Rationality (or something similar) is usually given as the relevant difference between all humans and animals; the reason humans do but animals do not deserve moral consideration. But according to the Argument from Marginal Cases not all humans are rational, yet if such (marginal) humans are morally considerable despite lacking rationality it would be arbitrary to deny animals with similar capacities a similar level of moral consideration. The slippery slope objection has it that although (...) class='Hi'>marginal humans are not strictly speaking morally considerable, we should give them moral consideration because if we do not we will slide down a slippery slope where we end up by not giving normal humans due consideration. I argue that this objection fails to show that marginal humans have the kind of direct moral status proponents of the slippery slope argument have in mind. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anderson claims that the argument from marginal cases is 'the central argument' behind the claim that nonhuman animals have rights. But she thinks, along with Cora Diamond, that the argument is 'obtuse'. Two different meanings could be intended here: that the argument from marginal cases is too blunt or dull to dissect the reasons why it makes sense to say that nonhuman animals have rights or that the argument (...) from marginal cases is insensitive regarding nonrational human beings. The purpose of the present article is to argue that, despite Anderson's and Diamond's nuanced and perceptive treatments of the argument from marginal cases, this argument is not obtuse in either sense of the term. (shrink)

Marginal humans are not rational yet we still think they are morally considerable. This is inconsistent with denying animals moral status on the basis of their irrationality. Therefore, either marginal humans and animals are both morally considerable or neither are. In this paper I consider a major objection to this argument: that species is a relevant difference between humans animals.

I characterize the main approaches to the moral consideration of children developed in the light of the argument from 'marginal' cases, and develop a more adequate strategy that provides guidance about the moral responsibilities adults have towards children. The first approach discounts the significance of children's potential and makes obligations to all children indirect, dependent upon interests others may have in children being treated well. The next approaches agree that the potential of children is morally considerable, (...) but disagree as to whether and why children with intellectual disabilities are morally considerable. These approaches explore the moral significance of intellectual capacities, species membership, the capacity for welfare, and the interests of others. I argue that relationships characterized by reciprocity of care are morally valuable, that both the potential to be in such relationships and the actuality of being in them are morally valuable, and that many children with significant intellectual disabilities have this potential. (shrink)

The Singer-Regan debate -- Reciprocity -- Frey's challenge -- The criticisms of Leahy and Carruthers -- The great ape project and slavery -- The Nozick-Rachels debate.

It matters a great deal whether animals have moral status. If animals have moral status, it may be wrong for us to use them as we currently do – hunting, farming, eating, and experimenting on them. The argument from marginal cases provides us with a reason to think that some animals have moral status that is equal to that of “marginal” humans.

Given the existence of “marginal human cases”, it is often argued that we must either acknowledge that some human beings have less moral status than some non-human animals, or commit to the idea that moral status is held by humans qua human. In this paper, the moves available on both sides are shown to be unsatisfactory, and an argument for moral status that avoids both of the standard positions is suggested. Ultimately, it is argued that the discussion (...) of moral status is confused when marginal human cases are seen as posing a unique, rather than a general, theoretical problem. (shrink)

The argument from species overlap has been widely used in the literature on animal ethics and speciesism. However, there has been much confusion regarding what the argument proves and what it does not prove, and regarding the views it challenges. This article intends to clarify these confusions, and to show that the name most often used for this argument (‘the argument from marginal cases’) reflects and reinforces these misunderstandings. The article claims that (...) the argument questions not only those defences of anthropocentrism that appeal to capacities believed to be typically human, but also those that appeal to special relations between humans. This means the scope of the argument is far wider than has been thought thus far. Finally, the article claims that, even if the argument cannot prove by itself that we should not disregard the interests of nonhuman animals, it provides us with strong reasons to do so, since the argument does prove that no defence of anthropocentrism appealing to non-definitional and testable criteria succeeds. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine two responses to the argument from marginal cases; the argument from kinds and the similarity argument. I will argue that these arguments are insufficient to show that all humans have moral status but no animals do. This does not prove that animals have moral status but it does shift the burden of proof onto those who want to maintain that all humans are morally considerable, but no animals (...) are. (shrink)

