Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals [Paperback]

Josephine Donovan (Editor), Carol J. Adams (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2000

This collection of essays seek to extend and further explore the feminist ethic-of-care theory to the issue of animal well-being. Together the contributors suggest ways that theorists may move beyond the limited concept of "rights", establishing care as a basis for the ethical treatment of animals.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Feminists have criticized contemporary animal advocacy theory for its reliance on natural rights doctrine and utilitarianism, which, they claim, have a masculine bias (rights and rules) that denies the morality of responsibility (caring). In eight scholarly essays, writers explore the ethics of care as applied to animals. To Deane Curtin, eco-feminism is the position that there are important connections between the domination of women and the domination of nature. Brian Luke finds that justice-based arguments for animal liberation have failed. On the treatment of companion and domestic animals, Rita Manning says the appropriate moral attitude is humility and care. Kenneth Shapiro profiles an animal rights activist; Josephine Donovan discusses sympathy as a basis for ethical treatment of animals; and Carol Adams looks beyond animal rights. Readers versed in feminist literature may find this volume a valuable addition to the genre; it may be too abstruse for others.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826412599
• ISBN-13: 978-0826412591
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,590,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. It's been called "ground-breaking" and "pioneering" (interesting how our description of books draws from our invasive relationship to the land). Many say it is an underground classic, which I guess means that lots of people know and love it, but it goes unnoticed by the dominant media. Of course, when it first came out, that was slightly different. Then, right-wing reviewers held it up as the latest example of academic excess and political correctness, which was funny to me, because I am not an academic. I used to teach a course I developed at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University on "Sexual and Domestic Violence: Theological and Pastoral Issues" -- but very infrequently. Basically, for as long as I have been an adult, I have been an advocate, an activist, someone trying to figure out how do we transform this d*#! world that is built on inequality.

I have published more than 100 articles in journals, books, and magazines on the issues of vegetarianism and veganism, animal advocacy, domestic violence and sexual abuse. I am particularly interested in the interconnections among forms of violence against human and nonhuman animals, writing, for instance, about why woman-batterers harm animals and the implications of this (it's in my book Animals and Women). Besides advancing scholarship and developing theory in the area of interlocking oppressions, I have created a series of books that address the vegetarian/vegan experience: Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian Survival Guide, Help! My Child Stopped Eating Meat! and The Inner Art of Vegetarianism.

I've worked to bring back into print Howard Williams's nineteenth-century classic text on vegetarianism, The Ethics of Diet. I have contributed prefaces to important vegetarian, vegan, and animal defense books and discovered an eighteenth-century vegetarian work that had never entered the vegetarian tradition.

Because I am so deeply moved by my relationship with animals, I have authored books of prayers for animals for both adults and children.

I am excited that the 20th anniversary edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat will be published next February.

I also write about literary topics, including two "Bedside" books: one on Frankenstein and one on Jane Austen. I am finishing a memoir on caregiving and reading.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Long-Awaited Animal Ethic - Contextual and Realistic, May 12, 2003

By 

Andrea Lenco (Poultney, Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals (Hardcover)

