Animal Ethics: Encylcopedia of Global Bioethics

International audienceThe transformation of farm animals into industry-produced “biomachines” explains that the plight of animals worldwide has never been more serious than it is today. The description of the abuse of animals raised for food and the denunciation of the painful death they experience in slaughterhouses were the starting point of the animal movement in the 1970s. Promoting activism as well as academic studies, this movement, which first brought analytical ethics, and particularly utilitarianism, to bear on many animal welfare issues, goes hand in hand with the rejection of speciesism. Coined in 1971, this word suggests that membership in the Homo sapiens species is not a sufficient measure of moral worth. Animal ethics is an inquiry into the criteria that are decisive to grant a being moral consideration and evaluate the rightness or wrongness of some practices involving animals. Although Peter Singer and Tom Regan do not have the same arguments, they both provide an alternative to speciesism by referring to some value-laden labels that pertain to a cognitive ontology. This is why many ethicists coming from different countries are trying today to think through the animal question in order to overcome the dichotomies human/man, body/mind, and nature/culture we find in humanism