Philosophers often enroll disabled bodies and minds as objects of thought in their arguments from marginal cases and in thought experiments: for example, arguments for animal ethics use cognitively disabled people as a contrast case, and Merleau-Ponty uses a blind man with a cane as an exemplar of the relationship of technology to the human, of how technology mediates. However, these philosophers enroll disabled people without engaging significantly in any way with disabled people themselves. Instead, disabled people (...) are treated in philosophy as literal objects—and in many cases, as less than human. (This sense of a categorical difference between disabled and nondisabled people is becoming especially clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, as I write this article.) Philosophical reflection thus makes assumptions—often wrong—about disabled people’s lives, experiences, and relationships to technology. Outside of philosophy as well as in, disabled people are not regarded as experts about our own experiences and lives; our testimony is paternalistically written over. We need better consideration of disabled people as people as we consider the future. Lack of disabled people’s points of view in philosophy colors—and sometimes invalidates—views of technological change. (shrink)

If we are going to treat other species so very differently from our own — killing, eating and experimenting on pigs and sheep, for example, but never human beings — then it seems we need to come up with some morally relevant difference between us and them that justifies this difference in treatment. Otherwise it appears we are guilty of bigotry (in just the same way that someone who discriminates on the basis of race or sex is guilty of (...) bigotry). But what is this morally relevant difference? Julia Tanner's article examines, and rejects, some of the most popular answers to this question. -/- . (shrink)

In this article, I argue that it is wrong to conduct any experiment on a nonhuman which we would regard as immoral were it to be conducted on a human, because such experimentation violates the basic moral rights of sentient beings. After distinguishing the rights approach from the utilitarian approach, I delineate basic concepts. I then raise the classic “argument from marginal cases” against those who support experimentation on nonhumans but not on humans. After next (...) replying to six important objections against that argument, I contend that moral agents are logically required to accord basic moral rights to every sentient being. I conclude by providing criteria for distinguishing ethical from unethical experimentation. (shrink)

David Sztybel has argued that defenders of the moralsignificance of animals have not made an effective case against theirenemy: anthropocentrism. He maintains that they have refuted only``straw'' versions of that view. Sztybel opposes anthropocentrism, butis convinced that it is a much more difficult view to defeat than hasbeen thought. He develops the strongest argument possible for``Obligatory Anthropocentrism'' (OA), defending it against manyobjections. He also holds that OA does not have unpalatable implicationsfor the treatment of average, below average, and mentally (...) challengedhumans. While I agree that Sztybel has done an admirable job ofdefending anthropocentrism, indeed a better job than theanthropocentrists themselves, I argue that his case for OA is subtly butfatally flawed. I also argue that OA does not dodge two very seriouscriticisms concerning its implications for the treatment of certainhuman beings: the charge of invidious perfectionism and the argumentfrom marginal cases. I conclude that the strongest version ofanthropocentrism is, in fact, not strong enough. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question: Who or what can have a moral status in the sense that we have direct moral duties to them? It argues for a biocentric answer which ascribes inherent moral status value to all individual living organisms. This position must be defended against an anthropocentric position. The argument from marginal cases propounded by Tom Regan and Peter Singer for this purpose is criticised as defective, and a different argument is proposed. The (...) biocentric position developed here is related to that of Albert Schweitzer and Paul F. Taylor, but rejects their assumption of equal inherent value for all living organisms. It argues instead for equal moral status value for moral persons and agents, and gradual moral status value for nonpersons, depending on their degree of similarity with moral persons. Mary Ann Warren's recent book on Moral Status is also discussed. The argument is constructed as a casuistic argument, proceeding by analogical extension from persons to non-persons. The meta-ethical question of its pragmatic validity is discussed. (shrink)

In spite of the considerable literature nowadays existing on the issue of the moral exclusion of nonhuman animals, there is still work to be done concerning the characterization of the conceptual framework with which this question can be appraised. This paper intends to tackle this task. It starts by defining speciesism as the unjustified disadvantageous consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to a certain species. It then clarifies some common misunderstandings concerning what this means. Next, (...) it rejects the idea that there are different kinds of speciesism. Such an idea may result from confusion because there are (1) different ways in which speciesism can be defended; and (2) different speciesist positions, that is, different positions that assume speciesism among their premises. Depending on whether or not these views assume other criteria for moral consideration apart from speciesism, they can be combined or simple speciesist positions. But speciesism remains in all cases the same idea. Finally, the paper examines the concept of anthropocentrism, the disadvantageous treatment or consideration of those who are not members of the human species. This notion must be conceptually distinguished from speciesism and from misothery (aversion to nonhuman animals). Anthropocentrism is shown to be refuted because it either commits a petitio principia fallacy or it falls prey to two arguments: the argument from species overlap (widely but misleadingly known as “argument from marginal cases”) and the argument from relevance. This rebuttal identifies anthropocentrism as a speciesist view. (shrink)

Many think doing animal ethics demands we see moral humanism as a speciesist prejudice of the kind found with sexism and racism. The only serious case for this rests on the Argument from Marginal Cases. We find that argument to the point, but show that properly understood it supports humanism. Understanding why it does this lets us see how we ought to go on in animal ethics.

