ISSN: 2641-9130
Authors: Chakraborty S*
Animals, the beautiful creatures of God in the Stoic and especially in Porphyry’s sense, need to be treated as rational. We know that the Stoics ask for justice to all rational beings, but I think there is no significant proclamation from their side that openly talks in favour of animal’s justice. They claim about the rationality of animals but do not confer any right to human beings. The later Neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry magnificently deciphers this idea in his writing On Abstinence from Animal Food. Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus thinks that both animals and humans are made up of same tissues and like human, animals also has the same way of perception, reasoning and appetites. My next effort would be to decipher how Porphyry illustrates Theophrastus’ perspective not in the way (the technical theory of justice) the Stoics argued. Porphyry’s stance seems more humanistic that looks for the pertinent reasons for treating animal rights from the contention of justice that Aristotle in his early writings defied since the animals can deal with reasons. The paper highlights on how much we could justificatorily demand the empathetic concern for animals from the outlook of the mentioned Greek thinkers and the modern animal rights thinkers as quasi-right of animals, even if my own position undertakes the empathetic ground for animals as an undeserving humanitarian way.
Keywords: Animal rights; Porphyry; Singer; Anti-speciesist argument; One-of-us-ness; Empathy
