Relating to Animals in Space and Time: An Exercise in Moral Imagination

Abstract

The need to think seriously about nonhuman animals from an ethical point of view - in fact, to integrate them into the moral community - is urgent, for three connected reasons. The first is that other species cohabiting the planet with us are becoming extinct at an alarming rate, in large measure because of human activity of various sorts. Second, certain animal species that are not at risk of extinction, namely, vast numbers of domesticated animals that exist only to serve human will and desire, are consuming and despoiling natural resources at an unsustainable rate. Third, there is a growing awareness of systemic cruel and exploitative human practices involving animals (factory farming being only the clearest and best known example), which contemporary moral philosophy also reflects. All of this notwithstanding, should we care about animals and their future? Many don't care very much, if at all - or so it seems. And we can scarcely hope for cultural rethinking and widespread change to come about without large numbers of people being on board. In what follows, I do not presume to answer the above question about caring in any definitive way, although I have tried to do so elsewhere. Rather, my purpose is to articulate a different way of viewing animals - and indeed the moral community - which might stimulate the imagination in ways that could produce the social momentum that arguments alone (important though they are) cannot.