Week 8: Moral Status and Nonhuman Animals

Essay question

Do human beings and nonhuman animals have the same moral status?

Key readings

• Donaldson, Sue & Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, ch. 2.
• Gruen, Lori, The Moral Status of Animals, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall, 2014.
• Kagan, Shelly, What’s Wrong with Speciesism?, Journal of Applied Philosophy, forthcoming.
• Singer, Peter, All Animals Are Equal, in Tom Regan & Peter Singer (eds.), Animal Rights and Human Obligations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 215-226.
• Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation or Animal Rights?, The Monist, vol. 70, no. 1 (1987), pp. 3-14.

Further reading

• Anderson, Elizabeth, Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life, in Cass Sunstein & Martha Nussbaum (eds.), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 277-298.
• Arneson, Richard, What, If Anything, Renders All Humans Morally Equal?, in Dale Jamieson (ed.), Singer and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, pp. 103-128.
• Diamond, Cora, Eating Meat and Eating People, Philosophy, vol. 53, no. 206 (October, 1978), pp. 465-479.
• Liao, S. M., The Basis of Human Moral Status, Journal of Moral Philosophy, vol. 7, no. 2 (2010), pp. 159-179.
• McMahan, Jeff, Our Fellow Creatures, Journal of Ethics, vol. 9, no. 3 (October, 2005), pp. 353-380.