To complete my argument: so far as we know, the only valuers are animals, and all animals are valuers. Therefore animals move to the center of what ethics is all about. The discussion of nonhuman animals turns out to be not some special issue of ‘applied ethics’, but rather part of ethics’ core (we human animals are the rest of it). I would say, then, that ethics is animal ethics.
Writes Joel Marks, Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut.
