Animal Welfare and the Economy of Kindness

This talk explores the natural and cultural limits on human kindness towards strangers and non-human animals. I suggest that humans have a deep natural capacity for kindness. However, the duties imposed by this capacity are highly demanding, so we use techniques of ethical avoidance to place limits on our responsibilities. Examples of such techniques include the creation of ethical blindspots and reliance on individual and cultural forms of rationalisation. These techniques play a central role in enabling humans to avoid confronting the suffering caused to animals by practices such as factory farming