Product Description

Gary Steiner argues that ethologists and philosophers in the analytic and continental traditions have largely failed to advance an adequate explanation of animal behavior. Critically engaging the positions of Marc Hauser, Daniel Dennett, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others, Steiner shows how the Western philosophical tradition has forced animals into human experiential categories in order to make sense of their cognitive abilities and moral status and how desperately we need a new approach to animal rights.

Steiner rejects the traditional assumption that a lack of formal rationality confers an inferior moral status on animals vis-à-vis human beings. Instead, he offers an associationist view of animal cognition in which animals grasp and adapt to their environments without employing concepts or intentionality. Steiner challenges the standard assumption of liberal individualism according to which humans have no obligations of justice toward animals. Instead, he advocates a "cosmic holism" that attributes a moral status to animals equivalent to that of people. Arguing for a relationship of justice between humans and nature, Steiner emphasizes our kinship with animals and the fundamental moral obligations entailed by this kinship.

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Animals merit moral status comparable to that of human beings        Rating:

"Animals and the Moral Community" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Steiner's book interview ran here as cover feature on May 20, 2009.

Highly Recommended        Rating:

Animals and the Moral Community takes up two major topics in six chapters. The first three chapters, drawing on previous works of philosophy and cognitive ethology, take the reader on a superb tour and analysis of both historical and current thought on the mental life of animals, settling on a moderate and compelling theory of animal minds that avoids the attribution to animals of complex and abstract cognition (i.e. conceptual rationality) found in normal adult humans and avoids the ludicrous neo-Cartesian denial of perceptual intelligence and experiential awareness. Bringing out the important difference between perceptual intelligence and conceptual rationality, Professor Steiner states at the end of these chapters on animal minds, "Animals are intelligent creatures with subjective states of awareness. The more we come to appreciate this fact, the less we will be able to cling to a related anthropocentric prejudice, namely, that animals, being cognitively inferior to humans, are morally inferior as well." (p. 88) This leads us to the second major topic of the book: moral status and kinship.

In discussing the moral status of and our kinship with animals, Steiner explores the conflict between liberal individualism and animal rights. As it has been traditionally conceived, liberal individualism posits Kantian rational autonomy of the moral agent as a necessary criterion for inclusion in the moral community. As such, many thinkers today who uncritically accept this traditional conception of liberal individualism, but nevertheless realize that the degree and severity of our exploitation of animals is morally unacceptable, have sought to argue that animals have sufficient cognitive abilities (i.e. minds sufficiently similar to human minds) to be included in a moral community that espouses traditional liberal individualism. Their opponents, of course, have denied such cognitive ability, but neither side has come to question the legitimacy of positing Kantian rational autonomy as a necessary criterion in the first place.

Drawing on Gary Francione's rejection of what Francione calls "similar minds theory", Professor Steiner also rejects the notion that the moral status of animals is a function of how similar animal minds are to human minds. Rather, the morally relevant criterion is sentience. Specifically, Steiner's view "is that perceptual experience (as defined in chapter 3) is sufficient, although perhaps not necessary, for moral status."

So how are we to overcome the existing paradigm of liberal individualism as traditionally conceived and its anthropocentric emphasis on Kantian rational autonomy and the exclusive liberty of the Kantian rational agent? The remaining two chapters of the book are dedicated to answering this question.

Gary Steiner introduces us to a broader and more logically consistent and holistic conception of justice that goes beyond the narrow confines of social justice with its emphasis on agency and reciprocity to what he calls "cosmic justice" in the context of what he describes as "cosmic holism", which recognizes our similarities and kinship with other sentient beings. It is our common striving for life and well-being that brings humans and nonhumans together in kinship. Our rationality allows us to recognize this kinship and compels us to respect the mutual striving and struggle for well-being and modify our attitudes and behavior accordingly; in particular, our rationality ultimately compels us to go and stay vegan.

The careful and thorough analysis of the nature of sentient nonhuman beings and the relation of that nature to a clear and detailed explanation of a conception of justice that is far more logically consistent and holistic than that found in traditional liberal individualism makes this book a must-read for both experts and those new to animal rights.

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