Animal Rights Concerns

The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics

Author: Edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams
ISBN-nr: 0
Category: Animal Rights Issues
added by Alex Melonas

I categorized this book under the heading "Animal Rights Issues" for convenience sake alone. The "ethic of care" tradition is a critique of "rights" discourses and its emphasis on universal standards and impartiality in our ethical reasoning. Positing instead a conception of morality that attends to "those concrete persons with whom we have special and valuable relationships," the ethic of care stresses "the moral importance of responding to such persons as particular individuals with characteristics that demand a response to them that we do not extend to others."

The ethic of care rests on the understanding of relationships as a response to another in their terms. It rejects separateness or a conception of self as "bundles of rights" to be protected against from intrusion, free from obligations that arise by our membership in groups, regardless of our choice to accept them. And the ethic of care criticizes the "tyranny of abstraction." 

Each of the aforementioned problems in traditional ethical reasoning are considered by feminist theorists to be the results of masculine biases in our ethical reasoning. Deontological and consequential discourses are examples.

In short, the "ethic of care" asks: What are the ethical consequences if we reason from the premise that Ethics are a product of relationships, and a caring response to the vulnerable? And how does this relate to the "question of the animal."    

"In Beyond Animal Rights, Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams introduced feminist "ethic of care" theory into philosophical discussions of the treatment of animals. In this new volume, seven essays from Beyond Animal Rights are joined by nine new articles-most of which were written in response to that book-and a new introduction that situates feminist animal care theory within feminist theory and the larger debate over animal rights. Contributors critique theorists' reliance on natural rights doctrine and utilitarianism, which, they suggest, have a masculine bias. They argue for ethical attentiveness and sympathy in our relationships with animals and propose a link between the continuing subjugation of women and the human domination of nature. Beginning with the earliest articulation of the idea in the mid-1980s and continuing to the theory's most recent revisions, this volume presents the most complete portrait of the evolution of the feminist-care tradition."