In recent years there has been a great profusion of scholarly writing about the mental capacities and the moral status of nonhuman animals. While much of this writing has come from ethologists, historians, and philosophers writing under the influence of traditional humanistic thought, an increasingly large proportion of it has come from postmodern thinkers who see in humanism a fundamental obstacle to the prospect of doing justice to the experiential capacities and the moral worth of animals.¹ A key prejudice of traditional humanistic thought is that there is an essential divide between human beings and nonhuman animals: only human beings...
The possibility of declaring veganism a fundamental moral principle depends, like the possibility of declaring any principle whatsoever, on the identification of a stable and enduring foundation upon which the principle can be justified. If veganism is to be considered a moral obligation, then it must be possible to derive it from a set of guiding convictions about the way things are and ought to be. This in turn, as trivial as it might seem, depends on there being something like “the way things are and ought to be.” But are we any longer entitled to speak of things like..