Why Animal Suffering Matters

Why Animal Suffering Matters
Author: Andrew Linzey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199352550

How we treat animals arouses strong emotions. Many people are repulsed by photographs of cruelty to animals and respond passionately to how we make animals suffer for food, commerce, and sport. But is this, as some argue, a purely emotional issue? Are there really no rational grounds for opposing our current treatment of animals? In Why Animal Suffering Matters, Andrew Linzey argues that when analyzed impartially the rational case for extending moral solicitude to all sentient beings is much stronger than many suppose. Indeed, Linzey shows that many of the justifications for inflicting animal suffering in fact provide grounds for protecting them. Because animals, the argument goes, lack reason or souls or language, harming them is not an offense. Linzey suggests that just the opposite is true, that the inability of animals to give or withhold consent, their inability to represent their interests, their moral innocence, and their relative defenselessness all compel us not to harm them. Andrew Linzey further shows that the arguments in favor of three controversial practices--hunting with dogs, fur farming, and commercial sealing--cannot withstand rational critique. He considers the economic, legal, and political issues surrounding each of these practices, appealing not to our emotions but to our reason, and shows that they are rationally unsupportable and morally repugnant. In this superbly argued and deeply engaging book, Linzey pioneers a new theory about why animal suffering matters, maintaining that sentient animals, like infants and young children, should be accorded a special moral status.

Thomism and the Problem of Animal Suffering

Thomism and the Problem of Animal Suffering
Author: B. Kyle Keltz
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2020-06-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725272806

The problem of animal suffering is the atheistic argument that an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good God would not use millions of years of animal suffering, disease, and death to form a planet for human beings. This argument has not received as much attention in the philosophical literature as other forms of the problem of evil, yet it has been increasingly touted by atheists since Charles Darwin. While several theists have attempted to provide answers to the problem, they disagree with each other as to which answer is correct. Also, some of these theists have given in to the problem and believe it entails that God is limited in certain ways. B. Kyle Keltz seeks to provide a classical answer to the problem of animal suffering inspired by the medieval philosopher/theologian Thomas Aquinas. In doing so, Keltz not only utilizes the wisdom of Aquinas, but also contemporary insights into non-human animal minds from contemporary philosophy and science. Keltz provides a compelling neo-Thomistic answer to the problem of animal suffering and explains why the classical God of theism would create a world that includes animal death.

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
Author: Michael Murray
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2008-06-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199237271

Those who believe in God often puzzle over how God could permit evil and suffering in the world. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw focuses specifically on non-human animal suffering, and whether or not it raises problems for belief in the existence of a perfectly good creator.

Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture

Animal Suffering: Philosophy and Culture
Author: E. Aaltola
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2012-07-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1137271825

Exploring how animal suffering is made meaningful within Western ramifications, the book investigates themes such as skepticism concerning non-human experience, cultural roots of compassion, and contemporary approaches to animal ethics. At its center is the pivotal question: What is the moral significance of animal suffering?

Animal Theology

Animal Theology
Author: Andrew Linzey
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1995
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780252064678

Animal rights is animal theology. The author argues that historical theology, creatively defined, must reject humanocentricity. He questions the assumption that if theology is to speak on this issue, 'it must only do so on the side of the oppressors.' His theological query investigates not only the abstractions of theory, but also the realities of hunting, animal experimentation, and genetic engineering. He is an important, pioneering, Christian voice speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Dominion

Dominion
Author: Matthew Scully
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2003-10-08
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1429980435

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." --Genesis 1:24-26 In this crucial passage from the Old Testament, God grants mankind power over animals. But with this privilege comes the grave responsibility to respect life, to treat animals with simple dignity and compassion. Somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong. In Dominion, we witness the annual convention of Safari Club International, an organization whose wealthier members will pay up to $20,000 to hunt an elephant, a lion or another animal, either abroad or in American "safari ranches," where the animals are fenced in pens. We attend the annual International Whaling Commission conference, where the skewed politics of the whaling industry come to light, and the focus is on developing more lethal, but not more merciful, methods of harvesting "living marine resources." And we visit a gargantuan American "factory farm," where animals are treated as mere product and raised in conditions of mass confinement, bred for passivity and bulk, inseminated and fed with machines, kept in tightly confined stalls for the entirety of their lives, and slaughtered in a way that maximizes profits and minimizes decency. Throughout Dominion, Scully counters the hypocritical arguments that attempt to excuse animal abuse: from those who argue that the Bible's message permits mankind to use animals as it pleases, to the hunter's argument that through hunting animal populations are controlled, to the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions, and are not conscious of their own lives. The result is eye opening, painful and infuriating, insightful and rewarding. Dominion is a plea for human benevolence and mercy, a scathing attack on those who would dismiss animal activists as mere sentimentalists, and a demand for reform from the government down to the individual. Matthew Scully has created a groundbreaking work, a book of lasting power and importance for all of us.

Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil

Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil
Author: Nicola Hoggard Creegan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2013-04-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199931852

Nicola Hoggard Creegan offers a compelling examination of the problem of evil in the context of animal suffering, disease, and extinction and the violence of the evolutionary process. Using the parable of the wheat and the tares as a hermeneutical lens for understanding the tragedy and beauty of evolutionary history, she shows how evolutionary theory has deconstructed the primary theodicy of historic Christianity-the Adamic fall-while scientific research on animals has increased appreciation of animal sentience and capacity for suffering. Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil responds to this new theodic challenge. Hoggard Creegan argues that nature can be understood as an interrelated mix of the perfect and the corrupted: the wheat and the tares. At times the good is glimpsed, but never easily or unequivocally. She then argues that humans are not to blame for all evil because so much evil preceded human becoming. Finally, she demonstrates that faith requires a confidence in the visibility of the work of God in nature, regardless of how infinitely subtle and almost hidden it is, affirming that there are ways of perceiving the evolutionary process beyond that "nature is red in tooth and claw."

Animal Rights and Wrongs

Animal Rights and Wrongs
Author: Roger Scruton
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2006-10-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780826494047

In this acclaimed book, Scruton takes the issues relating to vivisection, hunting, animal testing and BSE and places them in a wider framework of thought and feeling. Now available in paperback

Animals and why They Matter

Animals and why They Matter
Author: Mary Midgley
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 162
Release: 1984
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0820320412

Animals and Why They Matter examines the barriers that our philosophical traditions have erected between human beings and animals and reveals that the too-often ridiculed subject of animal rights is an issue crucially related to such problems within the human community as racism, sexism, and age discrimination. Mary Midgley's profound and clearly written narrative is a thought-provoking study of the way in which the opposition between reason and emotion has shaped our moral and political ideas and the problems it has raised. Whether considering vegetarianism, women's rights, or the "humanity" of pets, this book goes to the heart of the question of why all animals matter.