Animal ethics has presented challenging questions regarding the human-animalrelationship. According to some philosophers, non-human animals have value inthemselves. This claim is most commonly based on sentience or consciousness inthe phenomenal sense: since it is like something to be an animal, animals cannotbe treated as mere biological matter. However, the claim has been met with criticism.This paper analyses three of the most common arguments against what ishere called the “individual value” of non-human animals. These arguments are thecapacity argument, the humanistic (...) argument, and the special relations argument.It is maintained that they all face severe problems, which leave the door open forthe possibility that non-human animals may, indeed, have individual value. (shrink)

In this short article I respond, both positively and negatively, but mostly positively, to Jan Deckers’ examination of my defense of nonhuman animal rights from the perspective of process philosophy and from the perspective of what is commonly called the argument from marginal cases.

Many think doing animal ethics demands we see moral humanism as a speciesist prejudice of the kind found with sexism and racism. The only serious case for this rests on the Argument from Marginal Cases. We find that argument to the point, but show that properly understood it supports humanism. Understanding why it does this lets us see how we ought to go on in animal ethics.

This collection honors and critically engages with Tom Regan’s groundbreaking case for the moral rights of animals. Two of Regan’s arguments receive a great deal of attention in these articles: the lifeboat argument and the argument from marginal cases. This review article examines the role of the two arguments in these discussions of Regan and animal rights and argues that effective animal advocacy will require more critical attention to social context—in particular, to how well the (...) arguments’ assumptions describe our world and to how the arguments are likely to be used to reinforce existing injustices. (shrink)

Moral individualists like Jeff McMahan and Peter Singer argue that our moral obligations to animals, both human and non‐human, are grounded in the morally salient capacities of those animals. By contrast, what might be called moral relationalists argue that our obligations to non‐human animals are grounded in our relationship to them. Moral relationalists are of various kinds, from relationalists regarding assistance to animals, such as Clare Palmer and Elizabeth Anderson, to relationalists grounded in a Wittgensteinian view of human practice, (...) such as Cora Diamond and Alice Crary. This article argues that there are, in fact, two distinct types of moral reasons, those based on salient capacities and those based on relationships. Neither type of reason is reducible to the other, and there is no third type to which to reduce them both. Any attempt at reduction would run counter to deep intuitions about our moral relation to non‐human animals as well as to other humans. Among the implications of this is that certain kinds of arguments, such as the argument from marginal cases, seem to be incomplete precisely because they do not capture the complexity of our moral relations to non‐human animals. (shrink)

A central tenet of moral individualism is that only an entity’s intrinsic (non-relational) properties can ground moral status because only intrinsic properties give rise to agent-neutral reasons. However, I show that the two main approaches to making the agent-neutral/agent-relative distinction fail to exclude morally salient relational (extrinsic) properties from giving rise to agent-neutral reasons. As such, moral individualism accounts of moral status are false. Further, arguments that depend on moral individualism’s central tenet—like the argument from “marginal” (...) cases—are unable to defend their thesis by merely claiming that special relations cannot ground moral status. (shrink)

