Victorian Virtue and Vivisection: Quaker Pacifist Ethics and the Species Boundaries of Nonviolence

In this work I trace the Quaker peace testimony through the second half of the nineteenth century, analyzing the ways in which it was inflected by changes to the moral status of nonhuman animals during this period. This dissertation articulates the moral universe of late Victorian British and American Quakers, focusing specifically on how the Quaker peace testimony both established and blurred the boundaries between humans and animals. Interweaving historical, philosophical, and textual inquiry, I argue that Victorian Friends' perspectives on animal cruelty, virtue ethics, and vivisection---or experimenting upon live animals--- convinced Quakers that nonhuman species were deserving of moral consideration. This altered the way in which Quakers envisioned and articulated the parameters both of their pacifist ethic and of their testimony for simplicity. Generally understood only to prohibit war, the Quaker peace testimony now expanded to oppose violence to certain nonhuman animals. This shift was premised on a thoroughly theocentric understanding of virtue ethics, exemplified in the Quaker concept of the Inner Light.;This project addresses a wide range of important issues, many of which are central to the study of ethics: "who" or "what" is included within our moral community; "who" or "what" can receive violence; the influence of social and political environments on engaged ethics; the relationship between rights, duty, and virtue; and the perceived ethical impact of secularization on religious identity. Trans-disciplinary in both theory and method, my dissertation analyzes the fluid edges of the late Victorian Quaker moral universe as this trans-Atlantic religious community encountered "the animal" in both theory and practice.