Hugur - 01.01.2018, Page 110

110 Jón Ásgeir Kalmansson
two main sources: J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Lives of Animals and Cora Diamond’s
various writings on animal ethics. I begin by an account of The Lives of Animals
and discuss why it might not be accurate to describe the book as “an ethical
discussion” of the treatment of animals. Next I outline some features of what
may be called a typical philosophical approach to animal ethics, and point to
several aspects of Coetzee’s book that may be seen to undermine such approach.
To illuminate further the basis for such doubts about common philosophical
approaches in animal ethics I make use of Cora Diamond’s seminal discussion of
The Lives of Animals, and, in particular, her concept of “the difficulty of reality”.
Diamond argues that philosophers, in their theorizing about the moral standing
of animals, tend to bypass or deflect from certain difficult or disturbing human
encounters with the world that can have great bearing on our moral thought
and understanding. I also discuss her claim that philosophers tend to base their
ethical theories on the possession of certain properties, such as rationality or
sentience, and thus to disregard the importance of being human, i.e. the concept
of humanity. I conclude by considering what alternatives to a traditional philo-
sophical approach to animals can be gathered from The Lives of Animals. Here
I pay special attention to the prominence of the body in the novel, and how
deep acknowledgment of our bodily life is shown to give rise to kind-ness, i.e.
our sympathetic and imaginative identification with our fellow travelers in the
animal kingdom.
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