Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics

Neil Dalal is Assistant Professor of South Asian Philosophy and Religious Thought in the Philosophy Department and Religious Studies Program at the University of Alberta, Canada. He holds a PhD from the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Chloë Taylor is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Tomlinson postdoctoral fellow in Philosophy at McGill University.

Introduction Part 1: Compassion and Nonviolence 1. Being Sentiently with Others: The Shared Existential Trajectory among Humans and Nonhumans in Jainism 2. Animal Compassion: What the Jatakas Teach Levinas About Giving ‘the Bread from One’s Own Mouth’ Part 2: Humanism and Posthumanism 3. China’s Confucian Horses: The Place of Nonhuman Animals in a Confucian World Order 4. Heidegger and Zhuangzi on the Nonhuman: Towards a Transcultural Critique of (Post)humanism Part 3: Moral Rights and Status of Nonhuman Animals 5. The Argument for Ahiṃsā in the Anuśāsanaparvan of the Mahābhārata 6. Cutting the Cat in One: Zen Master Dōgen on the Moral Status of Non-Human Animals 7. Non-human animals and the Question of Rights from Asian Perspectives Part 4: Special Relations—Bovine Dharma and Snake Worship 8. Bovine Dharma: Non-human animals in the Swadhyaya Parivar 9. Snakes in the Dark Age: Human Action, Karmic Retribution, and the Possibilities for Hindu Animal Ethics