Is it acceptable to kill an animal that has been granted a pleasant life? This book rigorously explores the moral basis of the ideal of animal-friendly animal husbandry and sheds new light on utilitarian moral theory by pointing out the assumptions and implications of two different versions of utilitarianism, with surprising conclusions.

Is it acceptable to kill an animal that has been granted a pleasant life? This book rigorously explores the moral basis of the ideal of animal-friendly animal husbandry and sheds new light on utilitarian moral theory by pointing out the assumptions and implications of two different versions of utilitarianism, with surprising conclusions.

While it is generally accepted that animal welfare matters morally, it is less clear how to morally evaluate the ending of an animal's life. This volume presents a collection of contributions from major thinkers in ethics and animal welfare, with a special focus on the moral evaluation of killing animals.

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Philosophy - Practical (Ethics, Aesthetics, Culture, Nature, Right, ...), grade: B+, Education University of Hong Kong, course: PFS4030 Honours Project II, language: English, abstract: This essay sums up the discussion on killing animals, list six different views on the topic and find the best view out of them, and supplement the loophole of that view with the help of other views. Animal rights has long been a controversial issue in the human world as the human culture holds a lot of activities that involve the killing of animals, such as meat eating and foxhunting. There are both animal-friendly views and animal-unfriendly views in the three main stems of ethics: utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics.

Is my dog, with his joyful and carefree life, better off than I am? Do hens in battery cages have worse lives than cows at pasture? Will my money improve welfare more if I spend it on helping people or if I benefit chickens? How can we assess the harm of climate change for both humans and non-humans? If we want to systematically compare welfare across species, we first need to explore whether welfare subjects of different species have the same or rather a different capacity for welfare. According to what seems to be the dominant philosophical view, welfare subjects with higher cognitive capacities have a greater capacity for welfare and are generally much better off than those with lower cognitive capacities. Visak carefully explores and rejects this view. She argues instead that welfare subjects of different species have the same capacity for welfare despite different cognitive capacities. This book prepares the philosophical ground for comparisons of welfare across species. It will inform and inspire ethicists and animal welfare scientists alike, as well as a broader readership interested in wellbeing, animals, and ethics. Besides different views about capacity for welfare across species, the book discusses animal capacities, moral status, harm of death, whether bringing additional well-off individuals into existence is a good thing, and practical implications of these topics for counting and comparing the welfare of animals of different species.

Is my dog, with his joyful and carefree life, better off than I am? Do hens in battery cages have worse lives than cows at pasture? Will my money improve welfare more if I spend it on helping people or if I benefit chickens? How can we assess the harm of climate change for both humans and non-humans? If we want to systematically compare welfare across species, we first need to explore whether welfare subjects of different species have the same or rather a different capacity for welfare. According to what seems to be the dominant philosophical view, welfare subjects with higher cognitive capacities have a greater capacity for welfare and are generally much better off than those with lower cognitive capacities. Višak carefully explores and rejects this view. She argues instead that welfare subjects of different species have the same capacity for welfare despite different cognitive capacities. This book prepares the philosophical ground for comparisons of welfare across species. It will inform and inspire ethicists and animal welfare scientists alike, as well as a broader readership interested in wellbeing, animals, and ethics. Besides different views about capacity for welfare across species, the book discusses animal capacities, moral status, harm of death, whether bringing additional well-off individuals into existence is a good thing, and practical implications of these topics for counting and comparing the welfare of animals of different species.

Edited by Mylan Engel Jr. and Gary Lynn Comstock, this book employs different ethical lenses, including classical deontology, libertarianism, commonsense morality, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, and the capabilities approach, to explore the philosophical basis for the strong animal rights view, which holds that animals have moral rights equal in strength to the rights of humans, while also addressing what are undoubtedly the most serious challenges to the strong animal rights stance, including the challenges posed by rights nihilism, the “kind” argument against animal rights, the problem of predation, and the comparative value of lives. In addition, contributors explore the practical import of animal rights both from a social policy standpoint and from the standpoint of personal ethical decisions concerning what to eat and whether to hunt animals. Unlike other volumes on animal rights, which focus primarily on the legal rights of animals, and unlike other anthologies on animal ethics, which tend to cover a wide variety of topics but only devote a few articles to each topic, this volume focuses exclusively on the question of whether animals have moral rights and the practical import of such rights. The Moral Rights of Animals will be an indispensable resource for scholars, teachers, and students in the fields of animal ethics, applied ethics, ethical theory, and human-animal studies, as well as animal rights advocates and policy makers interested in improving the treatment of animals.

After lives filled with deep suffering, 74 billion animals are slaughtered worldwide every year on factory farms. Is it wrong to buy the products of this industry? In this book, two college students – a meat-eater and an ethical vegetarian – discuss this question in a series of dialogues conducted over four days. The issues they cover include: how intelligence affects the badness of pain, whether consumers are responsible for the practices of an industry, how individual choices affect an industry, whether farm animals are better off living on factory farms than not existing at all, whether meat-eating is natural, whether morality protects those who cannot understand morality, whether morality protects those who are not members of society, whether humans alone possess souls, whether different creatures have different degrees of consciousness, why extreme animal welfare positions "sound crazy," and the role of empathy in moral judgment. The two students go on to discuss the vegan life, why people who accept the arguments in favor of veganism often fail to change their behavior, and how vegans should interact with non-vegans. A foreword, by Peter Singer, introduces and provides context for the dialogues, and a final annotated bibliography offers a list of sources related to the discussion. It offers abstracts of the most important books and articles related to the ethics of vegetarianism and veganism. Key Features: Thoroughly reviews the common arguments on both sides of the debate. Dialogue format provides the most engaging way of introducing the issues. Written in clear, conversational prose for a popular audience. Offers new insights into the psychology of our dietary choices and our responsibility for influencing others.