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second-order desires that involve desiring that ourselves and others have cer-tain first-order desires, the ideal desires that emerge from the refinementprocess approaches agent-neutrality as each member of the communityadjusts his or her own desires in light of those belonging to other membersof the community. In one of the most inspired stretches of Oddie’s text, thismodel is put to work to show how the presence of even a single egoist, whosesecond-order desires concern only himself, can skew the refinement processfor a whole community by forcing it to eventually converge on him. Similarskewing effects are produced by the presence of hate, perversity, or an“obsessive altruist” who invests all her care in just one other person. Theseanalyses are not only illuminating in their own right, but also show that thereare desire-independent constraints to which desires must answer—and hencethat the idealist cannot fully account for all the data supplied by our valueexperience.

Values thus do not reduce to desires. Nor, Oddie argues, can they bereduced to anything purely natural—or, at least, not all of them can be. Theargument at this point becomes extremely complex and involves constructinga “combined natural-value space” in which we can represent conditions thathave, in effect, different configurations depending on whether they are repre-sented via the “geometry of value” or the “geometry of natural properties”.If the argument works, it shows that values are irreducible to natural properties,but without being completely transcendent. Were values transcendent, it wouldbe impossible to explain how they could cause us to experience them. Thusthe final, and crucial, step in Oddie’s defence of robust realism is to show howthe account of values he has developed allows them to be causally efficacious.

Oddie works hard to defend a position he acknowledges is unpopular withphilosophers but which shows how values, although not reducible to naturalproperties, are nonetheless not entirely unlike things we encounter in thenatural world. As the argument builds, however, it relies on an ever-expandingarsenal of principles, prior results, and technical innovations, some of whichare defended elsewhere in other published works, and some of which aresimply taken as obvious when in fact they may not be. The piling up ofterminology, formulas, diagrams, and charts may lead some readers nervouslyto recall Hume’s warning to philosophers who do things the hard way: it iseasy to commit a mistake without noticing it, and then amplify that mistakeby building on it. Whether Oddie falls into this trap readers will have to judgefor themselves, but there can be no question that his efforts constitute anadmirable feat of intellectual derring-do. ’ .

Creatures Like Us? A Relational Approach to the Moral Status of AnimalsBy Imprint Academic, 2005. vi + 230 pp. £17.95 paper

Here’s the recipe for criticizing any moral theory: (1) Find counterexamples:things the theory tells you are good or bad, right or wrong, etc., but clearly

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aren’t; (2) Ask of the theory’s test for good or bad, etc., why that is supposedto make things good or bad, etc.; and point out that there’s no reason given.Lynn Sharpe does plenty of both, attacking a variety of moral views thatclaim that the lives and welfare of animals are in any way less worthy of moralconcern than of humans. Her criticism is largely directed against the ‘animalrights’ theorists Peter Singer and Thomas Regan (not surprisingly: mostradical theorists direct their strongest criticism against their almost-allies).For example: Singer awards the strongest ethical concern to the great apes,because they’re most like us, especially in the crucial area of language capacityand rationality. But, Sharpe argues, Singer’s principle yields the apparentcounter-example that infants and mentally disabled humans are unworthy offull ethical consideration; and what’s so good, she asks, about language andrationality anyway?

The problem with most views on animal ethics, according to Sharpe, is thatthey are “us-ist”. This cringeworthy epithet (analogous with ‘racist’) is appliedwhen other species are granted moral status to the degree that they are likeus—us humans, that is. Sharpe finds plenty of counterexamples to ethicalprinciples based on various suggestions for what counts as sufficiently like us;and she also argues that it’s not clear in the first place why being like us(in any respect) has anything to do with a creature’s moral status. This is a goodquestion—a version of Moore’s Open Question Argument which threatensmost (all?) moral theories.

I find Sharpe a lot less plausible when at last she gets around to her ownviews: that our moral concerns for others are based on our relationships withthem. Relational ethics, with which Sharpe associates her views in the book’ssubtitle, argues that it’s a mistake to insist that ethics be disinterested, grantingequal consideration (for justice, utility, or whatever) to all, on the basis ofabstract universal principle. Instead, what’s relevant are the obligations andprohibitions that arise from your relationship with a particular individual.

To some extent relationism makes sense. An ethics which argued that youowe as much care to someone half-way around the world as you owe to yourown spouse, parent, or child would be crazy. But a relational ethics thatclaims that individual relations are all that count is wrong too. It would imply,it seems, that particular individuals (people or animals for that matter) withwhom you have no relationship have no ethical claim on you. If your belovedpet and some human strangers are on an overloaded lifeboat with you,Sharpe would permit you (sometimes) to toss one of the people overboard tosave Fido. Given our different relationships, what’s right for you may bewrong for me: thus a radical relativism.

One can have an extremely strong emotional, even ‘personal,’ relation withone’s pet, and the mutual loyalty, affection, and understanding that arise inan important relationship are not to be sneezed at. But this isn’t the sourceof many ethical obligations and prohibitions, which sometimes conflict withthe demands of particular relations. The real problem, in my view, is how tobalance the application of general principles of justice and right action withwhat we feel are the demands of particular relationships, and I don’t findmuch help on this problem in Sharpe’s book.

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There’s a wide variety of philosophical views on how much (if any!) innerlife is attributable to animals, and Sharpe’s are on the far left of this spectrum.She credits higher animals with a plethora of mental and personal character-istics usually reserved for humans. (For good humans, that is. She tends toexplain away animal nastiness as the result of the unnatural situation we’veput them into.) She’s well aware that many will find this extreme positionimplausible, and that she’ll face the charge of sloppy sentimentalism about heranimal friends.

But it also seems that there’s inconsistency here. After all, isn’t she justdefending the moral status of animals by appealing to how much they’relike us? Isn’t this us-ism all over again?

I must report, in conclusion, that I found the book a bit repetitious, rathertoo uniform in tone, relentlessly earnest. It’s clear that the author is veryserious about the topic, but her book would have benefited from some varietyand leavening. .