A Man and a Dog in a Lifeboat: Self-Sacrifice, Animals, and the Limits of Ethical Theory

C. Bailey

DOI:10.2979/ETE.2009.14.1.129

Corpus ID: 144689102

A Man and a Dog in a Lifeboat: Self-Sacrifice, Animals, and the Limits of Ethical Theory

@article{Bailey2009AMA,
  title={A Man and a Dog in a Lifeboat: Self-Sacrifice, Animals, and the Limits of Ethical Theory},
  author={C. Bailey},
  journal={Ethics & the Environment},
  year={2009},
  volume={14},
  pages={129 - 148}
}

C. Bailey

Published 2009

Sociology

Ethics & the Environment

In discussions of animal ethics, hypothetical scenarios are often used to try to force the clarification of intuitions about the relative value of human and animal life. Tom Regan requests, for example, that we imagine a man and a dog adrift in a lifeboat while Peter Singer explains why the life of one's child ought to be preferred to that of the family dog in the event of a house fire. I argue that such scenarios are not the usefully abstract analytic tools they purport to be, but indirectly… CONTINUE READING

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