Accountable Creatures: Primatt’s Dissertation, the Religious Enlightenment, and the Origins of Animal Rights

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 369-391
Author(s):  
Ran Segev
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Ecological Worldview

Abstract Outside the field of animal studies, Humphrey Primatt’s Duty of Mercy has received little attention. This article offers a new perspective on his work by contextualizing Primatt’s ecological worldview within Enlightenment debates about the “essence of mankind.” I argue that Primatt’s call to extend “rights” to all creatures was a deliberate attempt to redraw the contested borders between humans and animals by privileging morality over other characteristics of humanity. The article shows how Primatt, an Anglican vicar, incorporated contemporary ideologies and knowledge into Christian teachings in order to formulate his anthropocentric argument and transform the nature of human-animal interactions.

scholarly journals Virtue Ethics and Laboratory Animal Research

ILAR Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca L Walker
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Laboratory Animal ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Research ◽  
Moral Significance ◽  
Moral Framework ◽  
Animal Research Ethics ◽  
Human Animal

Abstract This article appeals to virtue ethics to help guide laboratory animal research by considering the role of character and flourishing in these practices. Philosophical approaches to animal research ethics have typically focused on animal rights or on the promotion of welfare for all affected, while animal research itself has been guided in its practice by the 3Rs (reduction, refinement, replacement). These different approaches have sometimes led to an impasse in debates over animal research where the philosophical approaches are focused on whether or when animal studies are justifiable, while the 3Rs assume a general justification for animal work but aim to reduce harm to sentient animals and increase their welfare in laboratory spaces. Missing in this exchange is a moral framework that neither assumes nor rejects the justifiability of animal research and focuses instead on the habits and structures of that work. I shall propose a place for virtue ethics in laboratory animal research by considering examples of relevant character traits, the moral significance of human-animal bonds, mentorship in the laboratory, and the importance of animals flourishing beyond mere welfare.

scholarly journals The Horse behind the Text: Animal Agency in Early Medieval Historiography

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-85
Author(s):  
Marieke Röben
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Narrative Device ◽  
The Future ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Medieval Historiography ◽  
Animal Agency

Early medieval authors frequently used horses as narrative devices. Therefore, when working with historiographical sources, one is confronted with a vital question: how can we reconstruct the horses’ agency without knowing whether their depiction is a mere narrative device? Combining praxeological approaches with the analysis of narrative structures, this paper offers a glance “beyond the text.” It shows how analysing the underlying knowledge of the medieval reader contributes to reconstructing a contemporary image of early medieval horses and their (perceived) agency in human society and thereby develops a new perspective for the future of historical human-animal studies.

scholarly journals They are Communities like You The Rationale for Animal Rights and Welfare in Islamic Civilization

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Necmettin Kızılkaya
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Islamic Jurisprudence ◽  
Abstract Level ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
Shed Light

Animal treatment has a comprehensive connotation and far-reaching implications in Islamic civilization. The rationes leges for this broader meaning in human-animal relations are the principles laid out in the two foundational sources of Islam, i.e., the Qurʾān and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muḥammad. While dealing with the subject of animals, different disciplines carried the framework drawn in these two sources to a more abstract level,thereby becoming the very basis for practices in societies’ daily life. One of these disciplines, Islamic jurisprudence deals with how people are to preserve the God-given rights of animals while extracting benefit from in different chapters. In this article, I will first provide a brief introduction to animal welfare and protection in Islamic civilization. I will then focus on how scholars have interpreted the Qurʾānic concept of community (ummah, plural:umam) in exegetical literature. After that, I will show how the Prophet Muḥammad’s approach of gentleness (rifq) and excellence (iḥsān) manifested in his treatment of animals through several examples from the ḥadīth literature.Finally, I will attempt to demonstrate how Islamic jurisprudence embodies this theoretical framework through the concept of harm. In conclusion, I will show that there are important concepts and examples in Islamic thought that shed light on scholarship in the field of animal studies.

Deleuze and the Animal

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Virtual Technology ◽  
Simple Idea ◽  
Human Subjectivity ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Human Animal

Human-animal studies and the age of the anthropocene are prevalent across many disciplines at this time and this book is among the first to explore the usefulness of Deleuze for extensions and debates in these fields which only Deleuzian understandings of human subjectivity can provide. While Deleuzian studies has always been critical of the structure and status of human subjectivity, utilizing Deleuze in discussions of the contentious and unstable concept of the animal underlines the utility of his work for altering both theories and practices from art to philosophy to everyday activism. This book collects essays by established scholars in the field of Deleuze studies, and new scholars, to show not only the diversity of Deleuze’s applicability to human-animal studies but to call into question what we mean by the seemingly simple idea of ‘the animal’. Through 16 chapters Deleuze’s entire oeuvre is used in analysing television, film, music, art, drunkenness, mourning, virtual technology, protest, activism, animal rights and abolition. Each chapter questions the premise of the animal as a discrete, easily understood concept and thereby simultaneously places the human as animal and critiques the centrality of the human. The book aims to create new questions in reference to what the age of the anthropocene means by ‘animal’ as much as to analyse and explore examples of the unclear boundaries between human and animal.

scholarly journals The Analogy of Race and Species in Animal Studies

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 244-255
Author(s):  
Neel Ahuja
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Animal

Abstract The emerging field of animal studies builds on ethical insights from the animal rights philosophies that involve an analogy between racism and speciesism, or discrimination based on species. Analyzing recent works addressing human-animal relationships in Black studies, this essay contends that it has been necessary for emerging scholarship on race to transcend this analogy in order to confront the persistence of anti-Black racism and contemporary environmental crisis.

