Fluent, challenging lectures on the ethics that shape the human-animal relationship, from South African novelist and essayist Coetzee (The Master of Petersburg, 1994, etc.). Princeton's Tanner Lectures are usually philosophical essays exploring human values. Here Coetzee subverts that formula by shaping his talks into fictional lectures given by an elderly novelist, Elizabeth Costello, on ``an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of'': our treatment of animals.
Utilising literature as a serious source of challenges to questions in philosophy and law, this book provides a fresh perspective upon the creation of moral and legal personhood. The interdisciplinary network creates fresh approaches to issues such as the 'reasonable man', provocation, rape, treason, abortion, and the social contract. Individual theorists such as John Finnis, Ronald Dworkin, Judith Jarvis Thomson and Christine Korsgaard are juxtaposed with philosophically linked texts by writers such as J.G. Ballard, J.M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Thomas Hardy.
