The Real Reason For Interest in Plant Sentience Has Nothing to Do With Plants
I. Plants: They React; They Don’t Respond Every now and then, the internet lights up with the most recent claim that new evidence indicates that plants are sentient; that is, that they are conscious and have some sort of mind and are relevantly similar to animals. The evidence on which these claims are based establishes at most […]
Teaching Children Not to Harm Others: Who Counts as “Another”?
“I take my veganism very seriously. I certainly hope that my kids will be vegans. I intended to educate them about the immorality of animal exploitation, and I hope that they will make the right choice. But I cannot impose my beliefs on them, and force them to vegan. I will support whatever choice they […]
Woke Animal Rights Means No Animal Rights, Part 2: Wokeabulary
Part 1 of this essay is here. Our social discourse is peppered with a great many words that reflect various aspects of woke culture. Let’s consider three that appear frequently in discussions about animal ethics and consider examples from that context. “Mansplaining”: There is no doubt we live in a patriarchal world that is replete with sexism and […]
Woke Animal Rights Means No Animal Rights, Part 1
Is being sensitive about injustice a good thing? You bet it is. Racism, sexism, homophobia — and speciesism — are all around us. We need to be aware of these various forms of discrimination and we ought to reject them. Principle 5 of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights is clear: Abolitionists reject all forms of human discrimination, […]
Surprise: U.K. Law Recognizes That Sentient Animals Are Sentient
The U.K. is proposing to do something that is absolutely revolutionary: it is going to enshrine in law that sentient animals are sentient. Never mind that, in 1789, Jeremy Bentham argued that the moral significance of animals did not hinge on whether animals had humanlike cognitive attributes but only on whether they are sentient: “the question […]
Is the Domestication of Animals Morally Justifiable?
For the past thirty or so years, I have developed what has come to known as the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights. One aspect of that theory rejects the status of animals as chattel property and maintains that we are morally obligated to abolish, and not merely regulate, the use of animals exclusively as resources. My Abolitionist […]
Do Vegans Who Get a COVID-19 Vaccine Abandon Their Moral Principles? Yes — and No.
Although the vaccines for COVID-19 that are presently available are being represented as having no animal ingredients, the blood of many thousands of horseshoe crabs is being used to make sure that the vaccines are free of contamination. Although the crab blood is technically not an ingredient of the vaccine, it might as well be. Horseshoe crabs […]