The ethical issues raised by aquaculture were analyzed. A modification of the Ethical Matrix of the Food Ethics Council for the evaluation of novel foods was used; the Ethical Matrix was changed in order to include the various aquaculture production stages separately. The following stages were distinguished: the breeding stage, the growth/feeding stage, the “other-handling” stage (that includes disease and treatment, transportation of organisms, killing procedure, and DNA vaccinations), and the commercialization stage. The ethical issues concerning the producers, the consumers, (...) the environment, and the aquacultured organisms, are discussed. This scheme was fitted to the intensive cage-culture of carnivorous fish. The differences with other forms of aquaculture are discussed, and how the scheme extrapolates to them. The ethical evaluation of aquaculture, in practice, will be rather a utilitarian balancing of cost and benefits of the respective actions. The desired characteristics of an ethical evaluation have been also outlined. Ethical evaluation should not be limited to a purely scientific analysis; it should be holistic, comparable to available alternatives, and should have the flexibility to incorporate new data generated in the fast growing/continuous changing aquaculture sector. (shrink)

This paper is the result of a contribution between ethics and law, which will be used as thought-process tools, to address the complex issue of legal and ethical statuses of GM fish. To find answers, we propose to consider this issue from a wider angle, looking at the relations between the human, animal, and living worlds. We show that it is possible to construct other forms of intellectual logic that, without setting these worlds in opposition, do not lapse into relativism (...) where boundaries are blurred. In this sense, we submit the hypothesis that ordered pluralism should help us to move past a mere Man–Animal relationship to reveal the entire complexity of relationships within mankind and between mankind and other (non-human) worlds alongside it and to which it belongs: the animal and living worlds. With this new logic, “animal ethics” and “animal law” are re-embedded into a set of relationships. This logic emerges from a new consideration: the nature of the contemporary objects we are dealing with. We shall call objects like genetically modified fish “relational objects” in the sense that in order to be apprehended, they utilize a set of relationships of which there are just as many as the dimensions forming them, not as predicates but as primary constituents. Experimentally, in the case of GM fish, we translate this by proposing to typologize legal and ethical considerations induced by multiple relations connected to this object. According to the type of relationship in question, the GM fish will not have the same status; it is a changing object that must be suitably apprehended. (shrink)

During the past few decades, the global food system has confronted new sustainability challenges related not only to public health and the environment but also to ethical concerns over the treatment of farmed animals. However, the traditional threedimensional framework of sustainable development is ill equipped to take ethical concerns related to non-human animals into account. For instance, the interests of farmed animals are often overridden by objectives associated with social, economic or environmental sustainability, despite their vast numbers and influence on (...) contemporary societies. Moreover, sustainability policies necessarily involve an element of ethical evaluation; yet this element is not explicitly incorporated in prevailing frameworks of sustainable development. Our purpose in this article is to address these shortcomings by developing a Sustainability Matrix that recognizes the need to consider food system sustainability from the perspective of all interest groups affected by the issue under consideration, from a plurality of ethical standpoints. Combing sustainability principles with the basic idea of an ethical evaluation tool, the proposed Sustainability Matrix evaluates the sustainability of food-related systems, decisions and policies from the perspectives of three major strands of ethical theory and from the perspectives of human beings, farmed animals and wildlife. In terms of policy implications, the Sustainability Matrix can be applied in deciding on the specific targets of food system sustainability that can then be utilized as a basis for designing policies and measures towards the achievement of these goals. (shrink)

As the world population is growing and government directives tell us to consume more fatty acids, the demand for fish is increasing. Due to declines in wild fish populations, we have come to rely more and more on aquaculture. Despite rapid expansion of aquaculture, this sector is still in a relatively early developmental stage. This means that this sector can still be steered in a favorable direction, which requires discussion about sustainability. If we want to avoid similar problems to the (...) ones we have experienced with livestock farming, we need to generate knowledge of the biology, profitability, environmental aspects, consumer awareness, and product appreciation of particular fish species. However, the discussion about a sustainable aquaculture also raises the question how we should treat fish. This moral question is regularly addressed as a problem of applied ethics with a focus on tailoring ethical principles to practical questions. In this article we do not deny the importance of the practical accounts, but we start from the fundamental question whether and why fish matter in our moral deliberations, i.e., from the discussion on moral status. We elaborate the distinction between moral considerability and moral significance in order to show both the importance and the limitations of the discussion about moral status for practical problems in aquaculture. We illustrate these points with a case-study about the farming of a specific fish species, the African catfish. (shrink)

Water is recognized to pose some very urgent questions in the near future. A significant number of people are deprived of clean drinking water and sanitation services, with an accordingly high percentage of people dying from water borne diseases. At the same time, an increasing percentage of the global population lives in areas that are at risk of flooding, partly exacerbated by climate change. Although it is increasingly recognized that adequate governance of water requires that issues of “equity” or “social (...) justice” are taken into account, political philosophers or applied ethicists have so far not or only barely been involved in the debate on water governance. In this paper, it is argued that political philosophers or applied ethicists should become more involved in the debate on water governance. Their role can be twofold: clarifying the debate; and help analyzing some urgent distributive questions related to water governance. The paper is concluded with an outline for an ethics of water governance. (shrink)