The Moral Status of Animals

Ethical Crossroads, Dead Ends and the Road Not Taken

Authors

  • Nancy O'Sullivan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/40531

Abstract

If ethical thinking is an evolutionary process, as Aldo Leopold, the father of modem environmental ethics, thought it was, 1 then today we stand at a crossroads in that discipline. Or is it instead, a dead end? For thousands, if not tens-of-thousands of years, human beings have despotically ruled the rest of the animal kingdom. Believing ourselves to be superior, other species were categorized as existing "merely as a means to an end," 2 a human end, that is. Animals, other than humans, held no moral status.3

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Published

1990-01-01

How to Cite

O’Sullivan, N. (1990). The Moral Status of Animals: Ethical Crossroads, Dead Ends and the Road Not Taken. UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, 2, 35–44. https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/40531

Issue

Vol. 2 (1990): Nature, Culture, Self

Section

Academic

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors retain copyright over their work and license their work for publication in UnderCurrents under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This means that the work is available for commercial and non-commercial use, reproduction, and adaptation provided that the original authors are credited and the original publication in this journal is cited, following standard academic practice.