Catholic Moral Theology and the Moral Status of Non-Human Animals
John Berkman and Celia Deane-Drummond
HIS ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL OF MORAL THEOLOGY features a collection of essays with an approach to a topic you’ve never read about in book or journal form. That is because there has never been a collection of academic essays entirely from the perspective of Catholic moral theology on this particular topic. And what is this topic ? Morality and non-human animals. More specifically, it is about, for example, particular elephants, chimpanzees, dogs, dolphins, hyenas, pigs, cats and hominids, and also all these animals (and others) as members of a particular species not simply as objects for human moral concern, but rather, as moral subjects.
2 This collection features essays about these elephants, chimpanzees, dolphins, etc. as God’s creatures worthy of being subjects (not merely objects) of moral concern. And it also features essays about higher non-human animals as potentially (or actually) moral agents whose intellectual and/or moral capacities are worthy of significant and sustained reflection and analysis.
