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‘Removing the Barriers’: Mary Midgley on Concern for Animals
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2020
Abstract
This paper focuses on Mary Midgley's influential discussions, over more than thirty years, of the relationship between human beings and animals, in particular on her concern to ‘remove the barriers’ that stand in the way of proper understanding and treatment of animals. These barriers, she demonstrates, have been erected by animal science, epistemology and mainstream moral philosophy alike. In each case, she argues, our attitudes to animals are warped by approaches that are at once excessively abstract, over-theoretical and guilty of a collective hubris on the part of humankind. In keeping with Midgley's own position, it is argued in this paper that, to remove these barriers, what is required is not yet another theory of how and why animals matter, but attention to actual engagements with animals and to the moral failings or vices that distort people's relationships with them.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 87: A Centenary Celebration: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch , July 2020 , pp. 249 - 262
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2020
References
1 References are to the following writings of Midgley, Mary: Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (BM) (London: Methuen, 1980)Google Scholar; Animals and Why They Matter (AWM) (London: Penguin, 1983); ‘Persons and Non-Persons’ (PN), in P. Singer (ed.), In Defence of Animals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 52–63; ‘Should We Let Them Go?’ (SW), in F. Dolins (ed.), Attitudes to Animals: Views in Animal Welfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 152–63; ‘Why Farm Animals Matter’ (WF), in M. Dawkins and R. Bonney (eds.), The Future of Animals Farming: Renewing the Ancient Contract (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 21–32; ‘On Being an Anthrozoon: How Unique Are We?’ (OBA), Minding Nature 5 (2012), 1–16.
2 Op. cit. note 1, BM, xiii.
3 Op. cit. note 1, OBA, 1.
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10 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 59.
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12 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 115.
13 Op. cit. note 1, OBA 10.
14 Op. cit. note 1, WF 12.
15 Op. cit. note 1, OBA 10, 12.
16 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 80.
17 Op. cit. note 1, BM 169.
18 Op. cit. note 1, SW 161-2.
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21 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 63.
22 Op. cit. note 1, AWM 67.
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36 The Complete Essays (London: Penguin, 1991), 505.