Abstract

I argue that hunting pursued for its own sake is morally justifiable. My focus is on recreational or sport hunting, defined as hunting motivated not by need or utility, but by a desire for pleasure or enjoyment. As a form of recreation, hunting is fundamentally and essentially a form of play. ;Moral debate about sport hunting goes back well over two thousand years. I examine the anti-hunting and animal rights movements on historical, sociological, and philosophical levels. Modern animal advocates employ an analogy to racism and sexism in the term, "speciesism." I conclude that the sound arguments against human racism and sexism are not sound when extended to nonhuman species differences. I review the conceptual, philosophical, and ethological issues that surround the idea of animal suffering, and I argue that animal sympathizers often make mistaken anthropomorphic attributions about animal behavior and animal mentality. I also draw from the philosophy of mind to examine how the question of animal self-consciousness might affect the moral questions surrounding our treatment of nonhuman animals. ;Many defenses of hunting, including prudential, utilitarian, ecological, and primitivist approaches, may correctly diagnose the fundamental moral problem involved, which I take to be the killing of animals for pleasure, but as a group generally fail to defend hunting on this basis. Situating the values of hunting in the context of an Aristotelian virtue ethic, I argue that sport hunting contributes heavily to the eudaimonia of hunters and is an activity especially well suited for promoting a range of crucial intellectual and emotional virtues. Employing Aristotelian and literary insights about tragedy, I develop the idea of hunting as a tragic art that yields both pleasure and knowledge. Reflective sport hunters develop a realistic awareness of death and experience a type of tragic pleasure in the hunt that yields tragic wisdom, an important moral virtue. ;Finally, utilizing insights from classical liberal political theory, I propose a rationale for allowing hunting that should guide government policy for the foreseeable future