A system of environmental ethics recently developed by Lawrence Johnson may be used to analyze the moral implications of biological control. According to this system, entities are morally relevant when they possess well-being interests (i.e., functions or processes that can be better or worse in so far as the entity is concerned). In this formulation of ethical analysis, species and ecosystems are morally relevant because they are not simply aggregates of individuals, so their processes, properties, and well-being interests are not (...) reducible to the sum of their individual members. Following Johnson's thesis, species and ecosystems have morally relevant interests in surviving and maintaining themselves as integrated wholes with particular self-identities. This theoretical structure gives rise to a number of ethical criteria that are particularly relevant to biological control, which apply to the ecosystem (the extent to which it is large, native, unique, and integrated) and to the action being considered (the extent to which it is novel, omnipresent, monitored, reversible, and necessary). In these terms, it is evident that not all biological control efforts are ethically defensible. In general terms, natural biological control is most desirable, followed by augmentative strategies, classical approaches, and finally neoclassical biological control. Two specific cases (neoclassical biological control of rangeland grasshoppers and classical biological control of prickly pear cactus) illustrate the ethical concerns. Finally, it can be shown that formalized restrictions of biological control are necessary, given the unique properties of this technology. (shrink)

As a member of the British Oxford Group, psychologist Richard Ryder marked the beginning of the modern animal rights and animal welfare movement in the seventies. By introducing the concept “speciesism.” Ryder contributed importantly to the expansion of this movement. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to Ryder’s moral theory, “painism”, that aims to resolve the conflict between the two predominant rival theories in animal ethics, the deontological of Tom Regan and the utilitarian of Peter Singer. First, this paper examines (...) the kernel and historical sources of Ryder’s painist theory, linking it to the work of John Rawls and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Second, it examines Ryder’s critique of utilitarianism. It is argued that his critique of Singer’s use of the word “sentience” is unconvincing and that his critique of utilitarian aggregation as not taking a full account of the metaphysical separateness of persons, has already been countered and dealt with. Finally this paper looks at some of the counterintuitive implications of Ryder’s theory and argues that utilitarianism might have more resources for dealing with its own alleged counterintuitive implications than Ryder acknowledges. (shrink)

The act of animal killing affects the human psyche in manners that are culturally contingent. Throughout history, societal attitudes towards the taking of animal lives have mostly been based on deference and/or dominion. Postdomestic societies have evolved in fundamentally different ways. Meat production is abundant yet concealed, animals are categorized and stereotyped, and slaughter has become a highly disquieting activity. Increased awareness of postdomestic meat production systems raises a moral polemic and provokes disgust in some consumer segments. Overall, a heterogeneous (...) set of solutions has emerged to deal with the societal upset and cognitive dissonance caused by animal slaughter. This includes the so-called carnism approach, a rise in animal welfare programs, a market demand for reassuring narratives, a rehabilitation of the metier of farmers and butchers, crowd butchering, neo-ritualism and home slaughter, the biotechnological exploration of “cultured meat” and “pain-free meat”, entomophagy, “meatless meat”, and the increasing proliferation of vegan and vegetarian lifestyles. (shrink)

The portrayal of animals in the media is often criticised for instrumentalising, objectifying and anthropomorphising animals :53–79, 1997; Lerner and Kalof in Sociol Q 40:565–586, 1999; Stewart and Cole in Int J Multidiscip Res 12:457–476, 2009). Although we agree with this criticism, we also identify the need for a more substantiated approach to the moral significance of instrumentalisation, objectification and anthropomorphism. Thus, we propose a new framework which is able to address the morally relevant aspects of animal portrayal in the (...) media. We closely examine the normative messages communicated by an unusual TV commercial in which an anthropomorphised piglet advertises organic beef. This serves as a case example to relate the philosophical and ethical concepts of objectification and anthropomorphism to each other and show how they can be applied. We conclude that the commercial conveys a message of animal instrumentalisation as being normatively correct within the constraint of good animal welfare. The depicted form of instrumentalisation is, nonetheless, associated with harm for the animals and thus, needs to overcome cognitive dissonance. To achieve this, animals are directly objectified by a trivialised and de-individualised portrayal. Moreover, animals are indirectly objectified even when they are anthropomorphised as they are granted significance only through being human-like. Thus, objectification and anthropomorphism are not opposing terms in our proposed framework. In addition, objectification, together with the reference to the dominant ideology, and combined with humorous anthropomorphism weakens scrutiny of these normative messages by the viewers. This eventually augments a decrease of moral concern for farmed animals in advertisement employing such portrayals. (shrink)

Biocentric and ecocentric ethics offer a rich discourse on protecting biotic communities – defending conservation with inherent value tied to life. A problem ar...

