In Search of Consistency: Ethics and Animals
lisa kemmerer
ISBN: 978-9004147256
Publisher: Brill, 2006
Overview
In Search of Consistency works across the disciplines of moral philosophy, environmental ethics, and theology. Author Dr. Lisa Kemmerer presents, explores, analyzes, and critically examines four key thinkers in animal ethics— Tom Regan (rights theory), Peter Singer (utilitarian), Paul Taylor (environmental ethics), and Andrew Linzey (theology). In Search of Consistency also presents a new approach to ethics—the Minimize Harm Maxim. Kemmerer’s maxim exposes, through real and hypothetical scenarios, common and well-accepted behaviors as patently irrational and raises questions few authors deign to entertain, bursting wide the bubble that has long protected conventional Greco-diaspora ways of valuing life and facing death.
Throughout the book, Kemmerer reminds readers that ethics carry an expectation of action, that ethics are intended to guide how we live, that ethics are nothing if they are not put to action. This first publication of Dr. Kemmerer provides the first glimpse of core elements that have made her work popular in classrooms and activist circles internationally, catapulting her innovative ideas into a rich career of research, writing, teaching, and public speaking.
Book Quotes
“Some of the world’s biggest killers (including heart disease, a number of common cancers, obesity, diabetes, and infections from pathogens such as E. coli) are more likely for those who consume flesh, diary, or eggs. Anymal agriculture is implicated in a number of additional serious and deadly medical concerns, including respiratory diseases, antibiotic resistance, and zoomorphic diseases—which are funded and furthered by those who buy anymal products, but which affect all human beings.”
- AMORE, Health Chapter
“In choosing our diet, we choose not only whether or not a pig, cow, sheep, or chicken will live a miserable life and face slaughter in their adolescence, but whether or not mothers will be allowed to raise their young, whether or not the sacred bond between young and their mothers will be respected and honored. . . . Only vegans refuse to participate in the suffering and death that defines anymal agriculture.”
- AMORE, Feminism Chapter
“Farmers burn fossil fuels to prepare the land, to plant, fertilize, harvest, and then to transport and store millions of tons of feedcrops. Anymal agriculture burns fossil fuels to transport herds and flocks to slaughter and then to move anymal products to shops and for cold storage. Anymal agriculture is also the largest source of human-induced methane, created and emitted into the environment by the decomposition of manure and the digestion process of billions of cattle, sheep, and goats birthed and raised as “food,” and human-induced nitrous oxide, which is created and emitted by the decomposition of manure and synthetic fertilizers made from the trillions of tons of manure produced on anymal farms”
- AMORE, Environment Chapter
“Perhaps more importantly (and rather obviously), 2000-year-old descriptions of ritual sacrifices that were performed before Jesus became the final sacrifice—abrogating the need for any further sacrifice—have nothing to do with eating a cheeseburger in the 21st century.”
- AMORE, Religion Chapter