Group items tagged

"Fourth, all of the philosophical/legal writing that I have done over the past 20+ years relies on an expansion of the liberal doctrine of equality. My work does not presuppose any religious or spiritual belief or require any such beliefs to come to the conclusion that we have no moral justification for exploiting nonhuman animals. My work relies on reason and rational argument. But there are many reasonable and intelligent people who do not agree with my view and yet have no substantive response to my arguments. I suppose that what separates us-and what caused me to become interested in animal ethics in the 1980s-is the sense of kinship that I feel with nonhuman animals. And I would suspect that this sense of kinship was and is related to my longstanding acceptance of Ahimsa, or the principle of nonviolence, as my foundational spiritual belief. "