Expanding Our Compassion: More to explore

[EA Handbook]

Animal welfare

• All Animals Are Equal

  • The opening chapter of Animal Liberation (1975), widely regarded as the founding text of the animal rights movement. (25 mins.)

• Dominion

  • Dominion uses drones and hidden cameras to expose the dark side of modern animal agriculture. (Film − 2 hours)

• The Importance of Wild Animal Suffering

  • An argument for us to consider the well-being of animals that live in the wild. (40 mins.)

• The wild frontier of animal welfare

  • A profile of Wild Animal Initiative, which does research on ways we could reduce the suffering of wild animals. (25 mins.)

• 2017 Report on Consciousness and Moral Patienthood

  • An investigation into what types of beings merit moral concern. (6 hours, can be skimmed)

• Food Impacts

  • A tool that shows the effects of diet changes on animal welfare.

  • See also ethical.diet, which offers different features (but hasn’t been updated with new data since 2017).

Lessons from history

• Key Lessons From Social Movement History

  • Lessons from a series of posts about how different social movements successfully (or unsuccessfully) pushed for moral circle expansion. (2 hours)

• The Narrowing Circle (see here for summary and discussion)

  • An argument that the “expanding circle” historical thesis ignores instances in which modern ethics narrowed the set of beings to be morally regarded, often backing its exclusion by asserting their non-existence. (30 mins.)

• The Subjection of Women

  • An essay published in 1869 by John Stuart Mill (with assistance from Harriet Taylor Mill), arguing for equality between men and women. (10 mins.)

• The Better Angels of Our Nature

  • Illustrates why we live in the most peaceful time ever in history, by looking at what motivates us to behave violently, how these motivators are outweighed by our tendencies towards a peaceful life and which major shifts in history caused this global reduction in violence. (Book — 834 pages)