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Robert Garner is a British political scientist,political theorist,and intellectual historian. He is a Professor Emeritus in the politics department at the University of Leicester,where he has worked for much of his career. Before working at Leicester,he worked at the University of Exeter and the University of Buckingham,and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Salford.
Much of his work concerns animals in politics and ethics. This has been the subject of many of his books,including Animals,Politics and Morality (1993;2004),Political Animals (1996),Animal Ethics (2005),The Political Theory of Animal Rights (2005),The Animal Rights Debate:Abolition or Regulation (2010,with Gary Francione),A Theory of Justice for Animals (2013),and The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights (2020,with Yewande Okuleye). It is also the topic of three collections he edited or co-edited. Garner has also authored or co-authored several textbooks on political science,political parties,and green politics.
Garner read for a BA at the University of Salford and an MA at the University of Manchester,before reading for a doctorate,also at Manchester. [1] He was supervised by David Howell,and submitted his thesis –Ideology and electoral politics in Labour's rise to major party status 1918-31 –in 1988. [2] He published work on the Labour Party in 1990, [3] and in 1991,by which time he was working at the University of Buckingham,he published a paper on political lobbying on behalf of animals. [4] In 1993,while still at Buckingham,he published his first book:Animals,Politics and Morality,with Manchester University Press. [5] A revised and updated version was published in 2004. [6] In the book,Garner charts the history of the animal protection movement,setting out key positions taken on animals and exploring the possibility of change. [7] [8] [9] Also in 1993,co-writing with Richard Kelly,Garner published a textbook entitled British Political Parties Today. This was also with Manchester University Press,and was part of the Politics Today series. [10] An updated version was published in 1998. [11]
After a time at the University of Exeter, [12] Garner moved to the University of Leicester. In 1996,he published the first edition of his Environmental Politics with Harvester Wheatsheaf,part of the series Contemporary Political Studies. [13] A second edition followed in 2000,and a third in 2011,both of which were published by Palgrave Macmillan. [14] [15] 1996 also saw the publication of Animal Rights:The Changing Debate,a collection edited by Garner and published by Palgrave Macmillan. [16] In 1998,Garner published his second research monograph:Political Animals:Animal Protection Politics in Britain and the United States. [17] Published by Palgrave Macmillan,the book offered a comparison of British and American policy pathways around animal welfare,as well as animal protection movements in the two countries,using policy pathway analysis. [18] By the late 1990s,Garner had been promoted to Reader. [19]
In 2005,Garner published both Animal Ethics [20] and The Political Theory of Animal Rights. [21] The former,published with Polity,is a scholarly introduction to animal ethics and animal rights. [7] The latter,published with Manchester University Press,explores what political theorists have said about animals and the place of animals in major political theories. [22] [23] In 2006,he was promoted to professor at Leicester. [24] In 2009,the first edition of his textbook Introduction to Politics,co-authored with Peter Ferdinand and Stephanie Lawson,was published with Oxford University Press. [25] A second edition followed in 2012, [26] a third in 2016, [27] a fourth in 2020, [28] and a fifth in 2023. [29] Additionally,textbook called simply Politics by the three was published by Oxford in 2018. [30]
2010 saw the publication of The Animal Rights Debate:Abolition or Regulation by Columbia University Press. [31] The book took the format of a debate between Garner and Gary Francione. While Francione defends an abolitionist approach to animal rights,Garner advocates for a reformist stance. [32] [33] [34] Garner became a founding member in 2011 of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice,a British charity that aims to "embed animal protection as a core goal of public policy". [35] In 2011,Garner explicated a theory of animal rights in A Theory of Justice for Animals,which was published by Oxford University Press. [36] In this work of political philosophy,Garner defends a novel theory of justice affording rights to animals. [37] [38] [39] [40] [41]
Two edited collections followed:Oxford University Press's The Ethics of Killing Animals (co-edited with Tatjana Višak) in 2015 [42] and Rowman &Littlefield International's The Political Turn in Animal Ethics in 2016. [43] In 2018,he published a textbook called Environmental Political Thought with Red Globe Press;focussing on green political theory,this has a narrower focus than his earlier Environmental Politics,which covered green politics generally. [44] In 2020,writing with Yewande Okuleye,Garner published The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights with Oxford University Press. The book is an intellectual history of the Oxford Group,based on interviews with surviving members of the group. [45] Garner retired from Leicester in 2020 and began an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. [46]
Speciesism is a term used in philosophy regarding the treatment of individuals of different species. The term has several different definitions. Some specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership, while others define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not. Richard D. 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 in exploitative ways which is pervasive in the modern society. Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to have intersectional bias that encapsulates and endorses racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.
