Making Light of the Ethical? The Ethics and Politics of Animal Rights

Abstract

In his chapter, Mark Rowlands examines the political turn in interspecies ethics. He considers the idea that ethical approaches alone cannot provide a successful framework to tackle the issues nonhuman animals currently face efficiently. Rowlands criticizes this position on two fronts. First, he observes that ethical and political theories about nonhuman animals have been distinguished in a problematic way. For such a distinction often fails to capture what really matters in this debate. Second, he points out that it is rather unclear whether political accounts are a superior approach to traditional ethical views, and argues that the latter may have a much more sophisticated conceptual apparatus to handle nonhuman animals issue than previously assumed.