Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
Selected articles published in peer-reviewed journals.
Journal for Critical Animal Studies, which used to be called Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal, is available free on-line, so those articles are linked to here. This great accessibility is why I chose that journal as a first and only try, so that certain essays can be used by activists as well as scholars. Other journals have rights to my articles but I have provided links so that you can order the essays if desired.
A Living Will Clause for Supporters of Animal Experimentation
Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (May 2006): 173-189. Utilitarian-style defenders of medical vivisection claim that animals are mental inferiors and so should be vivisected. In a Jonathan-Swift-style parody, these thinkers are challenged to squirm their way out of signing a living will to the effect that they themselves should be vivisected should they have an accident, injury, or what-have-you that makes their mental capabilties comparable to that of a laboratory animal. Keep in mind that it is far more useful to experiment on humans. A short version of this article is available here.
David Sztybel PhD
Animal Absolutes: Liberation Sociology's Missing Links
Part 2 of 2. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 8 (1/2) (2010): 126-175. This paper stakes out the radical claim that ethics can be conducted using the scientific method of evaluating evidence pro and con various hypotheses, and showing that a rigorous system of justification can be constructed. Advantages over the traditional relativist and other intuitionist approaches of sociologists are clarified. Although skepticism in ethics is a popular idea in theoretical circles, does it merely amount to a series of objections that are readily answerable by best caring? Dr. Richard White, editor of the journal, praises the article as “exceptionally well crafted and meticulously argued...skillfully develops a persuasive case that normative ethics...contrary to popular opinion, can indeed be 'scientific.' This rigorous discussion draws on a characteristically wide range of disciplines and ideas..."
David Sztybel PhD
Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism
Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-35. This article tackles head-on Gary Francione's attempt to drive a wedge between the animal rights and animal welfare movements. Is legislation that merely reduces suffering unethical or ineffective for animal rightists to advocate for the short-term? Not necessarily, or so I argue. Also available as a short version.
David Sztybel PhD
Animal Rights: Autonomy and Redundancy
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 14 (3) (2001): 259-273. Some thinkers believe than we can ascribe moral and/or legal rights to protect humans but that it would be redundant and somehow undesirable to assign such rights to nonhuman animals. I express my grounds for disagreeing with such views.
David Sztybel PhD
Can the Treatment of Nonhuman Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?
Ethics and the Environment 11 (Spring 2006): 97-132. Offers the most detailed comparison yet, in 39 respects, which holds regardless as to whether one believes that animals are oppressed. Answers key objections, including: Is the comparison morally objectionable? Does it "trivialize" the Holocaust? Available also as a photoessay.
David Sztybel PhD
Marxism and Animal Rights
Ethics and the Environment 2 (Fall 1997): 169-85. Marxism virtually entails animal rights.
David Sztybel PhD
Normative Sociology: the Intuitionist Crisis and Animals as Absent Referents
Part 1 of 2. Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7 (2) (2009): 83-127. Can we articulate a normative sociology that defends values and principles such as liberation? I argue in the affirmative, pointing out that we can also observe that nonhuman animals are “absent referents” in the history of by far most sociology. This first part takes a critical look at the existing literature, covering all major schools of sociology and other important thinkers. Dr.Richard White, editor of the issue in which Part I appears, writes that I employ "... a series of wonderfully clear, critical and persuasive lines of argument that address an extremely wide and broad literature."
David Sztybel PhD
Should animal rightists only argue animal rights?
Sztybel decisively destroys Dr. Katherine Perlo's arguments in the affirmative.
Dr. Katherine Perlo and Dr. David Sztybel
Taking Humanism Seriously: 'Obligatory' Anthropocentrism
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 3/4 (2000): 181-203. Outlines what L. W. Sumner, Evelyn B. Pluhar, and Michael Allen Fox consider to be the strongest version of human-centred ethics. Seems argumentatively stronger than existing animal liberation theories.
David Sztybel PhD
The Rights of Animal Persons
Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 4 (1) (2006): 1-37. This essay addresses important questions including: (1) If thinkers discriminate against animals on the basis of, say, rationality rather than species, are they still speciesists? (2) Does speciesism exist? (3) Do traditional animal rights theories or the ethics of care or utilitarianism provide adequate animal liberation ethics as each claims? (4) Is traditional treatment of animals best characterized as "animal welfare" or "animal illfare"? (5) Can a new approach, the best caring ethics theory of rights, provide a better basis for animal liberation ethics which reflects the strengths of competing views in ethics but not their weaknesses? (6) Should all sentient beings be granted legal personhood? (7) Is Peter Singer's utilitarianism truly a form of animal liberation, and is it in fact speciesist contrary to its intent? Also available as a short version.
David Sztybel PhD
