Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1971) is a collection of essays on animal rights, edited by Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, both from Canada, and John Harris from the UK. The editors were members of the Oxford Group, a group of postgraduate philosophy students and others based at the University of Oxford from 1968, who began raising the idea of animal rights in seminars and campaigning locally against factory farming and otter hunting.
The book was ground-breaking in its time, because it was one of the early publications in the mid-20th century that argued clearly in favour of animal liberation/animal rights, rather than simply for compassion in the way animals are used. The editors wrote in the introduction: "Once the full force of moral assessment has been made explicit there can be no rational excuse left for killing animals, be they killed for food, science, or sheer personal indulgence."[1]
Origins
Apart from the Godlovitches and Harris, the group also included David Wood and sociology student Mike Peters. The Godlovitches had recently become vegan on moral grounds, and soon after Harris and Wood met them, the latter were also persuaded that the case against exploiting animals was unanswerable, and they also became vegan. The group then began to raise the issue in lectures and seminars in moral philosophy at Oxford, and also began local campaigning against factory farming, otter hunting, and other animal exploitation issues.
The initial inspiration for the book was the discovery of an article called "The Rights of Animals" by the novelist Brigid Brophy, which had been published in The Sunday Times in October 1965. Brophy's piece was devastating in its brief and unsentimental statement of the case for animal rights. It began:
Were it to be announced tomorrow that anyone who fancied it might, without risk of reprisals or recriminations, stand at a fourth story window, dangle out of it a length of string with a meal (labelled 'Free') on the end, wait until a chance passer-by took a bite and then, having entangled his cheek or gullet on a hook hidden in the food, haul him up to the fourth floor and there batter him to death with a knobkerrie, I do not think there would be many takers.[2]
It concluded:
In point of fact, I am the very opposite of an anthromorphiser. I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality and moral choice – and that is precisely why we are under the obligation to recognise and respect the rights of animals.[2]
Soon after the Godlovitches and Harris read the article, the idea of creating a book, or symposium of articles, began to emerge. Much of what was written at that time about animal welfare was anthropomorphic and sentimental in tone. There was plainly a need for something which offered an alternative, in the form of a clear and rigorous philosophical and moral perspective. The group began to draw up a list of possible contributors. Members of the group went to London and visited Brophy, who was enthusiastic and agreed to contribute. Brophy then introduced the group to Richard D. Ryder, a clinical psychologist based in Oxford, who later agreed to write a piece on animal experimentation. The group began to visit publishers, and when they met Giles Gordon of Victor Gollancz, he persuaded them that they should themselves write chapters for the book, as well as better known authors, as this would make the whole more interesting. Gollancz also agreed to publish it.
The editors were uncompromising in their Introduction:
Once the full force of moral assessment has been made explicit there can be no rational excuse left for killing animals, be they killed for food, science, or sheer personal indulgence...should the reader himself find no fault in the positions he will find in these pages he is, as a rational being, committed to act in accordance with them. Should he fail to do so, he can only have been terribly misled since childhood about the nature of morality.[3]
John Harris writes about killing for food, Maureen Duffy about hunting, Brigid Brophy about the need for animal rights, Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch about the ethics, and Leonard Nelson (the German philosopher who died in 1927) about duties to animals. There are essays from David Wood and Michael Peters on the sociological position, and a postscript from Patrick Corbett, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Corbett concluded with: "Let animal slavery join human slavery in the graveyard of the past!"[4]
It was in Ryder's article that the word "speciesism" made its first appearance in an independent publication. Ryder had first used it in 1970 in a privately printed pamphlet, entitled "Speciesism," which he had distributed around Oxford and sent to the colleges.[5] He argued in the book that speciesism is as illogical as racism, writing that "species" and "race" are both vague terms, and asked: "If, under special conditions, it were one day found possible to cross a professor of biology with an ape, would the offspring be kept in a cage or in a cradle?"[6]
Reception
The book got into trouble from the moment of publication, because two animal experimenters named by the editors in Ryder's piece objected to what had been written about them. The publisher Gollancz was forced by the threat of legal action to pay damages, and to put an errata slip in all copies. In terms of public reception, the unusual and radical approach taken by the book meant that it created a small stir in the United Kingdom. John Harris was interviewed on the PM programme, and appeared on local television. The book was also reviewed in several papers and journals.
But the way forward for animal rights as an issue was eventually to occur by a different route. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer had come to vegetarianism through meeting the Godlovitches when he was a postgraduate student in Oxford, and gave critical feedback on Roslind Godlovitch's contribution to the book.[7] It was in his review of the book for The New York Review of Books in 1973 that Singer first used the term "animal liberation," writing that "Animals, Men and Morals is a manifesto for an Animal Liberation movement." The article prompted the New York Review to commission a book on the subject from Singer, which was published as Animal Liberation (1975), and which became one of the animal rights movement's canonical texts.[8]
See also
For a recent and detailed account of the history of the Oxford Group and the publication of Animals, Men and Morals see The Oxford Group and the Emergence of the Animal Rights Movement, R. Garner and Y Okuleye, OUP December 2020.
