ABSTRACT
Some thirty years back, when both these causes first became prominent in our lives, they were often seen as clashing. Extreme ‘deep ecologists’ tended then to emphasise the value of the whole so exclusively as to reject all concern for the interest of its parts, and especially for the interests of individuals.1 This went for individual animals as well as humans. On the other side, extreme ‘animal liberationists’, for their part, were busy extending the very demanding current conception of individual human rights to cover individual animals.2 That did seem to mean that animal claims – indeed, the claim of any single animal – must always prevail over every other claim, however strong, including claims from the environment. Each party tended to see only its own central ideal, and to look on the other’s concern as a perverse distraction from it. This is a typical case where a particular myth, expressing a particular vision, impresses some people so deeply as to fill the whole moral scene.
