Speciesism is a term used in philosophy regarding the treatment of individuals of different species. The term has several different definitions within the relevant literature. Some sources specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership, while other sources define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not. Richard Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species." Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals, which scholars say is pervasive in the modern society. Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to endorse racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.
Wildlife refers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area without being introduced by humans. Wildlife was also synonymous to game: those birds and mammals that were hunted for sport. Wildlife can be found in all ecosystems. Deserts, plains, grasslands, woodlands, forests, and other areas, including the most developed urban areas, all have distinct forms of wildlife. While the term in popular culture usually refers to animals that are untouched by human factors, most scientists agree that much wildlife is affected by human activities. Some wildlife threaten human safety, health, property, and quality of life. However, many wild animals, even the dangerous ones, have value to human beings. This value might be economic, educational, or emotional in nature.
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth independent of their utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Broadly speaking, and particularly in popular discourse, the term "animal rights" is often used synonymously with "animal protection" or "animal liberation". More narrowly, "animal rights" refers to the idea that many animals have fundamental rights to be treated with respect as individuals—rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture that may not be overridden by considerations of aggregate welfare.
Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American moral philosopher. He has been White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014.
Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.
Sentiocentrism, sentio-centrism, or sentientism is an ethical view that places sentient individuals at the center of moral concern. Both humans and other sentient individuals have rights and/or interests that must be considered.
Wild animal suffering is the suffering experienced by nonhuman animals living outside of direct human control, due to harms such as disease, injury, parasitism, starvation and malnutrition, dehydration, weather conditions, natural disasters, and killings by other animals, as well as psychological stress. Some estimates indicate that these individual animals make up the vast majority of animals in existence. An extensive amount of natural suffering has been described as an unavoidable consequence of Darwinian evolution and the pervasiveness of reproductive strategies which favor producing large numbers of offspring, with a low amount of parental care and of which only a small number survive to adulthood, the rest dying in painful ways, has led some to argue that suffering dominates happiness in nature.
Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations is a 2012 book by the British political theorist Alasdair Cochrane, in which it is argued that animal rights philosophy can be decoupled from animal liberation philosophy by the adoption of the interest-based rights approach. Cochrane, arguing that there is no reason that (nonhuman) animals should be excluded from justice, adopts Joseph Raz's account of interest rights and extends it to include animals. He argues that sentient animals possess a right not to be made to suffer and a right not to be killed, but not a right to freedom. The book's chapters apply Cochrane's account to a number of interactions between humans and animals; first animal experimentation, then animal agriculture, the genetic engineering of animals, the use of animals in entertainment and sport, the relationship of animals to environmental practices and the use of animals in cultural practices.
Welfare biology is a proposed cross-disciplinary field of research to study the positive and negative well-being of sentient individuals in relation to their environment. Yew-Kwang Ng first advanced the field in 1995. Since then, its establishment has been advocated for by a number of writers, including philosophers, who have argued for the importance of creating the research field, particularly in relation to wild animal suffering. Some researchers have put forward examples of existing research that welfare biology could draw upon and suggested specific applications for the research's findings.
John Hadley is an Australian philosopher whose research concerns moral and political philosophy, including animal ethics, environmental ethics, and metaethics. He is currently a senior lecturer in philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He has previously taught at Charles Sturt University and the University of Sydney, where he studied as an undergraduate and doctoral candidate. In addition to a variety of articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, he is the author of the 2015 monograph Animal Property Rights and the 2019 monograph Animal Neopragmatism. He is also the co-editor, with Elisa Aaltola, of the 2015 collection Animal Ethics and Philosophy.
Clare Palmer is a British philosopher, theologian and scholar of environmental and religious studies. She is known for her work on environmental and animal ethics. She was appointed as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University in 2010. She had previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Greenwich, Stirling, and Lancaster in the United Kingdom, and Washington University in St. Louis in the United States, among others.
Óscar Horta Álvarez is a Spanish animal activist and moral philosopher who is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and one of the co-founders of the organization Animal Ethics. He is known for his work in animal ethics, especially around the problem of wild animal suffering. He has also worked on the concept of speciesism and on the clarification of the arguments for the moral consideration of nonhuman animals. In 2022, Horta published his first book in English, Making a Stand for Animals.
Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice is a 2018 book by the English political theorist Alasdair Cochrane, published by Oxford University Press. In the book, Cochrane outlines and defends his political theory of "sentientist cosmopolitan democracy". The approach is sentientist in that it recognises all sentient animals as bearers of rights; cosmopolitan in that it extends cosmopolitan political theory to include animals, rejecting the importance of state borders and endorsing impartiality; and democratic in that it aims to include animals in systems of representative and cosmopolitan democracy. It was the first book to extend cosmopolitan theory to animals, and was a contribution to the "political turn" in animal ethics – animal ethics informed by political philosophy.
The predation problem or predation argument refers to the consideration of the harms experienced by animals due to predation as a moral problem, that humans may or may not have an obligation to work towards preventing. Discourse on this topic has, by and large, been held within the disciplines of animal and environmental ethics. The issue has particularly been discussed in relation to animal rights and wild animal suffering. Some critics have considered an obligation to prevent predation as untenable or absurd and have used the position as a reductio ad absurdum to reject the concept of animal rights altogether. Others have criticized any obligation implied by the animal rights position as environmentally harmful.
The relationship between animal ethics and environmental ethics concerns the differing ethical consideration of individual nonhuman animals—particularly those living in spaces outside of direct human control—and conceptual entities such as species, populations and ecosystems. The intersection of these two fields is a prominent component of vegan discourse.
The ethics of uncertain sentience refers to questions surrounding the treatment of and moral obligations towards individuals whose sentience—the capacity to subjectively sense and feel—and resulting ability to experience pain is uncertain; the topic has been particularly discussed within the field of animal ethics, with the precautionary principle frequently invoked in response.
Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she published her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.
"The Meat Eaters" is a 2010 essay by the American philosopher Jeff McMahan, published as an op-ed in The New York Times. In the essay, McMahan asserts that humans have a moral obligation to stop eating meat and, in a conclusion considered to be controversial, that humans also have a duty to prevent predation by individuals who belong to carnivorous species, if we can do so without inflicting greater harm overall.
Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering is a 2020 book by the philosopher Kyle Johannsen, that examines whether humans, from a deontological perspective, have a duty to reduce wild animal suffering. He concludes that such a duty exists and recommends effective interventions that could be potentially undertaken to help these sentient individuals.
Making a Stand for Animals is a 2022 book by moral philosopher Oscar Horta, a moral philosopher at the University of Santiago de Compostela and founder of the organization Animal Ethics. In the book, Horta examines many topics in the field of animal ethics, such as speciesism, sentience, wild animal suffering, veganism and longtermism. The book was initially published in Spanish and Galician.
