Interspecies Ethics - Paperback

by Cynthia Willett (Author)

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy.

Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Author Biography

Cynthia Willett (PhD, Philosophy, Penn State) is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, with affiliations in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Psychoanalytic Studies. She is the author of Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (Routledge, 1995), The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Cornell, 2001), Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom (Indiana, 2008), and Interspecies Ethics (Columbia, 2014) and the editor of Theorizing Multiculturalism (Blackwell, 1998).