In Beyond Animal Rights: A Feminist Caring Ethic for the Treatment of Animals, editors Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams bring together seven articles on ecofeminism, an ethic of care, and animal liberation from a variety of perspectives. As a whole, the collection seeks to apply a feminist ethic to the philosophies of well-known figures such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer. Working through a feminist lens, the anthology attempts to propose an appropriate mode of behavior through exploration of contextual relationships between humans and non-human animals. Animal liberation is discussed in reference to the current dominating theories and to a new proposed ethic of care.
Feminist critiques of philosophers such as Regan and Singer suggest that although these men condemn Cartesian scientific practices for their lack of consideration of the worth of moral beings, they in fact use these Cartesian objectivist modes of reasoning to suppress emotional knowledge with hierarchical systems of natural rights or utilitarianism, respectively (p 45). The persistence of these mainstream philosophers in denying their appeal to emotion when analyzing the case for animal rights shows their biased masculinist perspective that does not take into account the very real epistemology of emotion and sympathy. It is this sympathy, feminists like Josephine Donovan claim, that ultimately has driven vegetarians and animal rights activists to their defining behaviors. Since one does not oppose cruelty to animals on logistical claims of fairness (as in, I oppose the systematic slaughtering of animals because such treatment of humans is not tolerated!), but out of very real emotional sympathy for the animals, an ethic of care must be accepted in the animal rights movement and not dismissed as weak or irrational. Both Regan and Singer argue in favor of a justice approach, claiming that a caring ethic is not enough to sustain the animal liberation movement. Feminists declare that these claims are based on the philosophers low estimations of the human capacity to sympathize. However, author Brian Luke proves these estimates inaccurate by revealing the extensive mechanisms employed to undermine sympathetic opposition to animal exploitation such as rationales of divine permission, cover stories like human need of animal medical research and food, denying the harms caused to the animals and shielding the public from them, etc. (p 81). These attempts at guiding the public away from sympathy for animals show how powerful emotion is in dictating ones actions. An ethic based on sympathy is determined by Josephine Donovan to be appropriate and useful as it is a complex intellectual as well as emotional exercise that pushes one toward animal liberation out of compassion for the animal and its well-being in exploitative circumstances (p 149).
Feminist ethics redefine rights and cross-species identity to be relational, contextual, and mutually accommodating, affording non-human animals rights to themselves, regardless of how identical to (or different from) humans they are (p 63). An ethic of care essentially tries to undermine the private/public dichotomy that keeps appeals to emotion in general and sympathy for animals in particular from their rightful place in the animal liberation movement, while creating contexts where care can thrive as non-exploitative. This contextualist ethic of care does not require (as popular animal liberation theory does) that one consider all interests as though no relationship existed between any of the parties, nor does it view animal rights as a contest between competitors for moral standing based on applied rules. This ethic also refrains from popular debate about the abstract right to life. Instead, an ecofeminist caring ethic recognizes the role that our relationships with others play in our understanding of a situation and creates a central place for values of friendship and trust (p 61). Ecofeminist Rita C. Manning introduces an ethic of magic, in which the earth is recognized as a sacred living body of connected parts, all of which are deserving of respect and care. Humans should care about the natural world and all of its animal constituents because of the similarities in humans and non-humans, because of the role that animal care plays in the building of our character, and because some animals are genuinely entitled to care because they are as valuable as humans (p 103).
The issue of diet is looked at from a feminist perspective to reveal that our use of animals as food is not a gender-neutral issue. Language places positive slants on the consumption of animal flesh (a meaty question), while associating women and passivity with both vegetarians and vegetables (watching TV will turn you into a vegetable). In addition, the dairy and egg industries exploit the reproductive capacities of the female. An ecofeminist caring ethic calls for an end to the violent consumption of animals as food. Ecofeminist thought reveals the connection between the body and the self, claiming that our bodily selves develop a framework for violence when we inflict violence needlessly (when eating meat) (p 72).
Carol J. Adams addresses assumptions about women in a care-giving role in Western patriarchal culture in regards to an ethic for the treatment of non-human animals. She claims the autonomous rational being to be an illusion, revealing that men are as much or more so relational than women as they rely so heavily upon their relationships with women. The fact that they depend on the invisibility of womens caring activities is what allows men an illusionary façade of the autonomous rational individual (p 172). This shows that the patriarchal culture that we live in has created (in addition to the systems of animal exploitation in place today), contemporary animal rights philosophy that reflect patriarchal values. A feminist approach to looking at both animal exploitation and animal liberation emphasizes the value of caring and nurturing in the relationship between humans and non-human animals, rather than an objective, non-relational, rational look at the exploitation of animals, and determining it morally unacceptable.