피터 싱어는 쾌고감수능력이 있는 동물들을 고통스럽도록 다루면서, 쾌고감수능력이 없는 가장자리 인간들의 생명을 그들이 단지 인간이라는 생물 종의 구성원이라는 이유 하나만으로 신성시하는 것은 종차별주의라고 비판했다. 그의 이런 비판의 배후에는 이익평등고려의 원칙에 대한 확고한 신념이 있다. 필자는 이 논문에서 이익평등고려의 원칙을 세가지 측면에서 비판하고 있다. 첫째로, 이익평등고려의 원칙은 우리의 직관적인 도덕적 진리와 상충한다. 둘째로, 그 원칙은 동물과 비교해서 인간의 이익을 평등하게 고려하지 못하고 있다. 셋째로 싱어는 이익평등고려의 원칙에 근거한 자신의 동물해방론이 인간의 지위를 낮추는 것이 아니라 동물의 지위를 높이는 것이라고 주장하는데, 이 역시 (...) 잘못이다. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of the moral status of non-human animals, or the question whether sentient animals are morally considerable. The arguments for and against the moral status of animals are discussed, above all the argument from marginal cases. It is argued that sentient animals have moral status based on their having interests in their experiential well-being, but that there are degrees of moral status. Two interest-based approaches are presented and discussed: DeGrazia’s view that sentient (...) animals have interests in continuing to live, and that their interests should be granted moral weight; and McMahan’s TRIA which similarly postulates that animals have interests and that in a given situation we should compare the human and animal interests at stake. Finally, the paper concludes that the anthropocentric approach to animal ethics should be abandoned in favour of the biocentric ethics. (shrink)

The new classical natural law theorists have been decidedly skeptical about claims that non-human animals deserve serious moral consideration. Their theory features an array of incommensurable, nonfungible basic aspects of welfare and a set of principles governing participation in and pursuit of these goods. Attacks on animals’ interests seem to be inconsistent with one or more of these principles. But leading natural law theorists maintain that animals do not participate in basic aspects of well being in ways that merit protection, (...) that the so-called “argument from marginal cases” is unsuccessful as a basis for claims that animals have moral standing, and that affirming that animals have rights leaves one with no basis for maintaining that humans do as well. In response, I suggest that animals can be understood to participate in some aspects of well being, defend the argument from marginal cases, and offer reasons why we might believe that affirming that animals have rights does not undermine the claim that humans have rights. (shrink)

In this paper I run a 'marginal cases' type argument against Machan's claim that moral agents ought to be able to use animals.

This paper addresses the issue of the legal status of non-human animals and the possibility of changing it from the status of things or property to the status of non-things, or better, sentient beings. Key arguments for the change of their status are discussed, including the argument from marginal cases, as well as scientific evidence indicating that many animals are sentient beings. Two ways of initiating such changes seem most promising: legislation, i.e. modification of the (...) civil codes, and litigation, i.e. filing lawsuits on behalf of individual animals. It is argued that legislative changes are necessary for moving animals out of the legal category of things and into the category of sentient beings that can bear rights. On the other hand, litigation could bring about more radical change of the legal status of some animals. (shrink)

I argue that the equal rights views of Tom Regan and Evelyn B. Pluhar must be rejected because they have unacceptable consequences. My objection is similar to one made in the literature by Mary Anne Warren, but I develop it in more detail and defend it from several plausible responses that an equal rights theorist might make. I formulate a theory, a moderate form of perfectionism, that makes a valuedistinction between moral agents and moral patients according to which although (...) both have rights, these rights are not equal. This theory avoids the unacceptable consequences of the equal rights view and is immune to the marginal cases arguments that typical full-personhood theories succumb to. This moderate perfectionism generates an obligation for people to be vegetarians (in most cases) and to severely curtail animal experimentation. (shrink)

This article offers a brief overview of the argument for God's existence grounded in the evidence of design. It gives particular attention to the way the argument has evolved over time and in relation to changing scientific perspectives. The argument from de‐sign has in fact been formulated and reformulated in response to the discoveries and challenges it has encountered from the field of science. The conclusion of the article explores the theological importance of this (...) class='Hi'>argument—its extent and its limits. (shrink)

Presenting a series of powerful arguments, Robert Garner proposes that animal rights must be considered within the discourse on justice. The book offers an ideal theory of animal rights as well as a more achievable nonideal theory which we must use to get to the ideal, rejecting an array of alternative positions. The work contains much that is of value to animal ethicists, such as a novel consideration of the argument from marginal cases, and much that (...) will be convincing for those political thinkers and ethicists not already convinced of the moral significance of nonhuman animals. The text occasionally falls into an unfortunate "us and them" dynamic, and practical considerations are, in places, underdeveloped. These shortcomings do not detract from the value of the work, and the book comes highly recommended: It is readable, rigorous and, most importantly, highly convincing. (shrink)

