethical situation, and rights-based views avoid such calculations at the cost of
leaving out something relevant to what we ought to do.
The most recent addition to the literature of the animal
movement has come from a surprising quarter, one deeply hostile to any
discussion of the possibility of justifying the killing of human beings, no
matter how severely disabled they may be. In Dominion: The Power of Man, the
Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy Matthew Scully, a conservative
Christian, past literary editor of National Review and now speechwriter
to President George W. Bush, has written an eloquent polemic against human abuse
of animals, culminating with a devastating description of factory farming.
Since the animal movement has, for the past thirty years, generally been
associated with the left, it is curious now to see Scully make a case for many
of the same goals within the perspective of the Christian right, replete with
references to God, interpretation of the scripture, and attacks on "moral
relativism, self-centered materialism, license passing itself off as freedom,
and the culture of death"[14] —but this time
aimed at condemning not vic-timless crimes like homosexuality or
physician-assisted suicide, but the needless suffering inflicted by factory
farming and the modern slaughterhouse. Scully calls on all of us to show mercy
toward animals and abandon ways of treating them that fail to respect their
nature as animals. The result is a work that, although not philosophically
rigorous, has had a remarkable amount of sympathetic publicity in the
conservative press, which usually sneers at animal advocates.
3.
The history of the modern animal movement makes a nice counterexample to
skepticism about the impact of moral argument on real life.[15] As James Jasper
and Dorothy Nelkin observed in The Animal Rights Crusade: The Growth of a
Moral Protest, "Philosophers served as midwives of the animal rights
movement in the late 1970s."[16] The first
successful protest against animal experiments in the United States was the
1976–1977 campaign against experiments conducted at the American Museum of
Natural History on the sexual behavior of mutilated cats. Henry Spira, who
conceived and ran the campaign, had a background of working in the union and
civil rights movements, and had not considered, until he read the 1973 New
York Review article, that animals are also worth the attention of those
concerned about the exploitation of the weak. Spira went on to take on larger
targets, such as the testing of cosmetics on animals. His technique was to
target a prominent corporation that used animals—in the cosmetics campaign, he
started with Revlon—and ask them to take reasonable steps to find alternatives
to the use of animals. Always willing to engage in dialogue, and never one to
paint the abusers of animals as evil sadists, he was remarkably successful in
stimulating interest in developing ways of testing products without using
animals, or with using fewer animals in less painful ways.[17]
Partly as a result of his work, there has also been a sizable drop in the
number of animals used in research. In Britain official statistics show that
roughly half as many animals are now experimented upon as were used in 1970.
Estimates for the United States —where no official statistics are kept —suggest
a similar story. From the standpoint of a nonspeciesist ethic there is still a
long way to go for animals used in research, but the changes the animal movement
has brought about mean that every year millions fewer animals are forced to
undergo painful procedures and slow deaths.
The animal movement has had other successes too. Despite "fur is back" claims
by the industry, fur sales have still not recovered to their level in the 1980s,
when the animal movement began to target it. Since 1973, while the number of
dogs and cats owned has nearly doubled, the number of stray and unwanted animals
killed in pounds and shelters has been cut by more than half.[18]
These modest gains are dwarfed, however, by the huge increase
in animals kept confined, some so tightly that they are unable to stretch their
limbs or walk even a step or two, on America's factory farms. This is by far the
greatest source of human-inflicted suffering on animals, simply because the
numbers are so great. Animals used in experiments are numbered in the tens of
millions annually, but last year ten billion birds and mammals were
raised and killed for food in the United States alone. The increase over the
previous year is, at around 400 million animals, more than the total number of
animals killed in the US by pounds and shelters, for research, and for fur
combined. The overwhelming majority of these factory-reared animals now live
their lives entirely indoors, never knowing fresh air, sunshine, or grass until
they are trucked away to be slaughtered.
Against the confinement and slaughter of farm animals in America, the animal
movement has, until quite recently, been impotent. Gail Eisnitz's 1997 book
Slaughterhouse contains shocking, well-authenticated accounts of animals
in major American slaughterhouses being skinned and dismembered while still
conscious.[19] If such
incidents had been documented in Britain they would have led to major news
stories and the national government would have been forced to do something about
it. Here the book passed virtually unnoticed outside the animal movement.
