Lori Gruen

Some activists who identify with Effective Altruism, and many of those who don’t, are working to try to make unjust systems less harmful and exclusionary. Other activists and scholars argue that these systems are working precisely the way they are designed to work—they can’t be fixed because they aren’t actually broken—and we need radical social change. This chapter discusses the contours of the debate between improving existing social arrangements and radically transforming them. Drawing on the insights of early socialist activism and current prison abolition work, the chapter explores “non-reformist reforms” as a helpful way of gauging whether or not certain campaigns for animals can help to create a genuinely just and caring world.

This chapter examines the role that empathy plays in understanding the experiences of human and nonhuman others. The chapter first distinguishes between two often confused concepts, sympathy and empathy, to show how empathy builds connections with others by trying to understand their perspectives and worlds. The chapter then traces different kinds of empathy (affective resonance, and storied empathy) to argue for a concept of entangled empathy, which requires recognizing the manifold relationships people are in, including social and material conditions. The chapter also addresses worries about empathy. The chapter concludes by showing how entangled empathy can help people address the ways that many human and nonhuman animals can be and are oppressed.

Given the violence, objectification, domination, commodification, and oppression inherent in industrialized food production, some conscientious consumers have adopted vegan practices. This chapter discusses two conceptions of veganism, lifestyle/identity veganism, V I, and veganism as a goal/aspiration, V A. It argues that due to conceptual and practical flaws with V I, conscientious consumers should adopt V A. It considers and rejects the so-called compassionate carnivore movement. It then explores arguments denying the casual efficacy of adopting any form of veganism. It concludes that V A can make a difference, and those in consumer cultures are obligated to adopt and practice it.

Great apes have been observed to help one another cross roads, spring traps set by poachers, share food after group hunts, respond to the recently dead as if they were grieving, and to play with sticks as if they were dolls. But some deny that empathy is involved. This chapter argues that great apes empathic behavior does not fit the spectatorial model tested in recent studies. Ape empathy and ape morality are best seen from the perspective of their engaged interactions with others as individuals with relationships, past histories, personalities, social roles, emotions, and moods. When empathy is seen merely as the ability to correctly attribute mental states to others, it loses the richness involved in the entangled empathy experienced between individuals, which has cognitive as well as conative elements, and conclusions about ape ethics can only be that they have a rudimentary precursor to real human morality.

Prison reform policies in recent years have tended to emphasize “non-violent” offenders as more worthy of sentence reconsideration and alternatives to incarceration. This reinforces the distinction between violent and non-violent crime and strengthens negative attitudes and state sanctions against the so-called violent offenders. This chapter problematizes this facile distinction by exploring how violence operates in poor, black communities. In the first section it is argued that violence and dignity are not mutually exclusive. Violence can be understood as an expression of dignity in the state of emergency that obtains in many poor, black communities. In the second section, three types of violence are analyzed: retributive, pre-emptive, and destructive violence. The first two types are often deployed to protect dignity. In the last section, there is a discussion of what it would take to reach a non-violent state in black interstices, one that allows for the promotion and protection of dignity.

In this timely collection, some of the world's leading ethicists grapple with the variety of issues posed by human embryonic stem cell research. Investigates the moral status of the embryo including the creation of chimeras and paying for gametes (eggs and sperm) and embryos for research purposes Provides a thorough evaluation of the ethics and politics of regulating hESC research, and the privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent in the conduct of research and clinical investigations Essential reading for scientists, philosophers, policy makers, and all who are interested in the ethical conduct of science Contributors include David DeGrazia, Lori Gruen, Elizabeth Harman, John Harris, Jeff McMahan, Don Marquis and Peter Singer.

In this comprehensive updated introduction to animal ethics, Lori Gruen weaves together poignant and provocative case studies with discussions of ethical theory, urging readers to engage critically and reflect empathetically on our relationships with other animals. In clear and accessible language, Gruen discusses a range of issues central to human-animal relations and offers a reasoned new perspective on key debates in the field. She analyses and explains a range of theoretical positions and poses challenging questions that directly encourage readers to hone their ethical reasoning skills and to develop a defensible position about their own practices. Her book will be an invaluable resource for students in a wide range of disciplines including ethics, environmental studies, veterinary science, gender studies, and the emerging field of animal studies. The book is an engaging account of animal ethics for readers with no prior background in philosophy.

