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Books

Animal Passions

Ralph Blumenau reviews Animals and Why They Matter by Mary Midgley.

Mary Midgley’s book provides us with the philosophical tools which we might use to make specific decisions about the treatment of animals. She does not herself lead us all the way to specific decisions. She does not, for example, come out clearly for vegetarianism on the grounds that killing animals for food is ethically wrong (although she does say that feeding grain to animals in order then to eat the animals is economically much more wasteful than for humans to eat the grain in the first place). She does not make a blanket condemnation of medical experiments being carried out on animals for the benefit of humans. She does not deal with the ethics of culling.

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