Introduction: Anthropomorphism and Animal Ethics

Abstract

On one level this book maps the central debates surrounding anthropomorphism in relation to our descriptions of animals, their lifeworlds, animal mentality, and meaningful communication in the nonhuman world (see Chaps. 2 , 3 , and 4 ). These debates have been, in the history of ideas, mostly associated with philosophers and thinkers such as Hume, Montaigne, and Darwin, but can be traced back to the work of pre-Socratic philosophers (see Chap. 4 ). Today, cognitive ethologists (such as Frans de Waal, Marc Bekoff, and Gordon Burghardt) are well-known for giving special attention to the concept of anthropomorphism and have developed specialist terminology to precisely conceptualise and describe the moral maze of pertinent ethical issues that are intimately connected to the debates. The work of such cognitive ethologists is often linked with the arguments of ‘animal liberationist’ philosophers whose work was brought to the forefront of philosophy in the 1970s with the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation ([1975] 1995) and his arguments against speciesism therein; it is associated as such for the very reason that it utilises these philosophers’ debates by applying them to an empirical-based study of animal life, animal mentality, and animal communication (see Chap. 5 ).