The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue

Leading animal studies scholars offer an urgent defense of all forms of life.

Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee, Harlan B. Miller, and others join Paola Cavalieri in refuting the tenets of moral perfectionism, or the belief that conscious beings deserve different levels of moral consideration according to their cognitive abilities.

Cavalieri begins with a Socratic dialogue between two imagined philosophers, representing the analytical and continental traditions. They discuss the history and defenses of moral perfectionism and debate whether the view represents an archaic approach to ethics. Cavalieri then follows with a roundtable “multilogue” in which Coetzee, Miller, Cary Wolfe, and Matthew Calarco expand on the relationship between philosophy and animals, the boundaries of moral status, the psychology of speciesism, and the practical consequences of an antiperfectionist stance. Coetzee (author of the novels The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello) emphasizes the animality of human beings; Miller (a prominent analytic philosopher) dismantles the rationalizations of human bias; Wolfe (professor of English at Rice University) advocates an exposure to other worlds and beings; and Calarco (author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida) extends moral status to beings that traditionally have little or no moral standing, such as plants and animals.