Review
of
Animals & Ethics 101: Thinking Critically about Animal Rights
Nathan Nobis
Open Philosophy
Press, 2016
125 pp., ebook and
softcover
BOB FISCHER
Texas State
University
Suppose that you want to give your students a whirlwind tour
of the issues in animal ethics. You don’t just want to give them Singer and
Regan: instead, you want them to get a broader sense of the implications of
standard arguments. You want them to have some sense of how a serious regard
for animal interests might change what we eat, what we wear, scientific
practice, animals as companions and entertainment, and even how we protest.
Suppose further, though, that your students are still a bit wet behind the
ears, and they’ll need as much help with the basics of philosophical thinking
as with the material itself. What would you use?
Alternately, suppose that your local library or church runs
adult education classes, and you have the opportunity to do an eight week
series on animal ethics. You want to give people something to read that they
are likely to understand, freeing up time during your meetings for deeper
discussion of the ideas. And, of course, it would be great if the materials
were free, so that your library or church didn’t have to shell out anything to
make the classes possible. Again, what would you use?
In both cases, Nobis’s Animals
& Ethics 101 would be a great option. Essentially, the book is a
miniature course, complete with learning outcomes, recommended readings,
discussion questions, paper assignments, links to helpful resources, and
several tips about how to understand the significance of what’s being covered.
(“While animal ethics… can be a heated topic, logic can help keep you cool.
Find conclusions, ask for reasons, and demand a fair and impartial evaluation
of those reasons” (80).) Additionally, it has the great virtue of being an “open
access textbook,” which means that you can find it online for free. (The
paperback is just $5.99 on Amazon.)
The book begins with true basics. What do we mean when we start
talking about right and wrong? What are the differences between moral and legal
rights? Are moral rights really what’s at issue? How do philosophical arguments
work, and what are the parts of a moral argument? The next chapter some elementary
issues about animal minds; the third tackles extensionist arguments for
maintaining that animals have moral status. The fourth chapter covers the
argument from marginal cases, as well as a few other simple objections.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 explore the practical implications of animals deserving
moral consideration, and there are familiar discussions of the ethics of eating
animals, experimenting on them, and keeping them in captivity. The final
chapter attempt to stave off worries about animal activists giving animal
rights a bad name, and introduces the debate between welfarists and
abolitionists.
There’s much to like in Nobis’s book. It’s accessible in a
way that few introductory texts are: he’s genuinely concerned to make sure that
readers grasp the fundamentals, and because he has a keen appreciation for the
ways that students tend to misunderstand philosophical arguments, he’s able to
head off all sorts of confusions before they get entrenched. (One great
example: his discussion of moral methodology in Chapter 3 is designed to help
the reader appreciate why we ought to take Singer- and Regan-style argument
seriously, even before they’re offered.) It’s also full of pedagogical
resources, so even if you’ve never taught animal ethics before, you could pick
this up and know exactly what to assign — both in terms of readings and written
assignments. Finally, it’s comprehensive enough to let the novice get a sense
of the scope of animal ethics, but still refreshingly brief. The main text is
only 100 pages, quite a bit of which is taken up by recommended resources,
discussion questions, and the like. My guess is that if you were to remove all
those teaching aids, you’d only have 30 or 40 pages of content.
That last point indicates that it’s important to adjust
expectations with respect to Nobis’s book. It isn’t — and isn’t meant to be — a
replacement for something like Angus Taylor’s Animals & Ethics (Broadview, 2009), which summarizes most of
the standard arguments in most of the standard readings on animal ethics, and
provides brief introductions to the major moral frameworks that have been
brought to bear on animals. When I said that Nobis’s book is a miniature
course, I meant it: the book is only designed to survey some of the core
issues; it isn’t meant to be a comprehensive survey. If you want to have your
students (or fellow citizens, or fellow church goers) go deeper than that, you’d
need to have them look at the primary texts.
It would, however, be a mistake to see that as a flaw.
Different books are useful in different contexts, and there is no shortage of “standard”
introductions to the problems raised by our use and abuse of animals. Nobis has
put together a great resource for audiences with no philosophical background
whatever, and his book is a welcome addition for that reason.
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