The situation is very different in Europe. Americans have often looked down
on some European nations, especially the Mediterranean countries, for tolerating
cruelty to animals. Now the accusing glance goes in the opposite direction. Even
in Spain, with its culture of bull-fighting, most animals are better cared for
than in America. By 2012, European egg producers will be required to give their
hens access to a perch and a nesting box to lay their eggs in, and to allow at
least 750 square centimeters, or 120 square inches, per bird—dramatic changes
that will transform the living conditions of more than two hundred million hens.
United States egg producers haven't even started thinking about perches or
nesting boxes, and typically give their fully grown hens just forty-eight square
inches, or about half the area of a sheet of 81/2-x-11-inch letter paper per
bird.[20]
In the US veal calves are deliberately kept anemic, deprived of straw for
bedding, and confined in individual crates so narrow that they cannot even turn
around. That system of keeping calves has been illegal in Britain for many
years, and will become illegal throughout the European Union by 2007. Keeping
pregnant sows in individual crates for their entire pregnancy, also the standard
American practice, was banned in Britain in 1998, and is being phased out in
Europe. These changes have wide support throughout the European Union, and the
backing of leading European experts on the welfare of farm animals. They are a
vindication of much that animal advocates have been saying for the past thirty
years.
Are Americans simply less concerned with animal suffering than
their European counterparts? Perhaps, but in Political Animals: Animal
Protection Policies in Britain and the United States, Robert Garner explores
several other possible explanations for the widening gap in animal welfare
standards between the two nations.[21] By comparison
with Britain, the US political process is more corrupt. Elections are many times
more costly—the entire 2001 British general election cost less than John Corzine
spent to win a single Senate seat in 2000. With money playing a greater role,
American candidates are more beholden to their donors. Moreover, fund raising in
Europe is largely done by the political parties, not by individual candidates,
which makes it more open to public scrutiny and more likely to produce an
electoral backlash for the entire party if it is seen to be in the pocket of a
particular industry. These differences allow the agribusiness industry far
greater control over Congress than it can hope to have over the political
processes in Europe.
Consistent with that explanation, the most successful American campaigns—like
Spira's campaign against the use of animals to test cosmetics— have concentrated
on corporations rather than on the legislature or the government. Recently a ray
of hope has come from an unlikely vehicle for change. After protracted
discussions with animal advocates, started by Henry Spira before his death and
then taken up by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, McDonald's agreed
to set and enforce higher standards for the slaughterhouses that supply it with
meat, and then announced that it would require its egg suppliers to provide each
hen with a minimum of seventy-two square inches of living space—a 50 percent
improvement for most American hens, but still only enough to bring these
producers up to a level that is already on its way out in Europe. Burger King
and Wendy's followed suit. These steps were the first hopeful signs for American
farm animals since the modern animal movement began.
An even greater triumph was achieved last November by using another route
around the legislative roadblock: the citizen-initiated referendum. With support
from a number of national animal organizations, a group of animal activists in
Florida succeeded in gathering 690,000 signatures to put on the ballot a
proposal to change the constitution of Florida so as to ban the keeping of
pregnant sows in crates so narrow that they cannot even turn around. Changing
the constitution is the only way citizens can get a direct vote on a measure in
Florida. Opponents of the measure, obviously unwilling to argue that pigs don't
need to be able to turn around or walk, instead tried to persuade Florida voters
that the confinement of pigs was not an appropriate subject for the state
constitution. But by a margin of 55 to 45 percent, voters said no to sow crates,
thus making Florida the first jurisdiction in the United States to ban a major
form of farm-animal confinement. Though Florida has only a small number of
intensive piggeries, the vote supports the idea that it is not hard hearts or
lack of sympathy for animals but a failure of democracy that causes America to
lag so far behind Europe in abolishing the worst features of factory
farming.
4.
My original article in The New York Review ended with a paragraph that
saw the challenge of the animal movement as a test of human nature:
Can a purely moral demand of this kind succeed? The odds are
certainly against it. The book [Animals, Men and Morals] holds
out no inducements. It does not tell us that we will become healthier, or
enjoy life more, if we cease exploiting animals. Animal Liberation will
require greater altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation
movement, since animals are incapable of demanding it for themselves, or of
protesting against their exploitation by votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Is
man capable of such genuine altruism? Who knows? If this book does have a
significant effect, however, it will be a vindication of all those who have
believed that man has within himself the potential for more than cruelty and
selfishness.
