Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status

by David DeGrazia

Transcending the overplayed debate between utilitarians and rights theorists, the book offers a fresh methodological approach with specific constructive conclusions about our treatment of animals. David DeGrazia provides the most thorough discussion yet of whether equal consideration should be extended to animals' interests, and examines the issues of animal minds and animal well-being with an unparalleled combination of philosophical rigor and empirical documentation. This book is an important contribution to the field of animal ethics.

Genres: Philosophy, Animals, Psychology, Nonfiction

316 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 1996

About the author

David DeGrazia is an American moral philosopher specializing in bioethics and animal ethics. He is Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University, where he has taught since 1989.

Reviews

[Travis Rebello · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Taking Animals Seriously, David DeGrazia offers an impressively thorough examination of the moral status and minds of non-human animals. He makes a robust case for applying a principle of equal consideration to animals’ interests. And he brings considerable philosophical acumen to bear on empirical work concerning the mental lives of animals—focussing especially on the extent to which we find in the animal kingdom the mental capacities for feelings, desires and beliefs, self-awareness, language, moral agency and autonomy. In the final chapters, he develops a conception of well-being to guide comparisons between the interests of humans and other animals, and he draws out the implications of his views for our treatment of animals. All in all, Taking Animals Seriously defends highly nuanced positions on these topics, with exceptional argumentative rigour and attention to detail.

This is an excellent book for readers who have previously reviewed the terrible things we do to our fellow creatures, in such works as Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, and now seek a more comprehensive framework with which to think about issues in animal ethics. The writing is remarkably clear, though the content may be challenging to readers without a background in philosophy. DeGrazia doesn’t assume any familiarity with the issues in moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind which he explores, but I would still caution readers new to philosophy to approach the text with some patience. At least, I can promise that such patience will be rewarded by the book’s insights several times over.

[Zedder · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far this has been very worth reading. A paradigm of doing your homework, summarizing what others have said, and having a reasonable critical response.

Update: finished it. Good stuff. Though you can probably skip chaps. 2, 4, and 8. The best chapters are 3 and 5. The first is a critical overview of traditional philosophical views on our ethical responsibilities w/r/t animals. The second covers animal feelings (e..g, pleasure and pain).

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're not a philosophy student (as I am not!), this will be a dense read. DeGrazia's chapters on "Animals' moral status and the issue of equal consideration" and his final chapter "back to animal ethics" are excellent. It is also interesting to read about animals having feelings, desires, beliefs, self-awareness, language, moral agency and autonomy, although since this book is almost 30 years old, I wonder how the research and his conclusions would change. Overall, it was very helpful for me, but definitely hard work to plough through.

[Heather Browning · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a solid book on the ethical basis of our duties towards animals, but gets quite deep into philosophical and conceptual issues at time, which makes it a little dry. Like Singer and Regan, DeGrazia wants to defend a principle of equal consideration for animals, but does so through the lens of a 'coherence theory' of ethics. He spends a lot of time looking at the evidence for particular types of cognition in animals (beliefs, emotions, self-awareness), which is interesting but none of it as controversial as it perhaps was when the book was written. He ends by developing a set of principles to use in our dealings with animals, and looks at how they might apply in some common cases (meat eating, zoos). Interesting, but nothing greatly different here than the rest of the literature on the subject.