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This book, the culmination of forty years of theorizing about the moral status of animals, explicates and justifies society’s moral obligation to animals in terms of the commonsense metaphysics and ethics of Aristotle’s concept of telos. Rollin uses this concept to assert that humans have a responsibility to treat animals ethically. Aristotle used the concept, from the Greek word for "end" or "purpose," as the core explanatory concept for the world we live in. We understand what an animal is by what it does. This is the nature of an animal, and helps us understand our obligations to animals.
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A New Basis for Animal Ethics A New Basis for Animal Ethics Telos and Common Sense Bernard E. Rollin UNIVERSIT Y OF MISSOURI PRESS Columbia Copyright © 2016 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved. First printing, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-8262-2101-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944654 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Typefaces: Minion, Myriad This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Anna Bookchin, who instilled in me the toughness necessary to fight for the defenseless, and to my mother, who taught me empathy and compassion for all living things. And also to my family: My wife, Linda, perennial wise critic and partner in dialogue; my son, Michael, endless source of inspiration and fountain of ideas; my daughter-in-law, Theresa; and my grandchildren, Danny and Lily. Contents Preface / ix Acknowledgments / xi Introduction: Philosophy and Ethics / 1 PART ONE CREATING AN ANIMAL ETHIC The Need for a New Animal Ethic / 7 Social, Personal, and Professional Ethics / 15 Reminding versus Teaching / 31 The Denial of Animal Mind / 39 Mattering and Telos / 47 PART TWO IDEOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE Ideology / 59 Anecdote, Anthropomorphism, and Animal Mind / 79 Animal Telos and Animal Welfare / 97 The End of Husbandry / 109 Animal Research and Telos / 131 Genetic Engineering and Telos / 163 Conclusion / 173 References / 175 Index / 179 vii Preface For the last forty-five years, I have worked to raise the moral status of animals in society, on both a theoretical and a practical level. Unlike many philosophers, I have been able to effect significant change in animal use in society, to the direct benefit of the animals. Other, like-minded people and I have made major changes in the ways animals are used in education, eliminating many of the atrocious exercises that were earlier seen as essential to becoming a veterinarian or a physician or a science professor. We have been able to establish the control of pain in research as a major duty of the responsible researcher, and we have encoded this duty in legislation. We have been able to catalyze the elimination of one of the most egregiously inhumane housing systems regnant in confinement agriculture: sow stalls, or gestation crates. Equally important, we have been able to occasion moral thinking regarding our ethical obligations to animals among citizens and animal users alike. This book is an account of the thinking underlying these far-reaching changes. It is based in the realization that one’s ethics cannot be separated from one’s worldview or metaphysics. A metaphysic that sees the world as simply made of material particles obeying the mechanistic laws of physics, as, for example, Descartes postulated, is going to see such a world inevitably as having no place for values, and particularly, no place for ethics. Such is the world envisioned by physics developed during and after the Renaissance. In such a world it is understand