Mary Midgley was a philosopher who worked at Newcastle University in the UK. She was best known for her work on moral philosophy, epistemology and science and animal ethics.

She seemed to have a broadly naturalistic worldview, saying of Christianity “I couldn’t make it work. I would try to pray and it didn’t seem to get me anywhere so I stopped after a while.” At the same time she also said: “But I think it’s a perfectly sensible world view.” She was a strong critic of narrowly scientistic, reductionist forms of science and was an advocate for James Lovelocks’ Gaia Hypothesis as a holistic, moral way of thinking.

She wrote extensively on animal ethics, including in her books “Beast and Man” and “Animals and Why They Matter”. In the latter, she wrote: “The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death.” Her approach combined aspects of virtue and care or relational ethics, insisting that we should show compassion to other animals (both human and non) because of who they are and because of our relationships with them. She criticised “Those who defend the treatment of animals as mere objects, antiseptically detatched from sympathy, in laboratories and battery farms…”

Mary on Wikipedia