Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Recently, a number of feminists concerned with the welfare of nonhuman animals have challenged the prevailing approaches to animal defense theory. A collection of essays, Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, challenges the "rights " or "justice " approaches usually taken by animal defense theories, most notably those of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, and argues in favor of an ethic of care for our relations to nonhuman animals. This work arises out of feminist discussions over the past fifteen years of the "feminine " ethic of care and its relationship to the "masculine" ethic of justice. Those writing in Beyond Animal Rights have extended this discussion by recognizing that the care-justice debate is important not only for relationships among humans but for human relationships to nonhumans as well. For what has been called the ethic of justice in this discussion is in fact the rationalistic and individualistic approach to morality that has long been taken to be the moral point of view in the Western tradition. According to its critics, this moral point of view has resulted in our culture's subordination and devaluation not only of women, but of nonhuman animals and nature as well. If this is the case, then Singer's and Regan's extensions of the ethic of justice to
Author: Grace Clement
Language: English
Topic: Animal Law and Welfare
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Curtin University of Technology
OpenAlex ID: W2146315447