Animal Rights The Abolitionist Approach: Recent Episodes
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Note: Principle Five of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights maintains human rights and nonhuman rights are inextricably intertwined and that: Abolitionists reject all forms of human discrimination, including racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism, and classism—just as they reject speciesism. Many Abolitionists have asked me about what the Abolitionist position is about transphobia. The answer […]Related posts:1. Woke Animal Rights Means No Animal Rights, Part 2: Wokeabulary 2. Human Rights and Animal Rights: Perfect Together 3. Veganism: It’s Not Just a Animal Rights Issue 4. You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: Vegan Society “Ambassador” Claims That Promoting Veganism as a Moral Baseline “Damages” Animals 5. Thought of the Day: Human Rights and Animal Rights–Inextricably Intertwined
My essay, Are You a Vegan or Are you an Extremist?, published in Think (Cambridge University Press/The Royal Institute of Philosophy) is now available online.Related posts:1. “Philosophy Bites” Audio Interview on Abolition Published 2. My Interview On Philosophy Bites 3. Vegan Philosophy in Spain! 4. Guest Essay: Dear Vegan Feminists, Where Are You? An Open Letter 5. Essay on Domestication and Pet Ownership
By Prof. Gary Francione Effective Altruism (EA) maintains that those of us who are more affluent should give more to solve the problems of the world, and we should give to the organisations and individuals who are effective at solving those problems. There are a not inconsiderable number of criticisms that can be and have […]Related posts:1. Effective Animal Rights Advocacy—in Three Easy Steps 2. Upcoming Abolitionist Approach Podcast on Effective Animal Rights Advocacy: A Preview 3. The Death of Activism and the Rise of Branding Spectacle in Animal Advocacy 4. Violent Imagery in Animal Advocacy 5. Animal Rights: Marginalized By The “Animal Movement”
On my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages, I often receive comments to the effect that we cannot morally distinguish animal foods from plant foods. Some comments are made by those who maintain that plants are sentient and, therefore, are not morally different from sentient nonhumans. This argument, which ranks up there with “But Hitler was a vegetarian,” is tiresome, pathetic, and […]Related posts:1. A Frequently Asked Question: What About Plants? 2. Eating Animals: Our “Choice”? 3. “Happy Meat:” Making Humans Feel Better About Eating Animals 4. Is the Domestication of Animals Morally Justifiable? 5. The Real Reason For Interest in Plant Sentience Has Nothing to Do With Plants
I was invited on several occasions to sign the Montreal Declaration on Animal Exploitation. I appreciate that the drafters asked me to sign but, for the following reasons, I am unable to do so. First, the Declaration Does Not Reject All Animal Use What is the end — the ultimate goal — envisaged by the Declaration? The Declaration purports to seek […]
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West Ham footballer Kurt Zouma pled guilty to violating the Animal Welfare Act by kicking and slapping his cat and causing the cat “unnecessary suffering.” His brother, Yoan Zouma, who plays for Dagenham and Redbridge, filmed the incident and was accused of abetting, counselling or procuring Kurt to violate the law. Kurt was sentenced to do 180 hours of […]
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I advocate for the rights of animals. I argue that, if animals have moral value and are not just things, we are obligated to stop using animals as resources. It’s not just a matter of not causing animals to suffer. Although sentient (subjectively aware) animals certainly do have a morally significant interest in not suffering, […]
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The RSPCA is starting the process of prosecuting West Ham United’s Kurt Zouma for slapping and kicking his cat, and his brother, Yoan, who plays for Dagenham and Redbridge, for filming the incident. What the Zoumas did was clearly wrong. They inflicted harm on the cat without any justification; the cat was not threatening them in any […]
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The history of human thinking about animal ethics is littered with a great many examples of smart people engaging in reasoning that is anything but smart in order to justify continuing to exploit animals. Indeed, animal ethics provides what might be the greatest example of how self-interest — in particular gustatory self-interest — can deaden […]
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English Premier League football player Kurt Zouma is in big trouble. He kicked and slapped one of his cats. He has been fined £250k by West Ham, the team for which he plays. The cat he kicked and slapped, and another cat he has, were taken from him by the RSPCA, which is investigating him […]
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I. Plants: They React; They Don’t Respond Every now and then, the internet lights up with the most recent claim that new evidence indicates that plants are sentient; that is, that they are conscious and have some sort of mind and are relevantly similar to animals. The evidence on which these claims are based establishes at most […]
Related posts:1. A Frequently Asked Question: What About Plants? 2. Sentience 3. Only Sentience Matters 4. Sentience and Personhood 5. Nothing to Do with Science
“I take my veganism very seriously. I certainly hope that my kids will be vegans. I intended to educate them about the immorality of animal exploitation, and I hope that they will make the right choice. But I cannot impose my beliefs on them, and force them to vegan. I will support whatever choice they […]
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Part 1 of this essay is here. Our social discourse is peppered with a great many words that reflect various aspects of woke culture. Let’s consider three that appear frequently in discussions about animal ethics and consider examples from that context. “Mansplaining”: There is no doubt we live in a patriarchal world that is replete with sexism and […]
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Is being sensitive about injustice a good thing? You bet it is. Racism, sexism, homophobia — and speciesism — are all around us. We need to be aware of these various forms of discrimination and we ought to reject them. Principle 5 of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights is clear: Abolitionists reject all forms of human discrimination, […]
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The U.K. is proposing to do something that is absolutely revolutionary: it is going to enshrine in law that sentient animals are sentient. Never mind that, in 1789, Jeremy Bentham argued that the moral significance of animals did not hinge on whether animals had humanlike cognitive attributes but only on whether they are sentient: “the question […]
Related posts:1. Killing Animals and Making Animals Suffer 2. Eating Animals: Our “Choice”? 3. Animals as Property and the Rape Analogy: A Postscript 4. The Crowland Chicks and Our Conventional Wisdom About Animals 5. Debating Eating Animals at MoMA
For the past thirty or so years, I have developed what has come to known as the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights. One aspect of that theory rejects the status of animals as chattel property and maintains that we are morally obligated to abolish, and not merely regulate, the use of animals exclusively as resources. My Abolitionist […]
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Although the vaccines for COVID-19 that are presently available are being represented as having no animal ingredients, the blood of many thousands of horseshoe crabs is being used to make sure that the vaccines are free of contamination. Although the crab blood is technically not an ingredient of the vaccine, it might as well be. Horseshoe crabs […]
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It is often the case that, when a human is mistreated by other humans, the claim is made that the victim was treated “like an animal.” What is meant by this expression is that the victim has not been treated with any recognition of their moral value. They have been treated exclusively as a means […]
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For the past several weeks, news outlets have been telling us repeatedly that, as a result of meat processing plants closing because large numbers of employees have contracted Covid-19, and as a result of supply-chain disruptions for meat, milk, and eggs caused by the virus, many millions of farm animals are having to be “euthanized.” […]
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