Overview

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy. Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

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9781322553269

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Reviews

Filled with insight and humor, fascinating animal studies and profound philosophical speculations on the meaning of life and our place in it, Willett's Interspecies Ethics is a beautifully crafted testament to the need for interspecies ethics by considering what she calls communitarian cohabitation. Bringing together classical philosophy, contemporary Continental Philosophy, literature, psychology, zoology, and animal studies, Willett weaves a captivating tale of human-animal relationships that takes us well beyond human domination and towards interspecies community. This may be as important a paradigm shift in animal studies as Peter Singer's animal liberation or Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the category Animal. --Kelly Oliver, author of Animal Lessons: How They Teach us to be Human, and Earth and World

Author Information

Cynthia Willett is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. Her books include Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Freedom and Democracy ; The Soul of Justice: Racial Hubris and Social Bonds ; and Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities. She has also edited the anthology Theorizing Multiculturalism and is a coeditor for the Symposia on Race, Gender, and Philosophy.

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