Peter Singer's animal ethics. An introduction and an evaluation

Fifty years after the publication of Animal Liberation (1975), a text that revolutionized our relationship with non-human sentient beings, this book reconstructs Peter Singer's animal ethics from its theoretical presuppositions to its practical consequences, seeking to provide an overall assessment. While highlighting some limitations in the Australian philosopher's consequentialist approach, the volume emphasizes the broad merits of Singer's reflection, which, with his penetrating arguments, has paved the way for a irreversible inclusion of non-human animals in the community of moral patients and for a consideration of their interests that extends a principle of equality beyond the narrow confines of the human species, marking a point of no return. Moreover, within the panorama of contemporary animal ethics, Singer's position appears balanced. Because if he rejects as inadequate those overly moderate models that attribute consideration only to the suffering of animals and not to their lives, he also rejects extreme, overly radical versions that do not allow for distinctions in the harm caused by death, failing to consider the weight of mental complexity in attributing value to sentient life.