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

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

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Cavalieri begins with a Socratic dialogue between two imagined\nphilosophers, representing the analytical and continental\ntraditions. They discuss the history and defenses of moral\nperfectionism and debate whether the view represents an archaic\napproach to ethics. Cavalieri then follows with a roundtable\n“multilogue” in which Coetzee, Miller, Cary Wolfe, and Matthew\nCalarco expand on the relationship between philosophy and animals,\nthe boundaries of moral status, the psychology of speciesism, and\nthe practical consequences of an antiperfectionist stance. Coetzee\n(author of the novels The Lives of Animals and\n_Elizabeth Costello_) emphasizes the animality of human\nbeings; Miller (a prominent analytic philosopher) dismantles the\nrationalizations of human bias; Wolfe (professor of English at Rice\nUniversity) advocates an exposure to other worlds and beings; and\nCalarco (author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from\nHeidegger to Derrida) extends moral status to beings that\ntraditionally have little or no moral standing, such as plants and\nanimals.

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