Volume 13, Issue 2, June 2000

Ecotheologians and systematic theologians within the various Christian traditions have explored environmental problems. However, there has been little work by Christian ethicists from within the Roman Catholic tradition to develop an ethic of animals. This article remedies this defect. Taking up and developing a line of ethical reflection upon animals which Aquinas derived from the Roman jurist Ulpian, it proposes an alternative to Peter Singer’s animal ethic, which it finds unsatisfactory on several accounts.