Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents

Reviewed by: Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy James A. Serpell Gary Steiner . Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. ix + 332 pp. $37.50 (paperbound, 0-8229-4269-0). Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is a comprehensive scholarly account of the ongoing Western philosophical debate on the moral status of nonhuman animals (henceforth "animals"). The book covers a substantial period—essentially from Ovid and Hesiod to Singer and Regan—and, despite the occasional omission (e.g., Henry Salt), it is surprisingly thorough. It also manages to highlight many names that this reviewer did not previously associate with the "animals" debate. Gary Steiner is clearly well versed in the relevant literature, and is particularly adept at extracting the essence of the complex, and occasionally indigestible, arguments that philosophers over the ages have brought to bear on this problematic discussion. Although the book covers some of the same ground as previous texts,1 it also provides a useful introduction to a number of post-Enlightenment thinkers—especially the Romantics (Schopenhauer, Schweitzer) and postmodernists (Heidegger, Levinas, Jonas, Derrida)—who tend to have been ignored by comparable works. Like many other authors, Steiner emphasizes the overwhelmingly anthropocentric bias that pervades mainstream Western thinking on the nature and moral standing of animals. However, he devotes particular attention to a minority of philosophers throughout the ages who attempted to swim against this current of opinion, and who are the source of his "discontents." Among those who tended [End Page 219] to accord animals moral standing, Steiner recognizes two separate but overlapping categories of thinkers: those who argue for greater moral consideration on the basis of mental or experiential capacities that animals supposedly share with humans (the capacities approach), and those who focus on "kinship" in the holistic sense of kindred beings engaged in a common struggle to realize their "telos" or end in life (the kinship approach). He concludes by arguing that either of these approaches, when pursued in isolation, leads to significant philosophical problems or absurdities, whereas a combined approach may provide a basis for "overcoming the limitations and confusions in the contemporary debates about animals" (p. 223). The combination that Steiner proposes seems to involve a sort of two-tier moral system in which liberal individualism continues to dominate in the human sphere, while a new "cosmic holism" is applied to our relations with nature and other animals. Unfortunately, instead of elaborating on how this parallel approach might work in practice, or how it might resolve the difficulties associated with existing approaches, he ends the book with an escape clause: "Such an integration of liberal individualism into cosmic holism is difficult to envision today because the needed cosmological framework remains undeveloped" (p. 251). Although it would be too much to expect this book (or any history) to solve, once and for all, the intractable philosophical problems posed by animals' moral status, this reviewer felt somewhat cheated by such a cavalier denouement. To use a mundane analogy, if a plumber said to you, "I know just how to fix your leaky pipes, but sadly the tools I need to fix them haven't been invented yet," you might experience a similar level of disappointment. That said, this is undoubtedly a valuable reference work that belongs on the bookshelf of anybody with a serious interest in animal ethics and/or the history of Western attitudes toward animals. James A. Serpell University of Pennsylvania Footnotes 1. Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Keith Tester, Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights (London: Routledge, 1991); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983). Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Anthropocentrism · Enlightenment · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Mainstream · Theology · Western thought · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Philosophy

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