Not Coming to Terms: Nonhuman Animals and the Edge of Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-328
Author(s):  
Juliane Prade
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Anthropological Discourse

AbstractIn the emerging field of animal studies, criticism turns to questions of ethics and animal rights by reading representations of nonhuman animals in philosophy and literature. A rhetoric of coming to terms often shapes such readings and points to a lack of satisfactory answers to two questions: why read nonhuman animals, and why now? These questions are crucial to animal studies but can only be answered by understanding this critical approach as an element of the anthropological discourse, fundamental to philosophy. Examining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s approaches to thinking about the human-animal relation, it seems that the interest in reading how animals are presented in philosophy is not in coming to definitive terms with this relation or in correcting earlier theories. Rather, it appears to lie in reading the concept of the Animal as marking a limit of terminological language, and thus of theory. The Animal marks the point at which philosophy touches on poetry and withdraws. Criticism is concerned with animals now because the concept of “the animals” keeps casting doubt on theoretical conceptions of the Human and of human language.

scholarly journals Kantian Ethics and the Animal Turn. On the Contemporary Defence of Kant’s Indirect Duty View

Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 512
Author(s):  
Samuel Camenzind
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
Arthur Schopenhauer ◽  
Kantian Ethics ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Moral Relationship ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Kant's Ethics ◽  
Animal Question

Criticism of Kant’s position on our moral relationship with animals dates back to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Leonard Nelson, but historically Kantian scholars have shown limited interest in the human-animal relationship as such. This situation changed in the mid-1990s with the arrival of several publications arguing for the direct moral considerability of animals within the Kantian ethical framework. Against this, another contemporary Kantian approach has continued to defend Kant’s indirect duty view. In this approach it is argued, first, that it is impossible to establish direct duties to animals, and second, that this is also unnecessary because the Kantian notion that we have indirect duties to animals has far-reaching practical consequences and is to that extent adequate. This paper explores the argument of the far-reaching duties regarding animals in Kant’s ethics and seeks to show that Kantians underestimate essential differences between Kant and his rivals today (i.e., proponents of animal rights and utilitarians) on a practical and fundamental level. It also argues that Kant’s indirect duty view has not been defended convincingly: the defence tends to neglect theory-immanent problems in Kant’s ethics connected with unfounded value assumptions and unconvincing arguments for the denial of animals’ moral status. However, it is suggested that although the human-animal relationship was not a central concern of Kant’s, examination of the animal question within the framework of Kant’s ethics helps us to develop conceptual clarity about his duty concept and the limitations of the reciprocity argument.

scholarly journals Development and Application of the Owner-Bird Relationship Scale (OBRS) to Assess the Relation of Humans to Their Pet Birds

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Kathrin Burmeister ◽  
Katrin Drasch ◽  
Monika Rinder ◽  
Sebastian Prechsl ◽  
Andrea Peschel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Pet Birds ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Only a few birds besides domestic pigeons and poultry can be described as domesticated. Therefore, keeping a pet bird can be challenging, and the human-avian relationship will have a major influence on the quality of this cohabitation. Studies that focus on characterizing the owner-bird relationship generally use adapted cat/dog scales which may not identify its specific features. Following a sociological approach, a concept of human-animal relationship was developed leading to three types of human-animal relationship (impersonal, personal, and close personal). This concept was used to develop a 21-item owner-bird-relationship scale (OBRS). This scale was applied to measure the relationship between pet bird owners (or keepers) (n = 1,444) and their birds in an online survey performed in Germany. Factor analysis revealed that the relationship between owner and bird consisted of four dimensions: the tendency of the owner to anthropomorphize the bird; the social support the bird provides for the owner; the empathy, attentiveness, and respect of the owner toward the bird; and the relationship of the bird toward the owner. More than one quarter of the German bird owners of this sample showed an impersonal, half a personal, and less than a quarter a close personal relationship to their bird. The relationship varied with the socio-demographic characteristics of the owners, such as gender, marital status, and education. This scale supports more comprehensive quantitative research into the human-bird relationship in the broad field of human-animal studies including the psychology and sociology of animals as well as animal welfare and veterinary medicine.

Canine Rescue as a Social Movement: The Politics of Love

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 670-687
Author(s):  
Anna L. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Advocacy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Animal Bond ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Political Approach ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Politics Of Love

Abstract Canine rescue is a growing movement that affects the lives of tens of thousands of nonhuman animals and people every year. Rescue is noteworthy not only for its numbers, but also because it challenges common understandings of animal advocacy. Popular accounts often portray work on behalf of animals as sentimental, individualistic, and apolitical. In fact, work on behalf of animals has always been political, in multiple ways. It is characterized both by internal political tensions, especially between animal rights and welfare positions, and by complex relations to the broader public sphere. I analyze canine rescue, with a focus on pit bull rescue, to show that an important segment of canine rescue movements adopts an explicitly political approach which blurs the divide between rights and welfare, addresses the social context of the human-animal bond, and links animal advocacy to social justice.

The Philosophy behind the Movement: Animal Studies versus Animal Rights

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Aaltola
Keyword(s):  
Animal Rights ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Rights Movement

AbstractRecently, many pro-animal thinkers have expressed critical views on the animal rights movement. In particular, the movement has been criticized for being philosophically uninformed, politically regressive, and practically unpersuasive. This paper investigates these criticisms and seeks to map out the philosophy behind the grassroots animal rights movement, specifically. It concludes that the criticism presented by animal studies scholars is often misplaced due to a lack of understanding of the philosophical notions within the movement, but that the critics are right to argue that the movement needs to place more emphasis on persuasion.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document