Clubbing a rockfish to death was wildly inconsistent with my habitual way of living. It’s precisely the inconsistency that intrigued me. I doubt that there’s any wholly consistent way to live and there’s much to be learned by applying pressure to deeply held principles.
In some respects, animal ethics has more in common with anthropocentric ethics than it does with environmental ethics.
Especially on matters of value, it often seems settled from the outset that our minds or our hearts aren’t actually supposed to be changed in the process of reading or writing philosophy.
It’s not nice to think of yourself as a monster. There’s a strong tendency to want to harmonize the monstrous jumbling of categories in our self-understanding. But doing so creates further problems.
Starting with Plato, philosophy has systematically marginalized both literature and animals as beneath the dignity that philosophy has established for humankind.
How are animals of the same species subjected to such different treatments? Part of the answer, I think, is that we humans don’t quite know what to make of creatures that are both so similar to us and so different.
I want to get clear on my place in a world that I inhabit with an animal body. That requires resisting attempts to inflate my significance beyond the animal. But it also requires resisting attempts to deflate it.