Interspecies Ethics (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780231167772)

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy.

Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Author: Cynthia Willett
ISBN-10: 0231167776
ISBN-13: 9780231167772
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/05/2014
Pages: 232
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2015 pg. 1161