The deep and lasting changes to human behaviour that are required to address the global environmental crisis necessitate profound shifts in moral foundations. They amount to a change in what individuals and societies conceive of as progress. This imperative raises important questions about the justification, ends, and means of large-scale changes in people’s ethics. In this essay I will focus on the ends—the direction of moral change as prescribed by the goal of sustainable human flourishing. I shall present a meta-ethical (...) critique of anthropocentrism and propose that only an ecocentric ethic can support the sustainable flourishing of humanity. This proposition does not necessarily contradict itself. My claim will be that the values subsumed under the broad concept of anthropocentrism are categorically counterproductive, informing an undesirable concept of “progress”. I support this claim with two lines of argument. On the one hand, the end values of anthropocentrism are shallow and the “flourishing of humanity” is ill-defined. The conceptual constraints of anthropocentrism itself preclude a more concise definition which would take into account the utter dependence of the flourishing of humanity on the health of ecological support structures. On the other hand, pursuing the values that inform the actions of anthropocentrists (which may be identical with the “flourishing of humanity”) leads to unintended and undesirable outcomes, even from the view of the anthropocentrist herself. Those problems are not encountered with an ecocentric ethic, and the conceptual steps necessary to adopt it are not insurmountable. (shrink)

This article brings animal protection theory to bear on Temple Grandin’s work, in her capacity both as a designer of slaughter facilities and as an advocate for omnivorism. Animal protection is a better term for what is often termed animal rights, given that many of the theories grouped under the animal rights label do not extend the concept of rights to animals. I outline the nature of Grandin’s system of humane slaughter as it pertains to cattle. I then outline four (...) arguments Grandin has made defending meat-eating. On a protection-based approach, I argue, Grandin’s system of slaughter is superior to its traditional counterpart. Grandin’s success as a designer of humane slaughterhouses however is not matched by any corresponding success in offering a moral defence of meat-eating. Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of her work, Grandin’s arguments for continuing to eat animals are noteworthy only in how disappointing and rudimentary they are. If we can thank Grandin for making a difference in the lives of millions of farm animals, her work can also be criticized for not engaging the moral status of animals with the depth and rigor that it deserves. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of chefs to a position of cultural prominence. This rise has coincided with increased consciousness of ethical issues pertaining to food, particularly as they concern animals. We rank cookbooks by celebrity chefs according to the minimum number of sentient animals that must be killed to make their recipes. On our stipulative definition, celebrity chefs are those with their own television show on a national network in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia. (...) Thirty cookbooks by 26 such chefs were categorized according to the total number of cows, pigs, chicken, fish and other species they included as ingredients. The total number of animals killed was divided by the number of non-dessert recipes to generate an average number of animal deaths per recipe for each book. We outline the rationale for our project and its methodology before presenting a ranked table of 30 cookbooks by celebrity chefs. This method generates several interesting findings. The first concerns the wide variation in animal fatalities among cookbooks. The chef with the heaviest animal footprint killed 5.25 animals per recipe, while the omnivorous chef with the smallest footprints killed 0.19 per recipe. Clearly, not all approaches to meat eating are equal when it comes to their animal mortality rate. Pigs and large ruminants are all substantially bigger than poultry, which are themselves bigger than many fish. The prime determinant of a chef’s place in the index was the number of small animals his or her recipes required. Whether a chef cooked in the style of a particular cuisine (Italian, French, Mexican etc.), by contrast, had no discernible influence on his or her ranking. We analyze how different chefs present themselves—as either especially sensitive or insensitive to ethical issues involving animals and food—and note cases where these presentations do or do not match their index ranking. -/- . (shrink)

Early defenders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights invoked species hierarchy: human beings are owed rights because of our discontinuity with and superiority to animals. Subsequent defenders avoided species supremacism, appealing instead to conditions of embodied subjectivity and corporeal vulnerability we share with animals. In the past decade, however, supremacism has returned in work of the new ‘dignitarians’ who argue that human rights are grounded in dignity, and that human dignity requires according humans a higher status than animals. Against (...) the dignitarians, I argue that defending human rights on the backs of animals is philosophically suspect and politically self-defeating. (shrink)

Debates in animal ethics are largely characterized by ethical monism, the search for a single, timeless, and essential trait in which the moral standing of animals can be grounded. In this paper, we argue that a monistic approach towards animal ethics hampers and oversimplifies the moral debate. The value pluralism present in our contemporary societies requires a more open and flexible approach to moral inquiry. This paper advocates the turn to a pragmatic, pluralistic approach to animal ethics. It contributes to (...) the development of such an approach in two ways. It offers a pragmatist critique of ethical monism in animal ethics and presents the results of a qualitative study into the value diversity present in the different ways of thinking about animals in the Netherlands. Carefully arranged group discussions resulted in the reconstruction of four distinctive moral value frameworks that may serve as instruments in the future process of moral inquiry and deliberation in the reflection on animal use. (shrink)

