Empathy and animal ethics

Norva Lo (La Trobe University)

This paper investigates the extents to which empathy is relevant to three competing theories in moral philosophy, all of which have been or can be used to ground some form of non-anthropocentric animal ethics, in particular, to ground the core animal-ethical claim that we have moral duties directly towards nonhuman animals in ways very similar to how and why we have moral duties directly towards other human beings. The three schools are utilitarianism, deontology, and Humean virtue ethics.