In the last decade, the study of moral heuristics has gained in importance. I argue that we can consider speciesism as a moral heuristic: an intuitive rule of thumb that substitutes a target attribute (that is difficult to detect, e.g. “having rationality”) for a heuristic attribute (that is easier to detect, e.g. “looking like a human being”). This speciesism heuristic misfires when applied to some atypical humans such as the mentally disabled, giving them rights although they lack rationality. But I (...) argue that it is not necessarily irrational or inconsistent to hold on to this heuristic rule, because we have to take time and knowledge constraints, uncertainty aversion and emotional costs into account. However, this “heuristic defense” of speciesism uses a target attribute (rationality) that has implications of disrespect towards some atypical humans. Therefore, based on notions of impartiality and compassion, I argue for a morally better target attribute: sentience (“having a sense of well-being”). “Being a vertebrate” is suitable as a corresponding heuristic attribute because it is easy to detect and has a strong correlation with the target attribute of sentience. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Goal and Scope of the Argument The Concept of a Miracle Textual Assumptions Background Facts: Death and Burial The Salient Facts: W, D, and P Probabilistic Cumulative Case Arguments: Nature and Structure The Testimony of the Women: Bayes Factor Analysis The Testimony of the Disciples: Bayes Factor Analysis The Conversion of Paul: Bayes Factor Analysis The Collective Force of the Salient Facts Independence Hume's Maxim and Worldview Worries Plantinga's Principle of Dwindling Probabilities Knavery, (...) Folly, and the Love of Wonder Conclusion References. (shrink)

The present article is the second one in a series and begins to spell out the case for the intrinsic kind of theory of consciousness4. According to such theory, a mental-occurrence instance is conscious4 on its own, that is, as a part of its own internal structure. Considered here are a prominent phenomenologist’s argument in favor of an intrinsic theory of consciousness4, and his conception of how such inner awareness occurs in the case of objectivating mental acts, which are (...) all conscious4 in his view. Every objectivating act is a mental-occurrence instance that includes outer awareness, that is, awareness of something lying externally to the act. Every objectivating act presents an object distinct from itself, conveys awareness of that object, and — allegedly as a mere by-product or concomitant — conveys awareness of itself. This article emphasizes the question of what property of outer awareness it is that necessarily, as has been claimed, brings along with it inner awareness of the respective objectivating act. Also, this article begins to argue that, in the very occurrence of any conscious4 objectivating act, inner awareness is "interwoven" with outer awareness. Inner awareness is a part of the "thematizing" activity of any conscious4 mental act, rather than being "marginal," that is, a merely implicit concomitant of the act. (shrink)

This article explores Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation thesis and examines the arguments against his work, particularly from certain moral philosophers in the late 1970s and 1980s who seriously engaged with his ideas. This article argues that due to the straightforward, minimalist nature of Singer’s preference utilitarianism, his arguments have remained highly defensible and persuasive. By advancing sentience, above characteristics like intelligence or rationality, as a sufficient criterion for possessing interests, Singer provides a justifiable principle for morally considering animal interests (...) equal to those of humans. Numerous moral philosophers have challenged Singer, but they have struggled to seriously counter his core principle and to resolve the argument of ‘marginal cases’—that is, why do infants and intellectually disabled humans have moral status and animals do not. Ultimately, Singer broadly challenged prevailing anthropocentric views of animals and, in some instances, persuaded some of his most intransigent opponents. (shrink)

There are two principles that lend Brouwer's mathematics the extra power beyond arithmetic. Both are presented in Brouwer's writings with little or no argument. One, the principle of bar induction, will not concern us here. The other, the continuity principle for numbers, occurs for the first time in print in [4]. It is formulated and immediately applied to show that the set of numerical choice sequences is not enumerable. In fact, the idea of the continuity property can be dated (...) fairly precisely, it is to be found in the margin of Brouwer's notes for his course on Pointset Theory of 1915/16. The course was repeated in 1916/17 and he must have inserted his first formulation of the continuity principle in the fall of 1916 as new material right at the beginning of the course.In modern language, the principle readswhere α and β range over choice sequences of natural numbers, m and x over natural numbers, and stands for ⟨α, α, …, α⟩, the initial segment of α of length m.An immediate consequence of WC-N is that all full functions are continuous, and, as a corollary, that the continuum is unsplittable [28]. Note that WC-N is incompatible with Church's thesis, [22], section 4.6.After Brouwer asserted WC-N, Troelstra was the first to ask in print for a conceptual motivation, but he remained an exception; most authors followed Brouwer by simply asserting it, cf. [18].Let us note first that in one particular case the principle is obvious indeed, namely in the case of the lawless sequences. The notion of lawless sequence surfaced fairly late in the history of intuitionism. Kreisel introduced it in [17] for metamathematical purposes. There is a letter from Brouwer to Heyting in which the phenomenon also occurs [7]. This is an important and interesting fact since it is the only time that Brouwer made use of a possibility expressly stipulated in, e.g., [5], see below. (shrink)

Definition: considering human beings to be of central importance; the source of value.