Jan Narveson is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. An anarcho-capitalist and contractarian, Narveson's ideology is deeply influenced by the thought of Robert Nozick and David Gauthier.
Gary Lawrence Francione is an American academic in the fields of law and philosophy. He is Board of Governors Professor of Law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln (UK) and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia (UK). He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal ethics.
David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Previously, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While at Arizona, he founded and served as inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.
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.
Daniel Louis Lyons is the chief executive officer of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a British animal protection charity. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of Sheffield and the author of The Politics of Animal Experimentation (2013).
Abolitionism or abolitionist veganism is the animal rights based opposition to all animal use by humans. Abolitionism intends to eliminate all forms of animal use by maintaining that all sentient beings, humans or nonhumans, share a basic right not to be treated as properties or objects. Abolitionists emphasize that the production of animal products requires treating animals as property or resources, and that animal products are not necessary for human health in modern societies. Abolitionists believe that everyone who can live vegan is therefore morally obligated to be vegan.
The Case for Animal Rights is a 1983 book by the American philosopher Tom Regan, in which the author argues that at least some kinds of non-human animals have moral rights because they are the "subjects-of-a-life", and that these rights adhere to them whether or not they are recognized. The work is considered an important text within animal rights theory.
Animal protectionism is a position within animal rights theory that favors incremental change in pursuit of non-human animal interests. It is contrasted with abolitionism, the position that human beings have no moral right to use animals, and ought to have no legal right, no matter how the animals are treated.
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.
Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation. His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Cochrane is a Sentientist. Sentientism is a naturalistic worldview that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.
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.
Tatjana Višak, often credited as Tatjana Visak, is a German philosopher specialising in ethics and political philosophy who is currently based in the Department of Philosophy and Business Ethics at the University of Mannheim. She is the author of the monographs Killing Happy Animals and Capacity for Welfare Across Species, and the editor, with the political theorist Robert Garner, of The Ethics of Killing Animals.
Siobhan O'Sullivan was an Australian political scientist and political theorist. She was an associate professor in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. Her research focused, among other things, on animal welfare policy and the welfare state. She was the author of Animals, Equality and Democracy and a coauthor of Getting Welfare to Work and Buying and Selling the Poor. She co-edited Contracting-out Welfare Services and The Political Turn in Animal Ethics. She was the founding host of the regular animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.
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.
Political Animals and Animal Politics is a 2014 edited collection published by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by the green political theorists Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg. The work addresses the emergence of academic animal ethics informed by political philosophy as opposed to moral philosophy. It was the first edited collection to be published on the topic, and the first book-length attempt to explore the breadth and boundaries of the literature. As well as a substantial introduction by the editors, it features ten sole-authored chapters split over three parts, respectively concerning institutional change for animals, the relationship between animal ethics and ecologism, and real-world laws made for the benefit of animals. The book's contributors were Wissenburg, Schlosberg, Manuel Arias-Maldonado, Chad Flanders, Christie Smith, Clemens Driessen, Simon Otjes, Kurtis Boyer, Per-Anders Svärd, and Mihnea Tanasescu. The focus of their individual chapters varies, but recurring features include discussions of human exceptionalism, exploration of ways that animal issues are or could be present in political discourse, and reflections on the relationship between theory and practice in politics.
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.
Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes is an 1824 book by Lewis Gompertz, an early animal rights advocate and vegan. The book argues that animals, like humans, are sentient beings capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and thus deserve moral consideration. He critiques the exploitation of animals for labour, food, and clothing, condemning practices such as slaughter, hunting, and scientific experimentation. He also addresses the suffering of wild animals, suggesting that even in nature, animals face hardships such as hunger and predation.
The replaceability argument, or the logic of the larder, is a philosophical argument that has been used to reject vegetarianism. It holds that consuming nonhuman animal products is good for animals because if they were not consumed, fewer animals would be brought into existence. The argument has particularly been engaged with within the context of utilitarianism.