This essay places in dialogue the work of Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher of animal liberation, and Patricia Highsmith, whose fiction of the early s takes a curious interest in the topic of animal welfare.
My argument will partly be that animals enter the ethical stage for Singer at a moment when utilitarianism comes under fire from a contract ethics that Singer rejects on the assumption that such ethics cannot be reconciled with our obligations to non-contractual creatures to whom we nonetheless owe consideration.
For this reason, I argue, Singer has proved especially unwelcome among scholars of contemporary animal studies who insist that what matters in animal-human relations is an ethics of reciprocity. Highsmith's A Dog's Ransom and The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder set in play a contest between utility and contract in regard to human-animal relations, and arrive at conclusions that look awfully close to Singer's.
By way of her interest in animals as the subjects and objects of brute violence, Highsmith also allows us a novel vantage on the fascination among contemporary ethicists with fictive scenarios, not unlike the novelist's own, in which the crucial issue is whether the killing of other people is permissible or blameworthy. In this section, I consider the vexing role Singer occupies among contemporary theorists of what Kari Weil calls "the animal turn.
In the essay's final section, I connect the murder weapon in Highsmith's most politicized animal story β a pulled lever in "The Day of Reckoning," which focuses on battery-farmed chickens β to the pervasive interest among many philosophers in the seeming non-agency, and dramatic outcomes, of actions like button-pushing.
