The Animal Rights/ Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective

Collects key historical essays on the debate between animal rights and environmental ethics, tracing their development and exploring attempts to reconcile the moral value of individual animals with that of species and ecosystems.

Can the moral claims of individual animals be reconciled with the value of entire ecosystems, or are these two visions of ethics ultimately in conflict?

The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate brings together the most important original writings in the debate between Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics, presenting the intellectual history of a foundational dispute in contemporary moral philosophy. Organized around key texts by leading thinkers, the collection reveals how the disagreement has developed, sharpened, and in some cases converged over time.

From questions of sentience and species value to the moral standing of ecosystems and even extraterrestrial life, the essays map the central arguments that have shaped the field. Together, they offer both a critical archive of foundational work and a pathway toward possible reconciliation.

Designed for accessibility as well as depth, the book is suitable for students encountering environmental ethics for the first time, while also serving as a valuable resource for advanced scholars. It functions equally well as a textbook and as a reference for research and classroom discussion.

Eugene C. Hargrove is Editor of Environmental Ethics and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas, Denton.