From Anthropocentrism to a Cosmopolitan Biocentrism: Reflections on Animal Ethics

Abstract

The reasoning about the right and wrong ways to consider, use and treat animals is the focus of animal ethics. For a long time, animal rights have largely escaped anthropological attention. Only recently, however, thanks to new perspectives its assignment is to go beyond the human. This is because we must change the inner assumptions of our basic concepts on human and non-human ethics if we want to deconstruct the human/animal dichotomy. The author reflects on the different theories currently found in literature and the fact that none of them expressed so far are completely accepted, probably due to the different dispositions towards the term ethics. Some of the various theoretical alternatives recently proposed by Authors belonging to different disciplines are discussed in the paper.