Approaching The Agency Of Other Animals: An Introduction

Abstract

This chapter provides a brief overview of the book Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration and its chapters. It outlines a theory of agency, moves among a number of closely related terms-free will, ability, rationality, mind, morality, subjectivity-and we could add to this list in an indefinitely long fashion. It highlights how animals live in the world. Working out exactly what degree or kind of difference lies between human and nonhuman animal agency is part of the task at hand, although we are also interested in refining our ideas about human agency. There are at least two reasons for examining animal agency this way. The first is that the natural human tendency is to view an animal's actions in terms of our own conscious motives (called anthropomorphism). The second is because our own conscious motives may not be as conscious as we like to think.Keywords: animal agency; anthropomorphism; human agency

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