Ethical Diets and Animal Ethics — Beyond Extensionism
While Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983) remain key historical and theoretical texts in contemporary discussions of ethical diets, many developments in the past 30-40 years in fields related to understanding the animal or biological nature of human morality, animal behavior and cognition, plant and tree sentience, and sustainable agriculture have developed a richer context for thinking about animal and food ethics. In addition, the number and type of moral concerns associated with “ethical eating” has grown significantly during this time. While the “ethical extensionism” of the Singer and Regan models provided an important focus on suffering and rights, many authors have developed less abstract models for thinking about how food and animal values emerge from our embeddedness in nature, our own food practices, and our experience of culture.
Ethical Diets and Animal Ethics: Beyond Extensionism invites new work which moves beyond ethical extensionism either by critical appraisals of it or by framing moral concerns about animals and food from a diverse range of disciplines and traditions including continental philosophical traditions, naturalistic ethics, environmental ethics, animal cognition, anthropology, eco-feminism, and food studies.