Is there something distinctive about humanity that justifies the idea that humans have moral status while non-humans do not? Providing an answer to this question has become increasingly important among philosophers as well as those outside of philosophy who are interested in our treatment of non-human animals. For some, answering this question will enable us to better understand the nature of human beings and the proper scope of our moral obligations. Some argue that there is an answer that can distinguish humans from the rest of the natural world. Many of those who accept this answer are interested in justifying certain human practices towards non-humans—practices that cause pain, discomfort, suffering, and death. This latter group expects that in answering the question in a particular way, humans will be justified in granting moral consideration to other humans that is neither required nor justified when considering non-human animals. In contrast to this view, an increasing number of philosophers have argued that while humans are different in a variety of ways from each other and other animals, these differences do not provide a philosophical defense for denying non-human animals moral consideration. What the basis of moral consideration is and what it amounts to has been the source of much disagreement.

Consciousness, understood as an awareness of what is going on that helps shape one’s experiences, is one of the ways that scholars have distinguished animal life from the rest of the natural world. Beings that have interests in having good experiences and avoiding bad ones deserve our moral attention, and this quality is an important feature of ethical engagement with other sentient beings, both human and nonhuman. What interests matter and why they matter is a subject of disagreement that has affected what we judge to be permissible or impermissible treatment of other animals. Empathy toward and respect for other animals takes us beyond attention to their suffering and has us focus on what counts as well-being for others, by their own lights.

Val Plumwood urged us to attend to earth others in non-dualistic ways. In this essay I suggest that such attention be promoted through what I call "engaged empathy." Engaged empathy involves critical attention to the conditions that undermine the well being or flourishing of those to whom empathy is directed and this requires moral agents to attend to things they might not have otherwise. Engaged empathy requires gaining wisdom and perspective and, importantly, motivates the empathizer to act ethically.

Deeply rooted structures of racism, ableism, misogyny, ageism, and transphobia hurt great numbers of people, exposing them to intolerance, economic exclusion, and physical harm around the globe. Billions of land animals suffer and die annually in concentrated feeding operations and slaughterhouses. Our planet and all who live here are in perilous straights as the climate changes. In the face of such grievous problems, people who want to find positive ways to respond often grapple with difficult questions about how to make a difference. Effective Altruism has arisen as an attempt to help answer these questions, encouraging people to give as much money as they can in the most effective ways to address human and animal suffering. But the Effective Altruists’ answers support some of the very social structures that cause suffering, undermining its efforts to “do the most good.” The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does is the first book-length critique of Effective Altruism. It brings together a diverse group of activists and scholars to explore Effective Altruism’s failure to meaningfully address forms of human and animal suffering.

"In Entangled Empathy, scholar and activist Lori Gruen argues that rather than focusing on animal rights, we ought to work to make our relationships with animals right by empathetically responding to their needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and unique perspectives. Pointing out that we are already entangled in complex and life-altering relationships with other animals, Gruen guides readers through a new way of thinking about and practicing animal ethics. Lori Gruen is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Wesleyan Animal Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Ethics and Animals and co-editor, with Carol Adams, of Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Animals and the Earth."--Back cover.

In this paper, we explore how caretakers experience living with disabled companion animals. Drawing on interviews, as well as narratives on websites and other support groups, we examine ways in which caretakers describe the lives of animals they live with, and their various disabilties. The animals were mostly dogs, plus a few cats, with a range of physical disabilities; almost all had been rehomed, often from places specializing in homing disabled animals. Three themes emerged from analysis of these texts: first, respondents drew heavily on the common narrative of disabled individuals as heroes, often noted in disability rights literature – while simultaneously drawing on, and challenging, ideas of disability as incapacity. The second theme was love and empathy. Several of our interviewees spoke of empathy being enhanced thro We discuss these caretakers' stories of animal disability in relation to both studies of human-animal relationships, and to disability rights, as well as to ideas about what constitutes care. What these narratives emphasize is a particular sense of sharing and reciprocity, felt through the body, especially when caretakers spoke of their own ill-health. They saw disability – the animals' or their own – not as limiting, but as enabling both to flourish within caring relationships.

Class, race, and tough-on-crime political platforms are three of the most discussed, and thus most visible, forces that contribute to mass incarceration. The analysis of each of these forces has been illuminating, yet these broad narratives tend to obscure the burden of prison for those locked up within them. The social narratives that have developed to help understand the prison industrial system often inadvertently obscure the complex experiences and losses endured by prisoners. The psychic and physical toll that accrues from decades of social exile, the affronts to dignity that “corrections” regularly impose, and the injuries to one’s sense of themselves and their relationships that prison foments haven’t received the attention they deserve. This essay explores the question of the permissibility of causing harm through imprisonment and social abandonment, arguing that any adequate answer must make the particular experiences and actual concerns of incarcerated people socially visible.