Ebook: Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals (Blackwell Public Philosophy Series)

AnimalKind by Jean Kazez is one of the best books on the moral status of animals that I have seen in recent years. Kazez is unusual among philosophers in that she understands the limits of logic when it comes ethics, especially in the context of our relationships with other species. Thus she avoids foolish consistencies that led Joan Dunayer to conclude that termites have the right to eat your house, Peter Singer to suggest that it just might be okay for you to have sex with your dog, and Tom Regan to contend that while animal research should be outlawed, you should toss a million dogs out of a hypothetical life raft if it would save a single human being. Kazez is one of the few moral philosophers to understand the ethical implications of recent discoveries by psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, Marc Hauser, and Joshua Greene on role of intuition and emotion of human moral judgment. Philosophical treatises on animals and ethics tend to be simplistic (Speciesism by Joan Dunayer), indecipherable (Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am), or boring (Regan's The Case for Animal Rights). AnimalKind, in contrast, is refreshingly comprehensible, interesting, and insightful.

Hal Herzog