ABSTRACT
The issue of animal rights has been a matter of intellectual debate and theoretical reflection within the Anglo Saxon Utilitarian school of thought since the Australian philosopher Peter Singer published his pioneering work Animal Liberation in 1976. One of the central theses of this book is a rationally argued attribution of a moral status to non-human animals, based on Singer’s ethical principle “of equal consideration of interests”. From this egalitarian, non species-limited principle, Singer extends the self interest in not being subjected to physical suffering to all sentient creatures. The ethical thought of Singer thus provides a logical ground for the choice of a vegetarian diet based on the application of morals to animal life. In a way, the relative originality and consistency of Singer’s theoretical contribution lies in a long, albeit marginal, intellectual tradition in Western culture which pleads for a morally based vegetarianism. In the light of this underground cultural tradition, this paper will discuss the issue of animal rights and analyze, from a philosophical perspective, its narrative appropriation in two Portuguese morally-oriented vegetarian literary utopias of the first quarter of the twentieth century, Irmânia by Angelo Jorge and Redemption by Amilcar de Sousa.
