Fellow Creatures

Nathan Nobis, society & animals ...this book contributes to a new era for animals, based on yet another firm moral foundation.

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Aeon a clear statement by someone who has spent much of her life working on these themes, continually trying to strip away inessential details that might prevent us getting to the heart of the matter

Toby Svoboda, Environmental Values an interesting, well-argued book. It should be read by any philosopher who works on animal ethics.

Mark H. Bernstein, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "Christine Korsgaard has written an admirable book, accessible, cogently-argued, and thoughtful. She writes with bravery and humility, and perhaps most notably, with passion. It is evident that Korsgaard cares about the plight of animals, and yet the work is void of mawkish sentimentalism. All philosophers would benefit from a close reading; for any who are even remotely interested in animal ethics, reading Fellow Creatures is obligatory. . . . she is swimming against the tide. She is an outstanding swimmer, one of the most worthy animal advocates in the last half-century. . . . I strongly recommend reading this book. You and, I hope, your fellow creatures, will be better off for it."

CHOICE "[Korsgaard] is one of the preeminent contemporary scholars of Kantian moral theory, so this is a significant book that will need to be referenced by anyone working on these issues. It is a must have for any college or university library."

Todd May, New York Times "To be sure, nature itself is hardly a Valhalla of peace and harmony. Animals kill other animals regularly, often in ways that we (although not they) would consider cruel. But there is no other creature in nature whose predatory behavior is remotely as deep or as widespread as the behavior we display toward what the philosopher Christine Korsgaard aptly calls "our fellow creatures" in a sensitive book of the same name."

Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where she has taught since 1991. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. Before coming to teach at Harvard she held positions at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, and visiting positions at Berkeley and UCLA. She is the author of The Sources of Normativity (1996), Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996), The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology (2008), and Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (2009).

Part One: Human Beings and the Other Animals 1: Are People More Important than the Other Animals? 2: Animal Selves and the Good 3: What's Different about Being Human? 4: The Case Against Human Superiority Part Two: Immanuel Kant and the Animals 5: Kant, Marginal Cases, and Moral Standing 6: Kant Against the Animals, Part 1: The Indirect Duty View 7: Kant Against the Animals, Part 2: Reciprocity and the Grounds of Obligation 8: A Kantian Case for Our Obligations to the Other Animals 9: The Role of Pleasure and Pain Part Three: Consequences 10: The Animal Antinomy, Part 1: Creation Ethics 11: Species, Communities, and Habitat Loss 12: The Animal Antinomy, Part 2: Abolition and Apartheid