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Can Animals Be Moral?Stock informationGeneral Fields
Special Fields
DescriptionFrom eye-witness accounts of elephants apparently mourning the death of family members to an experiment that showed that hungry rhesus monkeys would not take food if doing so gave another monkey an electric shock, there is much evidence of animals displaying what seem to be moral feelings. But despite such suggestive evidence, philosophers steadfastly deny that animals can act morally, and for reasons that virtually everyone has found convincing. In Can Animals be Moral?, philosopher Mark Rowlands examines the reasoning of philosophers and scientists on this question-ranging from Aristotle and Kant to Hume and Darwin-and reveals that their arguments fall far short of compelling. The basic argument against moral behavior in animals is that humans have capabilities that animals lack. We can reflect on our motivations, formulate abstract principles that allow that allow us to judge right from wrong. For an actor to be moral, he or she must be able scrutinize their motivations and actions. No animal can do these things-no animal is moral. Author descriptionMark Rowlands is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He is the author of fourteen books, translated into more than twenty languages. His autobiography, The Philosopher and the Wolf was published in 2008, and became an international bestseller. Table of contents1. Can Animals be Moral? ; 2. Attributing Emotions to Animals ; 3. Moral Agents, Patients, and Subjects ; 4. The Reflection Condition: Aristotle and Kant ; 5. The Idiot ; 6. The Phenomenology of Moral Motivation ; 7. Moral Motivation and Meta-Cognition ; 8. Moral Reasons and Practice ; 9. Reconstructing Normativity and Agency ; 10. A Cognitive Ethologist from Mars |