Animal ethics around the turn of the twenty-first century.

A couple of decades after becoming a major area of both public and philosophical concern, animal ethics continues its inroads into mainstream consciousness. Increasingly, philosophers, ethicists, professionals who use animals, and the broader public confront specific ethical issues regarding human use of animals as well as more fundamental questions about animals’ moral status. A parallel, related development is the explosion of interest in animals’ mental lives, as seen in exciting new work in cognitive ethology1 and in the plethora of movies, television commercials, and popular books featuring apparently intelligent animals. As we approach the turn of the twenty-first century, philosophical animal ethics is an area of both increasing diversity and unrealized potential – a thesis supported by this essay as a whole. Following up on an earlier philosophical review of animal ethics (but without that review’s focus on animal research),2 the present article provides an updated narrative – one that offers some perspective on where we have been, a more detailed account of where we are, and a projection of where we might go. Each of the three major sections offers material that one is unlikely to find in other reviews of animal ethics: the first by viewing familiar territory in a different light (advancing the thesis that the utility-versus-rights debate in animal ethics is much less important than is generally thought); the second by reviewing major recent works that are not very well-known (at least