Herzog, Hal's Attitudes Toward Animals

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“Herzog, Hal. ‘Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why it’s so hard to think Straight about Animals”. New York, NY, Harper Perennial, 2010.

Hal Herzog focuses on the ethically inconsistent views that prevail in commonly held attitudes toward animals. The author suggests that moral incoherence is hardwired into the thinking of our species as a random by-product of evolution. One example that stood out to me, was the differing moral attitudes and responsibilities that people hold toward rats based on whether the animals have been categorised as ‘pets’, ‘pests’ or testing ‘subjects’.

As a professor of Psychology at Western Carolina University, Herzdog’s research has focused primarily on human-animal relationships. He has had articles published
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An example of this would be the sterilization of introduced species, so as to avoid throwing off the natural equilibrium of an ecosystem.+

As a professor of Bioethics at Princton University, Peter Singer has written extensively on the topic of practically applied ethics. Coming from a utilitarian perspective, Singer believes in analyzing moral issues and basing action on whichever route provides the greatest utility to the greatest number of parties (including non-human animals). This work has earned him many accolades, as seen in 2012 when he was named Companion of the Order of Australia for to his contributions to the field of philosophy and bioethics.

I believe Singer’s straight forward approach will be invaluable to my essay. I have observed that much resistance against the veganism is not based on ethics, but rather the perceived arrogance of vegans themselves. By simplifying my argument into one of ‘minimizing harm’, much initial resistance will be
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He even goes so far as to state ‘although animals experience pain as it is physically bad, their experience of it is not in itself morally bad. They are harmed in feeling pain, but this harm is not of a moral kind’. This purely philosophical line of reasoning is prevalent in Hsiao’s other writings, which include ‘Against Gun bans and restrictive licensing’ and ‘Industrial farming is not cruel to animals’. The abstract reasoning laid out by Hsiao was even inadvertently discredited by his fellow meat eating academic Hal Herzdog in ‘Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat’, who warned against living ‘in an imaginary moral ether’, and being ‘caught in the grip of

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