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This engaging volume explores and defends the claim that misanthropy is a justified attitude towards humankind in the light of how human beings both compare with and treat animals. Reflection on differences between humans and animals helps to confirm the misanthropic verdict, while reflection on the moral and other failings manifest in our treatment of animals illuminates what is wrong with this treatment. Human failings, it is argued, are too entrenched to permit optimism about the future of animals, but ways are proposed in which individual people may accommodate to the truth of misanthropy through cultivating mindful, humble and compassionate relationships to animals. Drawing on both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions David E. Cooper offers an original and challenging approach to the complex field of animal ethics.
This book argues that it can be both reasonable and appropriate to adopt a certain kind of misanthropy. The author defends a cognitivist version of misanthropy, an attitude whose central feature is the judgment that humanity is morally bad. Misanthropy is often dismissed on moral grounds. Many people hold that malice toward human persons is problematic and vulnerable to moral objections. In this book, the author advocates for cognitivist misanthropy. He defends an Asymmetry Thesis, according to which a morally bad deed carries more weight than a morally good deed, even if the harm of the former is exactly equal to the benefit of the latter. He makes the case that being misanthropic in the cognitivist sense is morally permissible and compatible with a broad range of moral reasons for action. He also considers the role of misanthropy in environmental thought, arguing that charges of misanthropy against certain "non-anthropocentric" views do not have the force they are typically thought to carry. Finally, the author investigates the practical implications of adopting cognitivist misanthropy, asking what living with such an attitude would involve. A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in ethics and the philosophy of human nature.
This book is the first major study of the theme of misanthropy, its history, arguments for and against it, and its importance for us today. Misanthropy is not strictly a Philosophy, it is an inconsistent thought that has often been mocked. But from Timon of Athens to Motörhead it has proven durable and irresistible, and attracted a huge range of fascinating figures. Human beings have always deeply distrusted who and what they are. This book does not seek to explain that distrust away or pour scorn on it. It asks, instead, how far misanthropy might have reason on its side -albeit a confused reason- with more appeal than many people might have first supposed.
Taking the reader deep inside of the circus, the zoo, and similar operations, Fear of the Animal Planet provides a window into animal behavior: chimpanzees escape, elephants attack, orcas demand more food, and tigers refuse to perform. Indeed, these animals are rebelling with intent and purpose. They become true heroes and our understanding of them will never be the same.
"An exploration of the failures of reason in human life and the enduring role of myth in science, politics, and morality"--
What brought the ape out of the trees, and so the man out of the ape, was a taste for blood. This is how the story went, when a few fossils found in Africa in the 1920s seemed to point to hunting as the first human activity among our simian forebears—the force behind our upright posture, skill with tools, domestic arrangements, and warlike ways. Why, on such slim evidence, did the theory take hold? In this engrossing book Matt Cartmill searches out the origins, and the strange allure, of the myth of Man the Hunter. An exhilarating foray into cultural history, A View to a Death in the Morning shows us how hunting has figured in the western imagination from the myth of Artemis to the tale of Bambi—and how its evolving image has reflected our own view of ourselves. A leading biological anthropologist, Cartmill brings remarkable wit and wisdom to his story. Beginning with the killer-ape theory in its post–World War II version, he takes us back through literature and history to other versions of the hunting hypothesis. Earlier accounts of Man the Hunter, drafted in the Renaissance, reveal a growing uneasiness with humanity’s supposed dominion over nature. By delving further into the history of hunting, from its promotion as a maker of men and builder of character to its image as an aristocratic pastime, charged with ritual and eroticism, Cartmill shows us how the hunter has always stood between the human domain and the wild, his status changing with cultural conceptions of that boundary. Cartmill’s inquiry leads us through classical antiquity and Christian tradition, medieval history, Renaissance thought, and the Romantic movement to the most recent controversies over wilderness management and animal rights. Modern ideas about human dominion find their expression in everything from scientific theories and philosophical assertions to Disney movies and sporting magazines. Cartmill’s survey of these sources offers fascinating insight into the significance of hunting as a mythic metaphor in recent times, particularly after the savagery of the world wars reawakened grievous doubts about man’s place in nature. A masterpiece of humanistic science, A View to a Death in the Morning is also a thoughtful meditation on what it means to be human, to stand uncertainly between the wilderness of beast and prey and the peaceable kingdom. This richly illustrated book will captivate readers on every side of the dilemma, from the most avid hunters to their most vehement opponents to those who simply wonder about the import of hunting in human nature.
Using Marxism, anarchism, and social ecology to explore domination, power, and hierarchy, the author criticizes the use and abuse of animals in capitalist society and argues for the abolition of animal involvement in industry and as a human food source.
Foot-and-mouth and mad-cow disease are but two of the results of treating animals as commodities, subject only to commercial constraints and ignoring all natural and moral considerations. Chickens hanging by their necks on conveyor belts, caged pigs with sores, bloated dead sheep with their legs in the air, mutilated dogs waiting to die after undergoing horrendous experiments in the name of science or just product-testing—these are some of the images that illustrate the indifference of a consumerist society to the suffering of animals. Few are willing to recognize that the packaged, sanitized supermarket meat that materializes on their dinner tables every day is the result of an industrial process involving unimaginable pain and suffering. We would be horrified if our pets were harmed, yet every day we eat animals that have been tortured and executed. Mark Rowlands claims that it is simply unjust to harm animals. As conscious, sentient beings, biologically continuous with humans, they have interests that cannot simply be disregarded. Using simple principles of justice, he argues that animals have moral rights, and examines the consequences of this claim in the contexts of vegetarianism, animal experimentation, zoos and hunting, and animal rights activism.