Against Liberation: Putting Animals in Perspective
Michael P. T. Leahy
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0415103169
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Western world is currently gripped by an obsessive concern for the rights of animals - their uses and abuses. In this book, Leahy argues that this is a movement based upon a series of fundamental misconceptions about the basic nature of animals.
This is a radical philosophical questioning of prevailing views on animal rights, which credit animals with a self-consciousness like ours. Leahy's conclusions have implications for issues such as bloodsports, meat eating and fur trading.
York, Macmillan. (First pub. 1953.) St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in A.C.Pegis (ed. and tr.) (1948) Introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas, New York: Random House. Wittgenstein (1967) Zettel, G.E.M.Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (eds), Oxford: Basil Blackwell. HAWK ROOSTING I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. The convenience of the high trees! The air’s buoyancy and the
quite properly, allows that because of their ‘superior mental powers’ and greater awareness of the implications of being in pain, human beings in many cases suffer more than animals: ‘A human dying from cancer is likely to suffer more than a mouse’ (1979: 53). He has in mind the possibility that the mouse’s cancer might be of a type that involves more pain than that of the human being but that the mouse would suffer less because it was incapable of knowing what it had, what the prognosis was and
to weighing up probabilities rather than considering what might be wrong with the account that is to be supplanted. Singer’s and Rollin’s interpretations are persuasive because both portray the animals as doing things, behaving in this or that way, in order to achieve relatively longterm ends. Furthermore, Figan, in particular, must be taken as having grasped that this is what he is doing and why he is doing it or he could hardly be described as having ‘sized up’ the situation (Goodall) or being
philosopher, offers a strange analysis of seeing which allows no place for judgement nor even the capability of it, as was the case with our driver, and which would include both the dog and the infant. He writes: Suppose that, when I saw Lloyd George, I made no mistake only through making no judgement whatever…. Suppose that I was an infant in arms. Even so…there is reason to say that I saw him, even though I then neither made, nor could have made any judgement at all, either right or wrong,
threshold of moral personality, together with certain permanently retarded or braindamaged humans. On contractualist grounds, he argues, they would seem to be bereft of equality. Animals too are incapable of moral personality. The three groups, together with the additions of which Rollin reminded us (the aged, the addicted, and the compulsive), are usually described as moral patients. Yet this can be confusing since many of the qualifiers, including the retarded, will have degrees of moral