Animal Rights

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A fresh view of animals and what we owe them. Do animals have moral standing? Do they count, morally speaking? In Animal Rights , Mark Rowlands argues that they do and explores the implications of this idea. He identifies three different waves in animal rights writing. The first wave was defined by a traditional dispute between utilitarianism (represented by Peter Singer) and rights-based approaches (represented by Tom Regan) to ethics. The second wave was defined by an expansion in a conception of ethics, which saw utilitarian and rights-based approaches supplemented by other ethical traditions, including contractualism, virtue ethics, and care ethics. The third wave was defined by an expansion in our conception of animals, driven by exciting new developments in the field of comparative psychology. Each of these waves had ramifications for how we understand the moral status of animals, but, this book argues, and reinforces, the core idea that animals