Animals and Why They Matter

...in the sense that it is a deeply thoughtful meditation on our relationship to animals. Other reviews have said it all. I can only add that I was struck by how small the book is, considering its depth. Its honest and unpretentious approach deserves a wide readership.

Robert Moore above says it all, but I just wanted to add that this is one of the best philosophy books I've ever read. I teach philosophy so that's a big thing to say. The philosophy of the writer Midgley is very very sharp and although it's common sense in some cases, Midgley has extraordinary common sense. While the French are fruit loops and the Americans dry as dust in philosophy, Midgley operates out of a witty but kind, sharp but not prickly, Britishness, that is too often as Moore put it, unjustly neglected. If you're tired of stupid Deleuze and mindless Foucault, as well as erudite but incomprehensible Peirce, open up Midgley. Midgley, Midgley, Midgley! I've read three of her books in a row, and this one is by far the best. Midgley is right on the money in every sentence throughout this book. Bravura performance without a trace of Deleuzian diva-dom. Somehow she gets you to see that animals aren't that different from us (at least among the social species of animal such as cats and dogs and simians) and she also provides us with a primer of philosophers on animal and women's rights in tight little nuggets that are highly condensed and yet insatiably readable. This is the book for anyone interested in teaching a course on animal rights. Nothing else will do.

Mary Midgley examines the general principles that ought to guide our attitude to animals. Midgley quotes a large number of philosophers who in the past have philosophized about animals. Some of them have considered the question of what obligations, if any, we have towards animals. Their answers have depended both on what they take an animal to be and on what they consider to be the cause, the nature and the range of obligations. Descartes, for example, considered that, because animals lacked souls and, more importantly, reasoning faculties, they are mere machines. Even in Descartes' day, such a conclusion must have seemed very odd to anyone who had much to do with animals: for even if one agreed that they did lack souls and reasoning faculties, any farmer or hunter could have told Descartes that relationships with animals are radically different from relationships with machines. But even writers of our own time, while not thinking of animals as machines, still deny them the capacity of thought: R.G.Frey because thought requires language and animals cannot speak; Stuart Hampshire because in the absence of language they cannot have concepts. Yet the simplest observations of how animals communicate with each other and even with humans would seem to suggest that thought, concepts and reasoning do not depend totally on a human language. Behaviourists go even further: we cannot even be sure that animals have feelings. The denial of thought and feelings to animals serve to erect such a strong barrier between the human and the animal species that we can exclude the animal species from the obligations we feel towards our fellow human beings. One of the most striking part of Midgley's book is her demonstration how easily past generations were able to overlook even other humans as belonging to a group towards which they had obligations. Thus the Athenians, who prided themselves on civic equality, and the Americans who proclaimed that all men were created equal, simply assumed that slaves did not count as humans: indeed Aristotle described slaves as being merely "living instruments". The Chartists demanded universal suffrage for men, but either did not even think of extending that demand to women or, if they did, found some rationalization for excluding them. The excluded groups were, in Midgley's words, consigned to the outer darkness, beyond the outer periphery of a group towards the members of which certain obligations were recognized. In the 20th century, denials of full membership of the group and the discrimination which this entails have been condemned under the name of various kinds of "-isms": racism for denying membership to other races, sexism for denying it to women, ageism for denying it to the old - and now speciesism for denying it to animals. Midgley's book is a sign that the time has come to widen the periphery of our obligations to include animals. Midgley admits that it is natural to be more concerned with those who are closest to us, a

When I taught a course on Animals and Ethics, I chose this volume over all others as my primary text. While Peter Singer's ANIMAL LIBERATION first awoke my consciousness to the tragedy of the manner in which humans have regarded and treated animals, I found the philosophical underpinnings of his work (a form of utilitarianism) troublesome (for reasons I won't go into here). On the other hand, I found Tom Regan's THE CASE FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS, to be far too Kantian. Midgley discusses a wide-ranging group of philosophers, but doesn't overly attach herself to any particular moral philosophy. As a result, she is less doctrinaire than any of the other major writers on the topic. The book reeks of common sense, in the way that the English so often seem to have mastered. Just a wonderful, unjustly neglected book.