Animals, Men and Morals

Animals, Men and Morals:
An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans

Author	Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch John Harris (eds.)
Subject	Animal rights Moral philosophy
Publisher	Grove Press, New York Victor Gollancz, London
Publication date	1971
Pages	240
ISBN	0-394-17825-4
LC Class	73-20609

Animals, Men and Morals: An Inquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-humans is a 1971 collection of essays on animal rights edited by Oxford philosophers Stanley and Roslind Godlovitch, both from Canada, and John Harris from the UK. The editors were members of the Oxford Group, a group of post graduate philosophy students and others based at the University of Oxford from 1968. Apart from the Godlovitches and Harris, the group also included David Wood and sociology student Mike Peters. The Godlovitches had recently become vegetarian (actually, vegan) on moral grounds, and soon after Harris and Wood met them, the latter were also persuaded that the case against exploiting animals was unanswerable, and they too became vegetarian. The group then began to raise the issue in lectures and seminars in moral philosophy at Oxford, and also began local campaigning against factory farming, otter hunting and other animal exploitation issues.

Origins

The inspiration for the book was the discovery of an article called 'The Rights of Animals' which was written by Brigid Brophy, and which was first published in the Sunday Times a few years earlier, on 10th October 1965. Brophy's piece was devasting in its brief and totally unsentimental statement of the case for animal rights. It began: "Were it to be announced tomorrow that anyone who fancied it might, without risk of reprisals or recriminations, stand at a fourth story window, dangle out of it a length of string with a meal (labelled 'Free') on the end, wait until a chance passer-by took a bite and then, having entangled his cheek or gullet on a hook hidden in the food, haul him up to the fourth floor and there batter him to death with a knobkerrie, I do not think there would be many takers." And concluded: "In point of fact, I am the very opposite of an anthromorphiser. I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality and moral choice - and that is precisely why we are under the obligation to recognise and respect the rights of animals"

Soon after, the idea of creating a book or symposium of articles by writers who might include Brophy, as well as other important writers such as Ruth Harrison, began to emerge. Much of what was written at that time about animal welfare was anthropomorphic and sentimental in tone. There was clearly a need for a clear and rigourous philosophical and moral perspective. The group began to draw up a list of possible contributors. Members of the group went to London and visited Brophy, who was enthusiastic and who also agreed to contribute. Brophy then introduced the group to Richard Ryder, a clinical psychologist based in Oxford, who later agreed to write a piece on Animal Experimentation. The group began to visit publishers, and when they met Giles Gordon of publishers Victor Gollancz, he persuaded them that they should themselves write pieces for the book, as well as better known authors, as this would make the whole more interesting. Gollancz also agreed to publish it.

The book was ground-breaking in its time, because it was one of the early publications that argued clearly in favour of arguments based on reasoned argument rather than compassion in determining the way animals are used. The editors were uncompromising in their Introduction:

"Once the full force of moral assessment has been made explicit there can be no rational excuse left for killing animals, be they killed for food, science, or sheer personal indulgence...should the reader find no fault in the positions he will find in these pages he is, as a rational being, committed to act in accordance with them. Should he fail to do so, he can only have been terribly mislead since childhood about the nature of morality."

Contents

The book fell into four sections. The first section was a factual survey of the use of animals in agriculture, science and fashion, which the second section then critiqued. The third section was more philosophical in tone, and the final section concluded with a sociological perspective. The book contains essays by Ruth Harrison on factory farming; Muriel Dowding, founder of Beauty without Cruelty, on furs and cosmetics; Richard Ryder, the Oxford psychologist, on animal testing; and Terence Hegarty from the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments on alternatives.

John Harris writes about killing for food, Maureen Duffy about hunting, Brigid Brophy about the need for animal rights, Roslind Godlovitch and Stanley Godlovitch about the ethics, and Leonard Nelson (the German philosopher who died in 1927) about duties to animals. There are essays from David Wood and Michael Peters on the sociological position, and a postscript from Patrick Corbett, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex.

Reception

The book got into trouble from the moment of publication, because two animal experimenters named in Ryder's piece objected to what had been written about them. The publisher Gollancz was forced by the threat of legal action to pay damages, and to put an errata slip in all copies. However, in terms of public reception the unusual and radical approach taken by the book meant that it created a small stir in the United Kingdom. John Harris was interviewed on the PM programme, and even appeared on local TV. The book was also reviewed in several papers and journals. But the way forward for animal rights as an issue was eventually to occur by a different route. It was in a review of the book for The New York Review of Books in 1973 that the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, first used the term "animal liberation," writing that "Animals, Men and Morals is a manifesto for an Animal Liberation movement." Two years later his own book, Animal Liberation (1975), was published.

Singer has subsequently written of how he came to vegetarianism through meeting, among others, the editors of Animals, Men and Morals, and gave critical feedback on Roslind Godlovitch's contribution to the book.

See also

• Henry Stephens Salt
• List of animal rights advocates