Animals, politics and morality

Abstract

This book examines moral theories that endeavour to tell us how we ought to treat animals, as well as how individuals and the law actually do treat them. The author gives consideration of the considerable bulk of philosophical literature on the moral status of animals that has appeared in recent years. What has made this philosophical debate so important, of course, has been its impact on the realm of practical politics. The book documents the re-emergence of the animal protection movement and the author makes an attempt at a classification of its key characteristics, and explores a number of explanations for its development. With the rise of a movement to expound the radical philosophy, the debate about the treatment of animals has also fundamentally changed. The book examines the nature of this debate by relating competing moral theories to the variety of uses to which humans put animals. It is the willingness of some elements in the animal protection movement to take direct action that has provoked the greatest publicity for the cause of animal protection in recent years. The author gives attention to the nature of modern pressure group politics and, in particular, it is asked, with the help of various theoretical approaches, to what extent the political system provides for fair competition between the animal protection movement and those with a vested interest in continuing to exploit animals

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 111 citations exist upstream.