Description
Book SynopsisThere are many introductions to the animal ethics literature. There arenât many introductions to the practice of doing animal ethics. Bob Fischerâs Animal Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction fills that gap, offering an accessible model of how animal ethics can be done today. The book takes up classic issues, such as the ethics of eating meat and experimenting on animals, but tackles them in an empirically informed and nuanced way. It also covers a range of relatively neglected issues in animal ethics, such as the possibility of insect sentience and the ethics of dealing with pests. Finally, the book doesnât assess every current practice using standard ethical theories, but tries to evaluate some of them using the moral frameworks endorsed by those involved. So, for instance, there is a chapter on the way that animal care and use committees try to justify some of the educational uses of animals, and the chapter on zoos considers the way that international zoological societies
Trade Review
"Bob Fischer’s book is a fantastic and unorthodox introduction to animal ethics. It’s highly readable, appealingly honest, firmly grounded in real-life cases, and challenges readers to think for themselves."
Clare Palmer, Texas A&M University
"This is an excellent introduction to animal ethics, both its various moral frameworks and the range of issues related to nonhuman animals. Its nuanced exploration of animal ethics is written in a style that is simultaneously accessible and engaging to newcomers to this topic and insightful and productively provocative for readers with extensive experience thinking about these issues. From a teaching perspective, this introduction makes many valuable observations and raises important questions for thinking about how to approach these topics. It is both a fantastic introduction and a valuable tool for prompting deeper discussions in more advanced courses."
Elan Abrell, New York University
Table of Contents1. Introduction 2. The Moral Community 3. Animal Minds 4. Welfare and Death 5. Moral Theory 6. Animal Agriculture and Aquaculture 7. Production and Consumption Ethics 8. Fishing 9. International Animal Care and Use Committees 10. Animal Research 11. Zoos 12. Pests 13. Companion Animals 14. Activism 15. Conclusion
