Laudator Temporis Acti

Dedication of Josiah Ober, Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017):

For Denise, Spike, Stella, Blanche, Bindi, and Enki.
They pounced.

Id., pp. 91-92:

The intuition that animals suffer if they are denied any opportunity to exercise their constitutive capacities (as well as if they are deprived of food, shelter, etc.) is, I suppose, at the core of many people's beliefs about acts constituting cruelty to animals. If that intuition is correct, a cat possessing all other goods (food, shelter, etc.), but denied any opportunity to exercise its capacity to pounce, whether on prey or prey analogues (toys, teasers, etc.), could not reasonably be said to have flourished over the course of its life as a cat. Those responsible for keeping cats in small cages over the course of their lives are blameworthy, in that they do harm to those cats. The cat that lives out its life in a cage suffers a deprivation that ought not, under ordinary circumstances, be suffered by any cat. There may be some consequentialist justification for someone to keep some cats in small cages. But the fact remains that the cat in a cage lives a fundamentally less good life than does the cat with an opportunity to pounce, all other things being equal.

Of the animals in the dedication the first four were ferrets, the last two Bengal cats (Josiah Ober, per litteras).

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"Walls of Roman houses at Vaison-la-Romaine (photo by the author)" in James C. Anderson, Jr., Roman Architecture in Provence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): Related posts:

• Delusion
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