• A coin appears to be elliptical when looked at from an angle, but it’s round. • A stick appears to be bent when it is partly immersed in water, but it’s straight. • An oasis appears to exist, but it doesn’t. • A bucket of water appears to be two different temperatures to two different hands, but it’s all..

This article is an ethnographic account of the speculative thought of Jane Roberts, a spirit medium or “channel,” important in New Age religion for the books that she dictated at the behest of a personality named “Seth.” At first, she tried to understand her strange subjectivity in psychiatric terms, then went on to elaborate metaphysical concepts to account for it. The author argues that understanding Roberts's concepts in social historical terms risks obscuring their meaning and that comparing them with the (...) related concepts of a credentialed philosopher, in this case Gilles Deleuze, is a more effective way of approaching them. The latter sort of interpretation entails another risk, however, which is that concepts like those of Roberts may get taken for mere illustrations of the arguments made by academic philosophers, whereas marginal thinking of Roberts's kind can form sophisticated bodies of thought on their own. Roberts developed concepts of consciousness and the person that exceed, in ways that this article specifies, anything that Deleuze's work can say about them and thus cast his own arguments in an unanticipated light. This essay's main point is that uncredentialed, marginal thinkers like Roberts should be considered proper objects of both anthropological and philosophical study and should be taken seriously for what they can teach us. (shrink)

_Arguments from Ignorance _explores the situations in which the argument from ignorance functions as a respectable form of reasoning and those in which it is indeed fallacious. Douglas Walton draws on everyday conversations on all kinds of practical matters in which the _argumentum ad ignorantiam _is used quite appropriately to infer conclusions. He also discusses the inappropriate use of this kind of argument, referring to various major case studies, including the Salem witchcraft trials, the McCarthy hearings, (...) and the Alger Hiss case. This book makes an original contribution in the areas of argumentation theory and informal logic, contending that, despite its traditional classification as a fallacy, the argument from ignorance is a genuine, very common, and legitimate type of argumentation with an identifiable structure. But the book is also interdisciplinary in scope, explaining many widely interesting and controversial subjects in artificial intelligence, medical education, philosophy of science, and philosophy of law in a clear way that makes it accessible to a broad range of readers. (shrink)

Many people think that animal liberation would require a fundamental transformation of basic beliefs. We would have to give up "speciesism" and start viewing animals as our equals, with rights and moral status. And we would have to apply these beliefs in an all-or-nothing way. But in Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir makes the radical argument that animal liberation doesn't require such radical arguments--and that liberation could be accomplished in a flexible and pragmatic way. By making a case (...) for liberation that is based primarily on common moral intuitions and beliefs, and that therefore could attract wide understanding and support, Zamir attempts to change the terms of the liberation debate. Without defending it, Ethics and the Beast claims that speciesism is fully compatible with liberation. Even if we believe that we should favor humans when there is a pressing human need at stake, Zamir argues, that does not mean that we should allow marginal human interests to trump the life-or-death interests of animals. As minimalist as it sounds, this position generates a robust liberation program, including commitments not to eat animals, subject them to factory farming, or use them in medical research. Zamir also applies his arguments to some questions that tend to be overlooked in the liberation debate, such as whether using animals can be distinguished from exploiting them, whether liberationists should be moral vegetarians or vegans, and whether using animals for therapeutic purposes is morally blameless. (shrink)

Personal narratives can let us in on aspects of reality which we have not experienced for ourselves, and are thus important sources for philosophical reflection. Yet a venerable tradition in mainstream philosophy has little room for arguments which rely on personal narrative, on the grounds that narratives are particular and testimonial, whereas philosophical arguments should be systematic and transparent. I argue that narrative arguments are an important form of philosophical argument. Their testimonial aspects witness to novel facets of reality, (...) but their argumentative aspects help us to understand those facets for ourselves. My argument takes the form of a case study of the exemplary narrative argument penned by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who uses her experiences to argue that prostitution amounts to sexual abuse. We’ll see that narrative arguments can enjoy expository Advantages over analytic ones. (shrink)