Animals and the Moral Community - Mental Life, Moral Status and Kinship

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-231-14234-2
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 208 Seiten, Format (B × H): 149 mm x 219 mm, Gewicht: 384 g

Gary Steiner argues that ethologists and philosophers in the analytic and continental traditions have largely failed to advance an adequate explanation of animal behavior. Critically engaging the positions of Marc Hauser, Daniel Dennett, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others, Steiner shows how the Western philosophical tradition has forced animals into human experiential categories in order to make sense of their cognitive abilities and moral status and how desperately we need a new approach to animal rights.

Steiner rejects the traditional assumption that a lack of formal rationality confers an inferior moral status on animals vis-à-vis human beings. Instead, he offers an associationist view of animal cognition in which animals grasp and adapt to their environments without employing concepts or intentionality. Steiner challenges the standard assumption of liberal individualism according to which humans have no obligations of justice toward animals. Instead, he advocates a "cosmic holism" that attributes a moral status to animals equivalent to that of people. Arguing for a relationship of justice between humans and nature, Steiner emphasizes our kinship with animals and the fundamental moral obligations entailed by this kinship.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steiner, Gary

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Ethik, Moralphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Angewandte Ethik & Soziale Verantwortung

Inhaltsverzeichnis

PrefaceAcknowledgments1. Arguments Against Rationality in Animals2. Arguments for Rationality in Animals3. An Associationist Model of Animal Cognition4. Liberal Individualism and the Problem of Animal Rights5. The Ideal of Cosmic Holism6. "Cosmo-Politics": Grounding Liberal Individualism in Cosmic HolismNotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Gary Steiner is John Howard Harris Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University. He is the author of Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism and Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy.