Reasonable Partiality and Animal Ethics

Reasonable partiality and animal ethics.

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship--philia in Aristotle's term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emergi...

5 Morality and Reasonable Partiality ∗

What is the relation between morality and partiality? Can the kind of partiality that matters to us be accommodated within moral thought, or are morality and partiality rival sources of normative considerations? These are questions that moral philosophy has struggled with in recent decades.1 They may not have much intuitive resonance, because the term ‘partiality’ is not used much in everyday d...

Ethics, Morality and Animal Biotechnology

Virtue Ethics and Animal Law

This essay explores virtue ethical concepts in the context of animal law theory and practice. For reasons discussed in the essay, virtue ethics may not, on its own, serve as an adequate foundation for general anticruelty statutes, but it may have application in those contexts in which sufficient sharing of values enables participants in legal reform to work through differences in moral commitme...

Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness

The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations...