Contributions of Ethology to the Birth of a Post-Anthropocentric Ethics

From the time of Aristotle until the first half of the twentieth century, with rare exceptions, the Western tradition has excluded non-human animals from the community of beings worthy of an ethical consideration, assigning them the role of “animated tools” of the human will (Aristotle, Politics: 1254 b 10). Only from the 1960s did an anti-speciesist, post-anthropocentric, bio-centric ethics begin to spread. This chapter documents the role played in promoting this ethical revolution by ethological research, the important discoveries it has led to and the changes in perspective they generated. What these pages are trying to focus on is, therefore, the link between the scientific revolutions introduced by ethology (daughters of the Darwinian revolutions), with its various stages and articulations, and an ethical revolution: that of contemporary anti-speciesism.