The Importance of Being a Dog, or How to Bring Human Beings and Animals Back into Ethics

Abstract

In her book, Alice Crary addresses some vital confusions of moral thought. These confusions pertain both to the way human beings and animals are being represented in ethics, and to the kind of methods which are purported to be the most plausible to bring about a conversion in someone’s moral activity. Crary does not confine herself to the criticism of the contemporary outlook, widely accepted in moral thought, according to which—in order to find grounds for the moral standing of humans and animals—we should turn to normatively neutral methods external to ethics (in particular the methods of natural sciences); this contemporary outlook, she concludes, situates human beings and animals “outside ethics.” Crary unfolds an elaborate argument in support of the claim that human beings and animals possess empirically observable moral characteristics (thus situating human beings and animals “inside ethics”), and on the basis of this argument, she acknowledges human beings and animals as proper objects of moral concern. Accordingly, she does not confine herself to the demonstration of the insufficiencies of some traditional forms of moral thought (in particular those championed by “moral individualists”1) but, extending her main argument, she presents a series of illustrations of how a non-neutral form of moral thought not only can constitute a sound argumentative strategy, but also can contribute directly to our ability