Abstract
If the words in this book were divided according to the relative mass of human and nonhuman creatures in the universe, not one would be allocated to humans. If we made the book longer, say equal to the combined length of all the books that have ever been published, we still could not allocate a single word to humans on this basis. We would need to increase the number of books by seven octillion times—seven followed by twenty-seven zeroes, or six orders of magnitude more than all the grains of sand on earth—before the human fraction of the universe justified a single word. If we restricted our interest to living creatures, things would be very different: on the basis of comparing human biomass with that of all living creatures on earth, humans would be entitled to twenty-two of the roughly two hundred thousand words in this book. If we were interested only in Christian ethics in relation to animals, we would be justified in allocating to humans a short six-thousand-word chapter....
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics |
| Editors | Tobias Winright |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury T&T Clark |
| Pages | 419–426 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-0-5676-7718-1, 978-0-5676-7719-8 , 978-0-5676-7720-4 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-0-5676-7717-4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2021 |