Within the field of ethics concern for anything other than humans was very late in coming. Apart from occasional mentions of, for example, kindness to a companion animal developing a propensity for kindness towards humans, or the statement in Bentham that what mattered was suffering, not what kind of being was doing the suffering, humans appeared to be the only entities worthy of ethical concern. Even Bentham's radical suggestion from 1789 was made only in a footnote (Fox, 2006: 286), and its implications were not properly explored until Singer's ground-breaking 1975 text Animal Liberation. However, outside formal philosophical ethical thinking, in religious texts or works of fiction, kindness towards animals or care for a natural environment was sometimes expressed. Of course, many counterexamples from such sources can also be found that promote a cultural attitude of seeing animals and land as resources to be used in any way we please. An achievement of the animal welfare and environmental movements has been the growing shift in attitudes in many parts of the world to consider entities other than ourselves as worthy of moral concern.
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