A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Animals

  • New book on animal rights

    Here’s a new book that may be of interest to some readers of this blog: Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Paul Waldau. From the product description: Organized around a series of probing questions, this timely resource offers the most complete, even-handed survey of the animal rights movement available. The book covers the Read more

  • Ethics and human-animal relationships

    Philosopher Clare Palmer provides a summary of her new book Animal Ethics in Context (via Scu). The intent of her book, according to Prof. Palmer, is to argue that animals’ capacities, while important, are not all that’s morally relevant. We need to take context and relation into account as well—just as we do in the Read more

  • The radical Lewis

    I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that many C. S. Lewis fans–maybe especially his many evangelical admirers–don’t know that Lewis wrote a pamphlet for the British Anti-Vivisection Society. This essay, reprinted later in God in the Dock, anticipates some key arguments since made by philosophical proponents of animal rights. Lewis posits Read more

  • Elizabeth Johnson on ecological Christology

    If you haven’t checked it out, the Homebrewed Christianity podcast series has some really good interviews with top-flight theologians. Today I listened to to this podcast with Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson. It seems she’s working on a book on “ecological Christology”–a very interesting discussion ensued. I also loved how when at the end the Read more

  • Giving thanks?

    Obviously, if you’re going to eat meat this is the way to do it. Still, I’ve always found the idea of “giving thanks” to an animal when you kill it to be kind of weird and self-serving. After all, it’s not like the animal has a choice. (Video at the link is fairly graphic.) Read more

  • Is universal vegetarianism (or veganism) possible?

    In his interesting book Beyond Animal Rights, philosopher Tony Milligan considers, among other questions, whether the whole world could be vegetarian (or vegan). If not, this could be considered a strike against these two dietary choices. The problem, he argues, is that we need to transition to a more ecologically sustainable system of food production, Read more

  • Election fallout – animals & the environment

    Obviously the big news from this week’s election is the G.O.P.’s takeover of the House and seats it gained in the Senate, neither of which bodes well for meaningful action on climate change or other environmental issues. (As was pointed out in various places, all the G.O.P. Senate candidates disputed the global warming consensus and Read more

  • Salt on Melville

    Henry S. Salt, who I believe I mentioned in a recent post, was a 19th-century humanitarian reformer involved in causes ranging from socialism to pacifism to animal rights. Salt wrote a number of books, including books on social reform, animal rights, and vegetarianism, as well as studies of Thoreau and Shelley. (When Gandhi was living Read more

  • Chimps, morals, and God

    This Frans de Waal essay and the accompanying video discussion with Robert Wright, on the evolutionary roots of morality, are worth checking out. De Waal’s argument is that moral impulses exist in our non-human animal relatives–particularly our closest relatives, the primates–and that we can see morality emerging along a continuum as a completely “natural” phenomenon. Read more

  • Human “exceptionalism” as moral exclusion

    In his review of Wesley Smith’s book that I linked to below, Angus Taylor puts his finger on exactly what has long bothered me about Smith’s rhetoric of “human exceptionalism”: Even if can be shown … that all human beings deserve an elevated moral status, it is not clear why this elevated status should entail Read more