Introduction

What’s good for humans often conflicts with what’s good for animals. How should we navigate those conflicts? When we think seriously and systematically about that question, we’re on our way to doing animal ethics. This chapter introduces the idea of doing ethics, tackles some preliminaries about the language we use to discuss animals, and surveys the contents of the book. It also offers some insights into my approach to animal ethics. Ethics is hard, so it’s difficult to be confident about our conclusions. At the same time, the stakes are high, both for people and animals, so we have to be willing to draw some tentative conclusions.