Thank you for the question. Having taught an animal rights class for many years, I'm embarrassed to admit I'd never run into this argument. I've now tracked it down to this very interesting excerpt from Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia , which I think I'll put on my syllabus. So thank you! Analogies are both helpful and distracting. Using analogies to explore the ethics of meat-eating is helpful to the extent that people are so accustomed to the practise that many can barely see that it raises an ethical issue. But analogies are distracting as well. We think the bat-swinger acts wrongly. Should we think the same of the meat-eater? Well, only if the bat-swinger is in all morally relevant ways like the meat-eater. But now we have to work hard to see whether that's the case. I think meat-eaters can rightly say that they're somewhat different. The meat-eater isn't so unfeeling as to have his pleasure while simultaneously watching a cow howl in pain. The dirty-work is done "out of...

If you haven't been reading David Benatar's book Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence , then you might want to read it, because his argument is very much like yours. Perhaps we ought to say that there actually is some obligation to bring into existence lives that are good. This only seems counterintuitive if you make the mistake of thinking this obligation trumps all other considerations, when people are deciding whether to have children. If that were so, we'd all be under an obligation to run around making the maximum number of babies--which seems absurd. But there are lots and lots of other considerations. Perhaps having children will interfere with the enormous good I'm doing as a concert violinist. Perhaps having children in an overpopulated world has both good and bad effects. Still, we should acknowledge some obligation to bring into existence lives that are good. Thus, there is an obligation to create lives that are good to put in the balance with...

I agree with the you that spaying/neutering raises difficult moral questions. On its face, it's abusive, since sterilization probably lowers quality of life for animals. So why do animal protection groups like the Humane Society encourage it? Because sterilizing animals lowers the number of unwanted animals that wind up being euthanized in animal shelters. As it is, an animal is euthanized every 6 seconds. On the issue of sterilizing humans, here's food for thought. Suppose that excess human populations were euthanized in "people" shelters. Make that one every 6 seconds. If that were the situation, and it could not be altered, it might not seem so terrible to sterilize people as a way of reducing the number of killings. Sterilizing to prevent later killing , makes a certain amount of sense in both cases. Of course, we wouldn't put up with killing humans to control overpopulation, while even many animal protection groups don't object to killing animals for that purpose. That's the...

I don't think we ought to eat the pig, if we have no more serious reason to do so than liking the taste of pork chops or bacon. I don't think it's necessary to use "retarded humans" as leverage to see that. Liking the taste of pork is just too trivial a reason for taking a life--even a pig's life. That being said, there's no reason not to think it's more revolting and morally worse to eat a retarded human. It is more revolting because it's more revolting--that's an emotional-sensory reaction that doesn't operate by the rules of logic. Eating people is revolting in the way sex with animals is revolting. The roots of these reactions are obviously deep. As to why it's morally worse to eat a retarded human, you might think of it this way. It's wrong in just the way it's wrong to eat a pig, but it's wrong in an additional way as well. So there are two layers to the wrongness, instead of just one. The additional layer has to do with an implicit agreement. Some day you might be that retarded...

It's hard to find books that are "balanced" or nuanced. For the most part, people who address the ethics of animal use tend to be on the extreme ends of the spectrum. They are for some sort of radical equality between humans and animals, or they think there are no major problems with the way we now treat animals. There's the further problem that books about animals and ethics tend to look at the big picture instead of the details. Thus, the quite interesting issues about meat vs. fish vs. dairy vs. leather tend not to be dealt with. The book that comes closest to meeting your needs (that I can think of) is The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. Singer is the author of Animal Liberation and by all means a staunch animal advocate, but this is a rather nuanced book, and it's also very practical. It's really about the decisions we all make in our daily lives. The authors look at the ethics of eating "humane" animal products (vs. none or factory farmed), they look at...

Interesting question. In Texas (for example), animal cruelty laws forbid torturing, killing, "seriously injuring," or cruelly confining an animal. There is no exemption for pet owners; you don't get to do just anything you want to your own pet. Though it seems like "seriously injuring," having a vet remove testicles, rip out claws, slice off tails, etc., is not taken to be a violation. In the case of farm animals, it's clear what the statute says about such things. You can castrate, clip beaks, cut off tails, and kill farm animals because the statute explicitly says "generally accepted" treatment of farm animals is exempt. I think this is implicit in the clauses about pets. Generally accepted veterinary practice is exempt. As to the moral, as opposed to the legal issues, I think all these things need careful thought. You are basically arguing, I take it, that there has to be a limit on what can be done to pets. It surely can't be right to put your cat through a sex change operation. ...

If you do decide to take the chronological approach, then I think you should definitely focus on key works--in fact, in many cases just chapters of key works. I think it would make sense to choose a history of philosophy as your guide, staying away from anything overly voluminous or idiosyncratic. Blackwell has a one-volume history by Anthony Kenny that looks good. The table of contents references specific philosophical works, which may help you create a manageable, focused itinerary for yourself. Bon voyage!

I don't think your prediction about how Singer would reply is accurate. Start with human meat eating. As a Utilitarian, Singer thinks it's right or wrong in any specific instance depending on whether it maximizes total happiness. Today in western countries (and more and more everywhere), we raise and kill animals in ways that cause them a great deal of misery. We get some pleasure at a result, but looking at the total picture, it's very hard to believe our meat-eating practices maximize total happiness. Singer does not extrapolate automatically to every single imaginable case of meat-eating. So of course he also doesn't automatically extrapolate to animals. Even if an animal did have the ability to make moral decisions, it's not obvious they'd always be wrong to continue their carnivorous ways. Take a hypothetical lion, Leo, about to eat Gabe the gazelle. Of course, he's not going to do much good for Gabe by eating him, but it could be that he will maximize total happiness. You'd have...

Peter Fosl says "it makes no sense to characterize the conduct of a being that's not a moral agent in moral terms." I wonder about this. If a child's not a moral agent yet, can we not say she does something wrong, though not blameworthy? It's hard to say why that wouldn't be the right way to talk about gratuitously cruel orcas or cats. Of course, using moral labels wouldn't tell us what we ought to do--intervene or not intervene. In many cases, trying to stop animal wrongs ("wrongs"?) will likely do more harm than good.

There are some ideas in ethics that I consider it valuable for people to believe, even though I'm not sure that they are strictly true. For example, the ideas in the UN declaration of human rights are not so much true as approximations to the truth. Jeremy Bentham might have been correct when he said rights were "nonsense upon stilts." But rights talk is powerful and inspiring, and a good way of abbreviating a more complex set of ethical realities. Although I can't make myself take rights talk 100% seriously, it does get taught in schools and through the media, so that people come to believe in rights, and I wouldn't want to get in the way of this process.

I have nothing to add to Douglas Burnham's response, but can't resist a terminological quibble. "Speciesism" is the term Peter Singer (following Richard Ryder) uses to mean a prejudice against animals. So if you think animals should receive equal consideration, as Singer does, you're going to want to call yourself something other than a "speciesist." Unfortunately, there's no standard term for your view. Singer says "all animals are equal," as the animals say in the book Animal Farm . As I recall, the pigs who use that slogan call themselves "animalists," but it doesn't have much of a ring to it.