Two Announcements

I have two announcements.

First, the title of my book, now due out in October, is a secret no longer, nor is the name of my publisher. My book is announced on the website of Palgrave Macmillan (one of the most prestigious academic book publishers) dedicated to a new book series by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. The title is: Universal Animal Rights: Winning the Ethical Debate.

Second, Part 2 of my essays on animals an normative sociology has been published. This essay has some special features:

1. The first ethical system ever truly to use the scientific method of gathering evidence for hypotheses, or so I argue. Best caring is given its most rigorous defence yet in print (the book will of course offer considerably more).
   
2. A very extensive critique of intuitionism (although the book goes further). Any ethic that relies on intuitionism is propaganda, or exploiting what people already believe. For example, Francione propagandizes that we ought to avoid unnecessary suffering, as countless laws state. However, this approach does nothing to justify this principle, making it propaganda, or comfortably getting people to extend what they already happen to believe IF the audience agrees. In fact, one of the overarching goals of philosophy is to justify beliefs, not play on them, as the form of propaganda persuasion goes. Of course the intuitionist approach can rationally leverage nothing against competing intuitions of other theories. This is a particularly apt example since Francione prejudicially appeals to an animal rights sense of "unnecessary suffering." He ignores the traditional, different sense of that phrase (see my blog entry for July 28, 2007). It is as though he is playing "peek-a-boo" and only sees the animal rights sense, covering his eyes against the other sense (recall his claim, cited in the earlier blog entry, that animal exploitation is unnecesary suffering in whatever sense one uses the phrase in question).
   
3. A hint of how I go about the task of answering skepticism in ethics; most animal ethics people do not even tackle this fundamental issue.
   
4. Showing how sociology can be done powered by a liberationist ethic.
   

Enjoy, and peace be with you!