Critical Perspectives on Animals

Edited by Gary L. Francione and Gary Steiner

With this series we seek to promote and give crucially needed direction to the emerging interdisciplinary field of animal studies. A generation ago the tendency in scholarship was to focus questions pertaining to animals within narrow disciplinary boundaries. This tendency has been replaced by an increasing recognition of the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and exploring the affinities as well as the differences between the approaches of fields such as philosophy, law, sociology, political theory, ethology, and literary studies to questions pertaining to animals. At stake in these explorations is an appreciation of the subjective experience and the moral status of animals as well as of the nature and place of human beings.

The ancient Greeks conceived of humanity as a form of life located between divinity and animality. Humans should aspire to emulate the gods and resist our animal impulses. The more we permit ourselves to resemble animals, with their lack of rationality and their submission to bodily desires, the more we permit our nature to be corrupted; the more we raise ourselves above animals and regulate our actions through the guidance of reason, the more we render ourselves godlike. The Greeks thereby set the tone for the subsequent history of Western thinking about animals, which characterized humans as fundamentally superior to nonhuman animals. There is nothing to be gained from conceiving of animals in terms of their similarities with human beings, just as there is nothing to be gained from conceiving of human existence in the light of animality. Moreover, the human uses of animals are morally unproblematic in principle in that animals either exist for the sake of satisfying human desires or, at the very least, are not the kind of beings toward which we can have any direct moral obligations.

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