Veterinarians serve on the front lines working to prevent animal suffering and abuse. For centuries, their compassion and expertise have improved the quality of life and death for animals in their care. However, modern interest in animal rights has led more and more people to ask questions about the ethical considerations that lie behind common veterinary practices. This Common Threads volume, drawn from articles originally published in the Journal of Animal Ethics (JAE), offers v...

This book begins with versions of the ethic of care and the ethic of justice. It argues that the ethic of care reveals important problems with the concept of autonomy, but that these problems are not present in all versions of autonomy.

'A landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself' The New York TimesWhy can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as 'fairness' and 'freedom' mean such different things to different people? Why is it so hard to see things from another viewpoint? Why do we come to blows over politics and religion?Jonathan Haidt reveals that we often find it hard to get along because o...

How our collective intelligence has helped us to evolve and prosperHumans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse ...

Do animals have moral rights? If so, what does this mean? What sorts of mental lives do animals have, and how should we understand welfare? By presenting models for understanding animals' moral status and rights, and examining their mental lives and welfare, David DeGrazia explores the implications for how we should treat animals in connection with our diet, zoos, and research. Animal Rights distinguishes itself by combining intellectual rigour with accessibility, offering a disti...

A book that challenges common misconceptions about the nature of intelligenceSatoshi Kanazawa's Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters (written with Alan S. Miller) was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a rollicking bit of pop science that turns the lens of evolutionary psychology on issues of the day." That book answered such burning questions as why women tend to lust after males who already have mates and why newborns look more like Dad tha...

A bold and beautifully written inquiry into the intertwined struggles for animal and disability justice—challenging what it means to be humanIn this provocative and original work, artist, activist, and scholar Sunaura Taylor, “Judith Butler meets St. Francis of Assisi” (The New Yorker), explores the profound connections between animal liberation and disability justice. With keen insight and lyrical prose, Beasts of Burden asks us to reconsider lon...

Human social life is constrained and defined by our cognitive and emotional dispositions, which are the legacy of our foraging ancestors. But how difficult is it to reconstruct the social systems and cultural traditions of those ancestors?The Archaeology of Human Ancestry provides a stimulating and provocative answer, in which archaeologists and biological anthropologists set out and demonstrate their reconstructive methods. Contributors use observations of primates and mod...

Winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, American Psychological AssociationWinner of a PROSE Award, Association of American PublishersShortlist, Cognitive Development Society Book AwardA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearA Natural History of Human Morality offers the most detailed account to date of the evolution of human moral psychology. Based on extensive experimental data comparing great apes and hum...

A scientist integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies."There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature." Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book.Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychol...

Friends-they are generous and cooperative with each other in ways that appear to defy standard evolutionary expectations, frequently sacrificing for one another without concern for past behaviors or future consequences. In this fascinating multidisciplinary study, Daniel J. Hruschka synthesizes an array of cross-cultural, experimental, and ethnographic data to understand the broad meaning of friendship, how it develops, how it interfaces with kinship and romantic relationships, and how it ...

Why do we consider incest wrong, even when it occurs between consenting adults unable to have children? Why are words that gross us out more likely to be deemed "obscene" and denied the protection of the First Amendment? In a world where a gruesome photograph can decisively influence a jury and homosexual behavior is still condemned by some as "unnatural," it is worth asking: is our legal system really governed by the power of reason? Or do we allow a primitive human emotion, disgust, to g...