Brute Ethics – The Animal Ethics Encyclopedia
http://www.animalethics.org.uk/aec-1-entries.html
- Animal Ethics
If you methodically question the meaning and purpose of life you are a philosopher, whether amateur or professional. Ethics is the part of philosophy that asks how people should live their lives and how they should do good and right to others. Animal ethics is the bit of ethics that deals specifically with animals: understanding animal-human moral issues through knowledge and reasoning and acting for the moral good. Thus animal ethics is a practical as well as a cognitive pursuit. In his book Animal Ethics (2005:12) Robert Garner says, "Animal ethics seeks to examine beliefs that are held about the moral status of non-human animals."
An ethical issue is when you think a harm or wrong is happening and something should be done about it. If we harm people then we must justify why we harm them and if we cannot justify our actions then we must not harm them. In the same way, animal ethics critically questions our conduct with animals. Everyone has some contact with animals directly or indirectly, whether farming or shooting animals, eating them, or feeding their pets factory farmed chicken and other animals, going to the zoo, using substances tested on animals or washing themselves with animal-based soap.
QUOTE
Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most people take for granted
is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and it is this task that makes
philosophy a worthwhile activity. Peter Singer (1986:226): Applied Ethics.