The last 20 years have witnessed the dramatic growth of the animal rights movement and a concurrent increase in its social scientific scrutiny. One of the most notable and consistent findings to emerge from this body of research has been the central role of women in the movement. This paper uses General Social Survey data to examine the influence of views of the relationship of humanity to nature on this gender difference. Holding a Romantic view of nature is associated with (...) higher levels of support for extending moral rights to animals and lower levels of support for animal-based testing. A Darwinian view is associated with greater support for testing on animals but is unrelated to views on moral rights for animals. In general, views of nature affect animal rights advocacy to a greater extent among males than females. (shrink)

Climate change compels us to rethink the ethics of our dietary choices and has become an interesting issue for ethicists concerned about diets, including animal ethicists. The defenders of veganism have found that climate change provides a new reason to support their cause because many animal-based foods have high greenhouse gas emissions. The new style of argumentation, the ‘climatic argument for veganism’, may benefit animals by persuading even those who are not concerned about animals themselves but worry about climate change. (...) The arguments about the high emissions of animal-based food, and a resulting moral obligation to abstain from eating such products, are an addition to the prior forms of argument for principled veganism grounded on the moral standing of, and concern for, nonhuman animals. In this paper, we examine whether the climatic argument for veganism is convincing. We propose a formulation for the amended version of the argument and discuss its implications and differences compared to the moral obligations of principled veganism. We also reflect upon the implications of our findings on agricultural and food ethics more generally. (shrink)

One of the hardest questions in environmental philosophy is the debate between anthropocentric and ecocentric accounts of value. I argue that a great deal of the disagreement in this debate arises from a) misunderstanding of the concepts used in the debate and b) unfruitful reading of vaguely framed arguments. The conceptual and argumentative analysis of the debate shows that many arguments can be ignored as they either contain conceptual confusion or concern issues that are actually irrelevant to the centrism division. (...) However, there are arguments that maintain their relevance, and these arguments have important consequences on the practical environmental ethics. Hence, contrary to Bryan G. Norton’s optimism about the “centrism convergence” on the level of practical environmentalism, I contend that disagreements prevail even in practice. As a solution, I suggest that the centrism debaters should focus on the practical level and work to find space for agreement. (shrink)

This paper identifies the duty to care for the public interest in the commonly valued ecological goods of the Gulf as one of the basic essential features of the moral significance of the federal policies that govern the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. I argue that the Clean Water Act and the Oil Protection Act implicitly provide for a communitarian interpretation of the public and ecological goods of this event that warrants a virtue ethical account of normativity that is ultimately expressed (...) in the duty to care, a duty that is one of the central moral principles that underlies the punitive damages doctrine. (shrink)

Pictures of sides of beef, hanging from overhead rails in refrigerated warehouses and meat-processing plants, often leave a feeling of unease. These pictures provoke the notion that human beings have no right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the sole purpose of providing food. However, the ethical analysis conducted in this study shows that meat production, if animal welfare and deaths per calorie created are considered, is less of a pressing problem compared to the production of (...) milk. While meat can be provided with minimal suffering to animals, the consumption of milk is always associated with considerable suffering during the dairy cow’s life-span and the lives of their offspring. Moreover, more bovine deaths per unit of calorific value created are associated with milk production compared to meat production. The vegan movement, which is currently growing, wishes to minimise farm animal suffering as much as possible. However, if a vegan diet is not possible, consumers should make an informed decision about the products they consume. Replacement of the calories obtained from meat with those from milk and dairy products is not rational if animal welfare is considered. (shrink)

Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

The Hybrid View endorses utilitarianism about animals and rejects utilitarianism about humans. This view has received relatively little sustained attention in the philosophical literature. Yet, as we show, the Hybrid View underlies many widely held beliefs about zoos, pet ownership, scientific research on animal and human subjects, and agriculture. We develop the Hybrid View in rigorous detail and extract several of its main commitments. Then we examine the Hybrid View in relation to the view that human use of animals constitutes (...) a special relationship. We show that it is intuitively plausible that our use of animals alters our moral obligations to animals. That idea is widely believed to be incompatible with the sort of utilitarian approach in animal ethics that is prescribed by the Hybrid View. To overturn that conventional wisdom, we develop two different principles concerning the moral significance of human use of animals, which we call the Partiality Principle and the Strengthening Principle. We show that the Partiality Principle is consistent with several key commitments of the Hybrid View. And, strikingly, we show that the Strengthening Principle is fully consistent with all of the main commitments of the Hybrid View. Thus we establish the surprising result that utilitarians about animals can coherently offer a robust and intuitively appealing account of the moral significance of animal use. (shrink)

