ABSTRACT
Cora Diamond’s use of quotation marks around “how we should treat animals” and “ethical issue” is also worth comment. If eating the flesh of animals is unthinkable, given what animals are and what we are, then whether we ought to eat their flesh, or whether it would be morally wrong to do so, are not real questions. Wild animals’ lives are separate from ours and we encounter them as something like objects, but they are objects with interesting features. Diamond writes: In the case of our relationship with animals, a sense of the difficulty of reality may involve not only the kind of horror felt by Elizabeth Costello in John Coetzee’s lectures, but also and equally a sense of astonishment and incomprehension that there should be beings so like us, so unlike us, so astonishingly capable of being companions of ours and so unfathomably distant.
