Three Main Stages of the Development of Animal Ethics

The reflections on the relationship between animals and humans can date back to ancient times. Many philosophers and thinkers ponder on animals and human-animal relationship, and present their perceptions of animal ethics, which exert great impact on their followers and influence people’s attitude towards animals. According to the extent of the recognition and realization of animals as well as interspecies relationship, the paper divides the development of animal ethics into three main stages. The first stage is full of anthropocentric prejudices against animals, according to which animals are deemed as inferior to human beings while their consciousness, minds, and emotion are denied. The second stage witnesses an awakening to animals’ sentience, consciousness, and feelings, a call for animals’ liberation, and a defense for animals’ rights. There’s increasing attention to animals’ living condition, pains, needs and wants, together with their value, esteem, moral agency, and ethical rights. The third stage attaches importance to interspecies interconnection and interaction. There’re more and more record of, researches into, and calls for human-animal interactions, in which humans’ attention to and care for animals are underscored. A dialogical interspecies ethics is advocated for cross-species interactions, which subverts the former anthropocentric and dualistic concept of human-animal relationship

Functions of Conversation in Detective Fiction: An Analysis of Smiley’s Duplicate Keys From Grice’s Theory of Conversational Implicature

Duplicate Keys, published in 1984, is a detective novel written by Pulitzer Laureate Jane Smiley. The novel develops around a murder discovered by Alice, the heroine, in Manhattan, in which two band members, Denny and his adopted brother Craig, were shot dead in Denny’s apartment. Since besides Alice, some of their other friends, and even their friends’ friends have duplicate keys, it’s extremely distracting and difficult for Police Detective Honey to solve the case. With suspense resolved and mystery unraveled, it turns out that the killer is Denny’s girlfriend and Alice’s best friend Susan, who pretends to be on a trip far away at the occurrence of the murder. The novel contains an abundance of conversations, which play a crucial part in plot advancement as well as characterization. Guided by Paul Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, the paper analyzes some conversations from Duplicate Keys, especially the disobedience of the cooperative principle in the conversations, deciphers the reasons behind the disobedience, while at the same time exposes characters’ inner world, and exhibits their personality traits. In so doing, functions of conversation in detective fiction are revealed.