Lori Gruen

I’ve been involved in animal issues as both a scholar and an activist. Peter Singer and I wrote a popular book together in the mid-1980s called Animal Liberation: A Graphic Guide (London:  Camden Press).

I’ve written a couple of reference pieces about the moral status of animals, including one here. I was a guest “Philosophy Talk” to discuss animal ethics. And my book Ethics and Animals is out from Cambridge University Press.

I’ve combined my thinking about human relations to animals with my feminist commitments in a number of publications, for example:

• “Dismantling Oppression:  An Analysis of the Connection between Women and Animals” in G. Gaard  (ed.), Ecofeminism:  Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993)

• “Animals, Intimacy, and Moral Distance” co-authored with Chris Cuomo in A. Bar On & A. Ferguson (eds). Daring to be Good (NY:  Routledge, 1997)

• “Empathy and Vegetarian Commitments” in S. Sapontzis (ed.)  Food for Thought:  The Debate over Eating Meat (NY:  Prometheus Press, 2004)  reprinted in C. Adams & J. Donovan The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (NY: Columbia, 2007)

• “The Faces of Animal Oppression” in A. Ferguson and M. Nagel (eds.) Dancing with Iris: Between Phenomenology and the Body Politic in the Political Philosophy of Iris Marion Young (NY: Oxford University Press, 2009).

•”Attending to Nature,” Ethics and the Environment 14(2) 2009.

I’ve been exploring the possibility that animals themselves have ethical capacities.  I had been thinking about this possibility in the abstract for some time and often included the topic in my courses on Animal Minds and Primate Ethics, Primate Minds, but it wasn’t until I met a group of very special chimpanzees that I was able to think systematically about what it would mean for a non-linguistic animal to follow norms, display altruism, act empathetically, and the like.  I’ve been writing about these and other issues in another book that explores human relations to captive chimpanzees.  Here is some of the historical and artistic work that emerged from my research:

First100chimps.wesleyan.edu
Chimpanzees.wesleyan.edu

To learn more about the special chimpanzees that are my intellectual inspiration, click here: