Animal Ethics

Animal Ethics provides information and promote debate about issues in animal ethics, sentience, animal interests and speciesism.

Detailed information on the data regarding the situation of nonhuman animals as well as on the arguments to defend animals is not always available, and we intend to provide it to all those who want to help them. In addition, we do outreach work ourselves aimed not at stopping particular ways in which animals are harmed (which other organizations are already addressing), but at achieving a shift in attitudes towards speciesism.

Our work deals with the way nonhuman animals are considered in everyday life, as well as how they are considered in fields that affect human attitudes and activities that are relevant to animals. These include academia, scientific fields, and the law. We look at the way nonhuman animals are impacted by current human activities, and how they might be impacted by future planned or unplanned human activities. This involves not only the ways we might harm them, but also how we might help them even when the cause of their plight is not human action.

The field of animal ethics deals with why we should take nonhuman animals into consideration in our moral decisions, and the ways in which we should. This has tremendously relevant practical consequences. Many people currently have little regard for nonhuman animals. But more often, people do give some consideration to the interests of animals, but still have a discriminatory attitude towards them. We can morally consider someone but still discriminate against them in a way that harms them. We can also discriminate against them in ways that don’t harm them at all, such as by helping some individuals more than we help others, for reasons that are unfair. Animal ethics as a field addresses these questions, and it is our aim to deal with them.