Peter Albert David Singer is an Australian moral philosopher and the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics, approaching the subject from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He wrote the book Animal Liberation (1975), in which he argues for vegetarianism, and the essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", which favours donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he revealed in The Point of View of the Universe (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian.
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.
Henry Spira was an American activist for socialism and animal rights, who is regarded by some as one of the most effective animal advocates of the 20th century.
Brigid Antonia Brophy, was a British author, literary critic and polemicist. She was an influential campaigner who agitated for many types of social reform, including homosexual parity, vegetarianism, humanism, and animal rights. Brophy appeared frequently on television and in the newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s, making her prominent both in literary circles and on the wider cultural scene. Her public reputation as an intellectual woman meant she was both revered and feared. Her oeuvre comprises both fiction and non-fiction, displaying the impressive range of Brophy's erudition and interests. All her work is suffused with her stylish crispness and verve. Brophy's major achievements include igniting contemporary debate about animal rights, and the establishment of the Public Lending Right by which writers in the UK receive a payment each time their book is borrowed from a public library.
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals is a 1975 book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer. It is widely considered within the animal liberation movement to be the founding philosophical statement of its ideas. Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to human and nonhuman animals. Following Jeremy Bentham, Singer argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to experience suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. He popularized the term "speciesism" in the book, which had been coined by Richard D. Ryder to describe the exploitative treatment of animals.
Richard Hood Jack Dudley Ryder is an English writer, psychologist, and animal rights advocate.
Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral choices based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions. A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong."
The animal rights (AR) movement, sometimes called the animal liberation, animal personhood, or animal advocacy movement, is a social movement that seeks an end to the rigid moral and legal distinction drawn between human and non-human animals, an end to the status of animals as property, and an end to their use in the research, food, clothing, and entertainment industries.
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.
David Wood was Centennial Professor of Philosophy, and Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor, at Vanderbilt University.
Women have played a central role in animal advocacy since the 19th century. The animal advocacy movement – embracing animal rights, animal welfare, and anti-vivisectionism – has been disproportionately initiated and led by women, particularly in the United Kingdom. Women are more likely to support animal rights than men. A 1996 study of adolescents by Linda Pifer suggested that factors that may partially explain this discrepancy include attitudes towards feminism and science, scientific literacy, and the presence of a greater emphasis on "nurturance or compassion" amongst women. Although vegetarianism does not necessarily imply animal advocacy, a 1992 market research study conducted by the Yankelovich research organization concluded that "of the 12.4 million people [in the US] who call themselves vegetarian, 68% are female, while only 32% are male".
Contemporary debates about animal welfare and animal rights can be traced back to ancient history. Records from as early as the 6th century before the common era (BCE) include discussions of animal ethics in Jain and Greek texts. The relations between humans and nonnhumans are also discussed in the books of Exodus and Genesis, Jewish writings from the 6th or 5th century BCE.
The concept of moral rights for animals is believed to date as far back as Ancient India, particularly early Jainist and Hindu history. What follows is mainly the history of animal rights in the Western world. There is a rich history of animal protection in the ancient texts, lives, and stories of Eastern, African, and Indigenous peoples.
The Oxford Group or Oxford Vegetarians consisted of a group of intellectuals in England in the late 1960s and early 1970s associated with the University of Oxford, who met and corresponded to discuss the emerging concept of animal rights, or animal liberation.
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.
Carnism is a concept used in discussions of humanity's relation to other animals, defined as a prevailing ideology in which people support the use and consumption of animal products, especially meat. Carnism is presented as a dominant belief system supported by a variety of defense mechanisms and mostly unchallenged assumptions. The term carnism was coined by social psychologist and author Melanie Joy in 2001 and popularized by her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2009).
An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory is a 2010 textbook by the British political theorist Alasdair Cochrane. It is the first book in the publisher Palgrave Macmillan's Animal Ethics Series, edited by Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn. Cochrane's book examines five schools of political theory—utilitarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism and feminism—and their respective relationships with questions concerning animal rights and the political status of (non-human) animals. Cochrane concludes that each tradition has something to offer to these issues, but ultimately presents his own account of interest-based animal rights as preferable to any. His account, though drawing from all examined traditions, builds primarily upon liberalism and utilitarianism.
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.
Moral circle expansion is an increase over time in the number and type of entities given moral consideration. The general idea of moral inclusion was discussed by ancient philosophers and since the 19th century has inspired social movements related to human rights and animal rights. Especially in relation to animal rights, the philosopher Peter Singer has written about the subject since the 1970s, and since 2017 so has the think tank Sentience Institute, part of the 21st-century effective altruism movement. There is significant debate on whether humanity actually has an expanding moral circle, considering topics such as the lack of a uniform border of growing moral consideration and the disconnect between people's moral attitudes and their behavior. Research into the phenomenon is ongoing.
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