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‘Removing the Barriers’: Mary Midgley on Concern for Animals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

David E. Cooper
David E. Cooper*
Affiliation:
Durham University
*
d.e.cooper@durham.ac.uk
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Abstract

This paper focuses on Mary Midgley's influential discussions, over more than thirty years, of the relationship between human beings and animals, in particular on her concern to ‘remove the barriers’ that stand in the way of proper understanding and treatment of animals. These barriers, she demonstrates, have been erected by animal science, epistemology and mainstream moral philosophy alike. In each case, she argues, our attitudes to animals are warped by approaches that are at once excessively abstract, over-theoretical and guilty of a collective hubris on the part of humankind. In keeping with Midgley's own position, it is argued in this paper that, to remove these barriers, what is required is not yet another theory of how and why animals matter, but attention to actual engagements with animals and to the moral failings or vices that distort people's relationships with them.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 87: A Centenary Celebration: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch , July 2020 , pp. 249 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2020

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References

1 References are to the following writings of Midgley, Mary: Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (BM) (London: Methuen, 1980)Google Scholar; Animals and Why They Matter (AWM) (London: Penguin, 1983); ‘Persons and Non-Persons’ (PN), in P. Singer (ed.), In Defence of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 52–63; ‘Should We Let Them Go?’ (SW), in F. Dolins (ed.), Attitudes to Animals: Views in Animal Welfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152–63; ‘Why Farm Animals Matter’ (WF), in M. Dawkins and R. Bonney (eds.), The Future of Animals Farming: Renewing the Ancient Contract (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 21–32; ‘On Being an Anthrozoon: How Unique Are We?’ (OBA), Minding Nature 5 (2012), 1–16.

2 Op. cit. note 1, BM, xiii.

3 Op. cit. note 1, OBA, 1.

4 Callicott, J. Baird, ‘Animal liberation and environmental ethics: back together again’, Between the Species 4 (1988), 163–9Google Scholar.

5 Op. cit. note 1, AWM, 144.

6 Hacker, PeterHuman Nature: The Categorial Framework (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 1Google Scholar.

7 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 14.

8 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 115.

9 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 57.

10 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 59.

11 Op. cit. note 1, SW 157–9.

12 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 115.

13 Op. cit. note 1, OBA 10.

14 Op. cit. note 1, WF 12.

15 Op. cit. note 1, OBA 10, 12.

16 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 80.

17 Op. cit. note 1, BM 169.

18 Op. cit. note 1, SW 161-2.

19 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 110-1. On the shortcomings of the expanding circle image, see Serpell, James, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar, and McElwain, Gregory S., ‘The Mixed Community’, in Kidd, I.J. and McKinnell, L. (eds.), Science and Self: Animals, Evolution, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Mary Midgley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 41–51Google Scholar.

20 See op. cit. note 1, SW 160 on dignity, and AWM on pets.

21 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 63.

22 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 67.

23 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 10.

24 Op. cit. note 1, SW 159.

25 Op. cit. note 1, SW 159.

26 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 50-1.

27 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 50.

28 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 50.

29 On ‘boosterishness’, see Alain de Botton's remarks in Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?: Munk Debate (London: OneWorld, 2015), 13.

30 Op. cit. note 4, 165–6.

31 DeGrazia, David, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Op. cit. note 1, WF 21.

33 Op. cit. note 1, SW 159.

34 See Cooper, David E., Animals and Misanthropy (London: Routledge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar on the vices and failings reflected in our treatment of animals.

35 What is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1973).

36 The Complete Essays (London: Penguin, 1991), 505.