So how have we done? Both the optimists and the cynics about human nature
could see the results as confirming their views. Significant changes have
occurred, in animal testing and other forms of animal abuse. In Europe, entire
industries are being transformed because of the concern of the public for the
welfare of farm animals. Perhaps most encouraging for the optimists is the fact
that millions of activists have freely given up their time and money to support
the animal movement, many of them changing their diet and lifestyle to avoid
supporting the abuse of animals. Vegetarianism and even veganism (avoiding all
animal products) are far more widespread in North America and Europe than they
were thirty years ago, and although it is difficult to know how much of this
relates to concern for animals, undoubtedly some of it does.
On the other hand, despite the generally favorable course of the
philosophical debate about the moral status of animals, popular views on that
topic are still very far from adopting the basic idea that the interests of all
beings should be given equal consideration irrespective of their species. Most
people still eat meat, and buy what is cheapest, oblivious to the suffering of
the animal from which the meat comes. The number of animals being consumed is
much greater today than it was thirty years ago, and increasing prosperity in
East Asia is creating a demand for meat that threatens to boost that number far
higher still. Meanwhile the rules of the World Trade Organization threaten
advances in animal welfare by making it doubtful that Europe will be able to
keep out imports from countries with lower standards. In short, the outcome so
far indicates that as a species we are capable of altruistic concern for other
beings; but imperfect information, powerful interests, and a desire not to know
disturbing facts have limited the gains made by the animal movement.
Notes
[1] Taplinger,
1972.
[2] Peter Singer,
Animal Liberation (New York Review/Random House, 1975; revised edition,
New York Review/ Random House, 1990; reissued with a new preface, Ecco, 2001).
[3] Charles Magel,
Keyguide to Information Sources in Animal Rights (McFarland, 1989).
[4] See, for
example, Carl Cohen, "The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,"
New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 315 (1986), pp. 865–870; and
Michael Leahy, Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective
(London: Routledge, 1991).
[5] See Mary
Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (University of Georgia Press, 1984);
Jeffrey Gray, "On the Morality of Speciesism," Psychologist, Vol. 4, No.
5 (May 1991), pp. 196–198, and "On Speciesism and Racism: Reply to Singer and
Ryder," Psychologist, Vol. 4, No. 5 (May 1991), pp. 202–203; and Lewis
Petrinovich, Darwinian Dominion: Animal Welfare and Human Interests (MIT
Press, 1999).
[6] Petrinovich,
Darwinian Dominion, p. 29.
[7] Robert Nozick,
"About Mammals and People," The New York Times Book Review, November 27,
1983, p. 11; I draw here on Richard I. Arneson, "What, If Anything, Renders All
Humans Morally Equal?" in Singer and His Critics, edited by Dale Jamieson
(Blackwell, 1999), p. 123.
[8] Peter
Carruthers, The Animals Issue: Moral Theory in Practice (Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
[9] Daniel
Dombrowski, Babies and Beasts: The Argument from Marginal Cases
(University of Illinois Press, 1997).
[10] See, for
example, Peter Carruthers, The Animals Issue.
[11] Aristotle,
Politics (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1916), p. 16.
[12] As Dworkin
himself argued in regard to the detention of suspected terrorists; see "The
Threat to Patriotism," The New York Review, February 28, 2002.
[13] See my
Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially Chapter
4.
[14] Quoted from
Kathryn Jean Lopez, "Exploring 'Dominion': Matthew Scully on Animals,"
National Review Online, December 3, 2002.
[15] See, for
example, See Richard A. Posner, The Problematics of Moral and Legal
Theory (Belnap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999).
[16] Free Press,
1992, p. 90.
[17] See Peter
Singer, Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement
(Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
[18] The State
of the Animals 2001, edited by Deborah Salem and Andrew Rowan (Humane
Society Press, 2001).
[19] Prometheus,
1997.
[20] See Karen
Davis, Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry
Industry (Book Publishing Company, 1996).
[21] St. Martin's,
1998.
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