Interspecies Ethics (Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law)

Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy. Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book's ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics. Introduction: New Ideals Of Belonging And Africana Origins Of Interspecies Living -- Can The Animal Subaltern Laugh? : Neoliberal Inversions, Cross-species Solidarities, And Other Challenges To Human Exceptionalism / With Julie Willett -- Paleolithic Ethics : Ethics' Evolution From Play, The Interspecies Community Selection Hypothesis, And Anarchic Communitarianism -- Affect Attunement : Discourse Ethics Across Species -- Water And Wing Give Wonder : Meditations On Cosmopolitan Peace -- Reflections : A Model And A Vision Of Ethical Life -- Coda; Or, The Song Of The Dog-man : Mourning In J.m. Coetzee's Disgrace. Cynthia Willett. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 177-215) And Index. Text In English. Table of Contents 8 Introduction: New Ideals of Belonging and Africana Origins of Interspecies Living 12 1. Can the Animal Subaltern Laugh? Neoliberal Inversions, Cross-Species Solidarities, and Other Challenges to Human Exceptionalism, with Julie Willett 40 2. Paleolithic Ethics: Ethics’ Evolution from Play, the Interspecies Community Selection Hypothesis, and Anarchic Communitarianism 71 3. Affect Attunement: Discourse Ethics Across Species 91 4. Water and Wing Give Wonder: Meditations on Cosmopolitan Peace 111 5. Reflections: A Model and a Vision of Ethical Life 142 Coda; or, The Song of the Dog-Man: Mourning in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace 158 Acknowledgments 186 Notes 188 Index 228 __Interspecies Ethics__ explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy.