David Sztybel | |
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| Born | 2 February 1967 |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Education | BA (philosophy, 1991) MA (philosophy, 1994) PhD (philosophy, 2000) BEd (English and Social Studies, 2006) |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto |
| Occupation(s) | Philosopher, writer |
| Known for | Animal ethics |
| Website | davidsztybel.info |
David Sztybel (born 2 February 1967) is a Canadian philosopher specializing in animal ethics.
Sztybel was born in Toronto, Ontario. He obtained his BA in philosophy in 1991, his MA in 1994, and his PhD in 2000 – for a thesis entitled "Empathy and Rationality in Ethics" – from the University of Toronto. [1]
He fulfilled an Advisory Research Committee Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Queen's University (2001-2002), held a fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (2007–2011), and a research fellowship at the University of Vienna (2011 to present). [1] Most of his work is related to animal rights. [2]
Sztybel has developed a new theory of animal rights which he terms "best caring", as outlined in his paper "The Rights of Animal Persons". Criticizing conventional theories of rights based on intuition, traditionalism or common sense, compassion, Immanuel Kant's theory, John Rawls's theory, and Alan Gewirth's theory, Sztybel devises a new theory of rights for human and nonhuman animals. Sztybel bases his theory, in part, on the idea that sentient beings are ends-in-themselves, a theory of emotional cognition which verifies that some things really are good or bad for sentient beings. This is a non-utilitarian or "individuals-respecting" theory that defends the proposition that all sentient beings should be legally recognized as persons. [4]
He is critical of utilitarianism and the traditional feminist ethics of care. He also takes issue with the traditional notion of animal welfare, which supports the use of animals if steps are taken to avoid "unnecessary" suffering, the parameters of which vary. Sztybel argues that we would never call the same treatment of humans, mentally disabled or otherwise, to be consistent with their welfare. He coined the term "animal illfare" to describe conventional animal treatment. He holds that true animal welfare would only entail wishing animals good (never anything avoidably malicious). He supports that fully realized substantial animal rights correspond to a significant respect for all sentient beings.
Sztybel contends that Singer's philosophy of animal liberation is not really about liberating animals in general; he accuses Singer of being a speciesist for defending the vivisection of animals on the ground that they have inferior cognitive capacities. In so doing, Singer is effectively sanctioning the harmful treatment of nonhuman animals on the basis of a species-characteristic which does not justify violent treatment.
He also provides a critique of the abolitionist views of Gary L. Francione and Joan Dunayer, who argue that animal rights supporters should not pursue a welfarist approach. A defense of suffering-reduction laws and a discussion of the logical problems of anti-welfarism are featured in Sztybel's article "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism".
| Authority control databases: Academics |
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Speciesism is a term used in philosophy regarding the treatment of individuals of different species. The term has several different definitions within the relevant literature. Some sources specifically define speciesism as discrimination or unjustified treatment based on an individual's species membership, while other sources define it as differential treatment without regard to whether the treatment is justified or not. Richard D. Ryder, who coined the term, defined it as "a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species". Speciesism results in the belief that humans have the right to use non-human animals, which scholars say is pervasive in the modern society. Studies from 2015 and 2019 suggest that people who support animal exploitation also tend to endorse racist, sexist, and other prejudicial views, which furthers the beliefs in human supremacy and group dominance to justify systems of inequality and oppression.
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals is a 1975 book by Australian philosopher Peter Singer. It is widely considered within the animal liberation movement to be the founding philosophical statement of its ideas. Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to human and nonhuman animals. Following Jeremy Bentham, Singer argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to experience suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. He popularized the term "speciesism" in the book, which had been coined by Richard D. Ryder to describe the exploitative treatment of animals.
Gary Lawrence Francione is an American academic in the fields of law and philosophy. He is Board of Governors Professor of Law and Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Lincoln (UK) and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia (UK). He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal ethics.
Andrew Linzey is an English Anglican priest, theologian, and prominent figure in Christian vegetarianism. He is a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford, and held the world's first academic post in Ethics, Theology and Animal Welfare, the Bede Jarret Senior Research Fellowship at Blackfriars Hall.
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all sentient animals have moral worth independent of their utility to humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Broadly speaking, and particularly in popular discourse, the term "animal rights" is often used synonymously with "animal protection" or "animal liberation". More narrowly, "animal rights" refers to the idea that many animals have fundamental rights to be treated with respect as individuals—rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture that may not be overridden by considerations of aggregate welfare.
Animal ethics is a branch of ethics which examines human-animal relationships, the moral consideration of animals and how nonhuman animals ought to be treated. The subject matter includes animal rights, animal welfare, animal law, speciesism, animal cognition, wildlife conservation, wild animal suffering, the moral status of nonhuman animals, the concept of nonhuman personhood, human exceptionalism, the history of animal use, and theories of justice. Several different theoretical approaches have been proposed to examine this field, in accordance with the different theories currently defended in moral and political philosophy. There is no theory which is completely accepted due to the differing understandings of what is meant by the term ethics; however, there are theories that are more widely accepted by society such as animal rights and utilitarianism.
Abolitionism or abolitionist veganism is the animal rights based opposition to all animal use by humans. Abolitionism intends to eliminate all forms of animal use by maintaining that all sentient beings, humans or nonhumans, share a basic right not to be treated as properties or objects. Abolitionists emphasize that the production of animal products requires treating animals as property or resources, and that animal products are not necessary for human health in modern societies. Abolitionists believe that everyone who can live vegan is therefore morally obligated to be vegan.
Roger Yates is an English lecturer in sociology at University College Dublin and the University of Wales, specialising in animal rights. He is a former executive committee member of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), a former Animal Liberation Front (ALF) press officer, and a co-founder of the Fur Action Group.
Total liberation, also referred to as total liberation ecology or veganarchism, is a political philosophy and movement that combines anarchism with a commitment to animal and earth liberation. Whilst more traditional approaches to anarchism have often focused primarily on opposing the state and capitalism, total liberation is additionally concerned with opposing all additional forms of human oppression as well as the oppression of other animals and ecosystems. Proponents of total liberation typically espouse a holistic and intersectional approach aimed at using direct action to dismantle all forms of domination and hierarchy, common examples of which include the state, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, cissexism, disablism, ageism, speciesism and ecological domination.
David Alan Nibert is an American sociologist, author, activist and professor of sociology at Wittenberg University. He is the co-organizer of the Section on Animals and Society of the American Sociological Association. In 2005, he received their Award for Distinguished Scholarship.
Raymond G. Frey was a professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, specializing in moral, political and legal philosophy, and author or editor of a number of books. He was a noted critic of animal rights.
Alasdair Cochrane is a British political theorist and ethicist who is currently Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on animal rights from the perspective of political theory, which is the subject of his two books: An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory and Animal Rights Without Liberation. His third book, Sentientist Politics, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He is a founding member of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a UK-based think tank focused on furthering the social and political status of nonhuman animals. He joined the Department at Sheffield in 2012, having previously been a faculty member at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics. Cochrane is a Sentientist. Sentientism is a naturalistic worldview that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings.
Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations is a 2012 book by the British political theorist Alasdair Cochrane, in which it is argued that animal rights philosophy can be decoupled from animal liberation philosophy by the adoption of the interest-based rights approach. Cochrane, arguing that there is no reason that (nonhuman) animals should be excluded from justice, adopts Joseph Raz's account of interest rights and extends it to include animals. He argues that sentient animals possess a right not to be made to suffer and a right not to be killed, but not a right to freedom. The book's chapters apply Cochrane's account to a number of interactions between humans and animals; first animal experimentation, then animal agriculture, the genetic engineering of animals, the use of animals in entertainment and sport, the relationship of animals to environmental practices and the use of animals in cultural practices.
John Hadley is an Australian philosopher whose research concerns moral and political philosophy, including animal ethics, environmental ethics, and metaethics. He is currently a senior lecturer in philosophy in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He has previously taught at Charles Sturt University and the University of Sydney, where he studied as an undergraduate and doctoral candidate. In addition to a variety of articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, he is the author of the 2015 monograph Animal Property Rights and the 2019 monograph Animal Neopragmatism. He is also the co-editor, with Elisa Aaltola, of the 2015 collection Animal Ethics and Philosophy.
Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned? is a 2016 book, written by Jan Deckers and published by Ubiquity Press. The book engages with the work of many scholars who have written on the subject, including Carol Adams, Alasdair Cochrane, Gary Francione, Melanie Joy, Martha Nussbaum, and Peter Singer, as well as with the views of non-specialists, including slaughterhouse workers involved with the film Slaughterhouse: The Task of Blood, released by Century Films in 2005.
Gary Edward Varner was an American philosopher specializing in environmental ethics, philosophical questions related to animal rights and animal welfare, and R. M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor in the department of philosophy at Texas A&M University; he had been based at the university since 1990. He was educated at Arizona State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison; at Madison, where he was supervised by Jon Morline, he wrote one of the first doctoral theses on environmental ethics. Varner's first monograph was In Nature's Interests?, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. In the book, Varner defended a form of biocentric individualism, according to which all living entities have morally considerable interests.
Óscar Horta Álvarez is a Spanish animal activist and moral philosopher who is currently a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and one of the co-founders of the organization Animal Ethics. He is known for his work in animal ethics, especially around the problem of wild animal suffering. He has also worked on the concept of speciesism and on the clarification of the arguments for the moral consideration of nonhuman animals. In 2022, Horta published his first book in English, Making a Stand for Animals.
The relationship between animal ethics and environmental ethics concerns the differing ethical consideration of individual nonhuman animals—particularly those living in spaces outside of direct human control—and conceptual entities such as species, populations and ecosystems. The intersection of these two fields is a prominent component of vegan discourse.
Valéry Giroux is a Canadian philosopher, lawyer and animal rights activist from Quebec. She is an adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Law, associate director for the Centre de recherche en éthique, a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and an author and speaker on animal ethics issues and veganism, with a notable focus on the topic of antispeciesism through her co-editorship of the antispeciesist journal L'Amorce. Her philosophy argues for the equal moral consideration of all sentient beings, objects to the ethical notion that the utilization of non-human animals by humans as being morally permissible, and advocates for the individual right to freedom for all sentient beings, regardless of their species, emphasizing negative or republican freedom over positive freedom.
