Marc Bekoff;Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals
I would have a hard time recommending this book.
I would admit to a degree of prejudice against animal rights activist. I would place both authors in this generalized category. While I'm also in favor of animal rights the prejudice I have is against activist. We are all activist who campaigns for some kind of social change at some level. Unfortunately activism has come to be associated with single causes and often without regard to how the cause in question affect other important social issues. The reader should simply keep in mind that I tried to not let my prejudice influence my review.
Over all the book is more about philosophy than science and does a good job of laying the foundation for a philosophical justification for accepting that the word morality applies to non human animals. The authors also dispel a lot of the concern for anthropomorphism that scientist have. Unfortunately I don't think that many scientist will be persuaded by even sound philosophical arguments. From the point of view of anyone reading the book the attempt to synthesize science and philosophy is well done but it isn't entertaining. Scientist will find it unconvincing philosophers will find it over simplified and the general population boring. The people it will appeal to is anyone wanting to review the attempt at synthesizing two disciplines and I would recommend it to that group of readers.
My problem with the book can be summed up by examining one quote from the book.
“Darwinian theory, which has sent us looking instead for competition and unfettered aggression.”
The quote is in relationship to the widespread or ever prevalence of examples of cooperative and other non competitive social behaviors.
I find their assertion to be unfair to Darwin. Darwin because of his education and the time he lived in wrote in a style that reflected a philosophical mind-set. He simply would not have made the mistake they are accusing him of. The only way that the authors statement could be true is to ignore the larger context and apply it to social animals out of relationship to the general theory of biological evolution. The authors repeatedly try to convince the reader that we our prejudiced by a conspiracy of history to believe that nature is “bloody tooth and claw”. This is a gross oversimplification of what bloody tooth and claw actually means. Competition should never be considered solely as the direct competition between life forms but within the context of limited resources. Only in a world in which resources were infinite could competition not be the fundamental defining aspect of the relationship between life forms and that is the Darwinian context. That cooperation is more common than competition within in social structures should come as no surprise to an Evolutionary Biologist.