Animals, Men and Morals
.jpg) |
|
| Author | Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch John Harris (eds.) |
|---|---|
| Illustrator |
James Grashow, Friends of Animals |
| Country | United Kingdom, United States |
| Subject |
Animal rights Moral philosophy |
| Publisher |
Victor Gollancz, London Grove Press, New York |
|
Publication date
|
1971 |
| Pages | 240 |
| ISBN | |
| LC Class | 73-20609 |
Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans (1971) is a collection of essays on animal rights, edited by Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, both from Canada, and John Harris from the UK. The editors were members of the Oxford Group, a group of postgraduate philosophy students and others based at the University of Oxford from 1968, who began raising the idea of animal rights in seminars and campaigning locally against factory farming and otter hunting.
The book was ground-breaking in its time, because it was one of the early publications in the mid-20th century that argued clearly in favour of animal liberation/animal rights, rather than simply for compassion in the way animals are used. The editors wrote in the introduction: "Once the full force of moral assessment has been made explicit there can be no rational excuse left for killing animals, be they killed for food, science, or sheer personal indulgence."
Apart from the Godlovitches and Harris, the group also included David Wood and sociology student Mike Peters. The Godlovitches had recently become vegan on moral grounds, and soon after Harris and Wood met them, the latter were also persuaded that the case against exploiting animals was unanswerable, and they also became vegan. The group then began to raise the issue in lectures and seminars in moral philosophy at Oxford, and also began local campaigning against factory farming, otter hunting, and other animal exploitation issues.
The initial inspiration for the book was the discovery of an article called "The Rights of Animals" by the novelist Brigid Brophy, which had been published in The Sunday Times in October 1965. Brophy's piece was devastating in its brief and unsentimental statement of the case for animal rights. It began:
Were it to be announced tomorrow that anyone who fancied it might, without risk of reprisals or recriminations, stand at a fourth story window, dangle out of it a length of string with a meal (labelled 'Free') on the end, wait until a chance passer-by took a bite and then, having entangled his cheek or gullet on a hook hidden in the food, haul him up to the fourth floor and there batter him to death with a knobkerrie, I do not think there would be many takers.
It concluded:
In point of fact, I am the very opposite of an anthromorphiser. I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality and moral choice – and that is precisely why we are under the obligation to recognise and respect the rights of animals.
...
Wikipedia