Animal Ethics

Catalog description

Animal ethics refers to the moral and legal obligations of humans to nonhuman animals. To determine these obligations, we will give the first few weeks of the course to considering the shared mental faculties of humans and animals. Traditionally obligations in ethics and law are owed in ethics to persons, and so it is necessary to find out whether any nonhuman animals qualify as persons. Related to the issue of nonhuman animals qualifying as persons, we will examine several moral theories in modern Western philosophy: Kant's theory of duty, the original and contemporary versions of utilitarianism, the social contract theory of John Rawls, and Martha Nussbaum's capabilities theory. In addition we will investigate the current situation in law for the permitted treatment of animals.