Description: Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species.
Brief description: Cynthia Willett (PhD, Philosophy, Penn State) is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, with affiliations in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Psychoanalytic Studies. She is the author of Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (Routledge, 1995), The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Cornell, 2001), Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom (Indiana, 2008), and Interspecies Ethics (Columbia, 2014) and the editor of Theorizing Multiculturalism (Blackwell, 1998).
Review Quotes: Filled with insight and humor, fascinating animal studies and profound philosophical speculations on the meaning of life and our place in it, Willett's Interspecies Ethics is a beautifully crafted testament to the need for interspecies ethics by considering what she calls "communitarian cohabitation." Bringing together classical philosophy, contemporary Continental Philosophy, literature, psychology, zoology, and animal studies, Willett weaves a captivating tale of human-animal relationships that takes us well beyond human domination and towards interspecies community. This may be as important a paradigm shift in animal studies as Peter Singer's animal liberation or Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the category "Animal."--Kelly Oliver, author of Animal Lessons: How They Teach us to be Human, and Earth and World