Abstract
Virtually all persons—philosophers and laypersons alike—agree that, special circumstances aside, killing humans is more morally objectionable than killing (nonhuman) animals. I argue for a radical inversion of this dogma: all else being equal, killing nonhuman animals is more morally objectionable than killing humans. We will discover that the dominant reason for the pervasive belief that killing humans is (morally) worse than killing animals—that the human kind of animal uniquely has the capacities for self-consciousness and self-reflection—can be implemented to demonstrate the very opposite conclusion
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Notes
- 1.
P. Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 4; M. Rowlands, Animals like Us (New York: Verso Press, 2002), chap. 4; J. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 3.
- 2.
Singer, Practical Ethics, 21.
- 3.
Ibid., 21–22.
Bibliography
McMahan, J. The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Rowlands, M. Animals like Us. New York: Verso Press, 2002.
Singer, P. Practical Ethics. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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Bernstein, M.H. (2018). Comparing the Wrongness of Killing Humans and Killing Animals. In: Linzey, A., Linzey, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36671-9_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36671-9_21
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