Morality's Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature

Morality's Progress is the summation of nearly three decades of work by Dale Jamieson, a leading figure in environmental ethics and bioethics. The twenty-two papers here are invigoratingly diverse, but together tell a unified story about various aspects of the morality of our relationships to animals and to nature. The volume begins by addressing the possibility of moral progress and the value of practical ethics. It then moves on to discuss the nature of animal minds, and our moral duties with respect to animals; it concludes with essays that address larger environmental questions. Considered as a whole, Morality's Progress is an attempt to draw out the moral consequences of a thoroughgoing Darwinian Naturalism. The perspective that informs this work is philosophically naturalist, morally consequentialist, and metaethically constructivist. Jamieson's essays will convince sceptics that thinking about our moral relations to animals and nature can offer great intellectual reward, and his work here sets a challenging, controversial agenda for the future.