Media and nonhuman animal liberation is an under-researched area in the United Kingdom. If the most appropriate metaphor describing the media/social movement relationship is "dance," then largely the media and animal liberation are dancing in the dark of neglect. Drawing upon different approaches to media and offering some notes toward animal liberation media studies, this article explores how, by engaging with the "established terms of the problematic at play," animal liberationists and their claims are appropriated by speciesist ideology through exclusion (...) and confusing and redefining maneuvers. A contextual analysis of its typical texts raises questions of the public interest role, due impartiality of media and, implicitly, of movement strategy. (shrink)

Stephen Clark’s article The Rights of Wild Things from 1979 was the starting point for the consideration in the animal ethics literature of the so-called ‘predation problem’. Clark examines the response of David George Ritchie to Henry Stephens Salt, the first writer who has argued explicitly in favor of animal rights. Ritchie attempts to demonstrate—via reductio ad absurdum—that animals cannot have rights, because granting them rights would oblige us to protect prey animals against predators that wrongly violate their rights. This (...) article navigates the reader through the debate sparked off by Clarke’s article, with as final destination what I consider to be the best way to deal with the predation problem. I will successively discuss arguments against the predation reductio from Singer’s utilitarian approach, Regan’s deontological approach, Nussbaum’s capability approach, and Donadson and Kymlicka’s political theory of animal rights. (shrink)

This paper illuminates a variety of issues that speak to the question of whether ‘captivity for conservation’ can be an ethically acceptable goal of the modern zoo. Reflecting on both theoretical disagreements and practical challenges , the paper explains why the ‘Noah’s Ark’ paradigm is being replaced by an alternative ‘integrated approach.’ It explores the changes in the zoo’s core tasks that the new paradigm implies. And it pays special attention to the changes that would have to be made in (...) zoos’ collection policies: connection with in situ projects, emphasizing local species and the local biogeographical region, exchange of animals among zoos and between zoos and wildlife, and a shift towards smaller species. Finally the question will be addressed whether the new paradigm will achieve a morally acceptable balance between animal welfare costs and species conservation benefits. (shrink)

Tom Regan encapsulated his principle of harm as a prima facie direct duty not to harm experiencing subjects of a life. However, his consideration of harm as deprivation, one example of which is loss of freedom, can easily be interpreted as a harm, which may not be experienced by its subject. This creates a gap between Regan’s criterion for moral status and his account of what our duties are. However, in comparison with three basic paradigms of welfare known in nonhuman (...) animal welfare science, Regan’s understanding coheres with a modified version of a feelings-based paradigm: not only the immediate feelings of satisfaction, but also future opportunities to have such feelings, must be taken into account. Such an interpretation is compatible with Regan’s understanding of harm as deprivation. The potential source of confusion, however, lies in Regan’s own possible argumentative mistakes. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach emphasizes species-specific abilities in grounding our treatment of animals. Though this emphasis provides many action-guiding benefits, it also generates a number of complications. The criticism registered here is that Nussbaum unjustifiably restricts what is allowed into our concept of species norms, the most notable restrictions being placed on latent abilities and those that arise as a result of human intervention. These restrictions run the risk of producing inaccurate or misleading recommendations that fail to correspond to the (...) true needs of animals. Here and throughout the essay the argument draws from the lives of captive apes, especially those with extensive experience with humans. A further criticism is that the normative guidance the capabilities approach does provide is merely at the level of heuristics. Preference testing, it is argued, also uses species norms profitably as a heuristic, but it does so within a much larger and fecund system of assessing an animal’s well-being. (shrink)

Ethicists have tended to treat the psychology of attributing mental states to animals as an entirely separate issue from the moral importance of animals’ mental states. In this paper I bring these two issues together. I argue for two theses, one descriptive and one normative. The descriptive thesis holds that ordinary human agents use what are generally called phenomenal mental states to assign moral considerability to animals. I examine recent empirical research on the attribution of phenomenal states and agential states (...) to argue that phenomenal mental states are the primary factor, psychologically, for judging an animal to be morally considerable. I further argue that, given the role of phenomenal states in assigning moral considerability, certain theories in animal ethics will meet significant psychological resistance. The normative thesis holds that ethicists must take the psychology of attributing mental states into account when constructing moral ideals concerning animals. I draw from the literature in political philosophy on ideal and non-ideal theory to argue that non-ideal theories for animals must account for human psychology because—like current social and political conditions—human psychology limits the achievement of moral ideals. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism has long been considered a cardinal error when describing animals. Ethicists have feared the consequences of misrepresenting animals in their reasoning. Recent research within human- animal studies, however, has sophisticated the notion of anthropomorphism. It is suggested that avoiding anthropomorphism merely creates other morphisms, such as mechanomorphism. Instead of avoiding anthropomorphism, it is argued that it is a communicative strategy that should be used critically. Instances of anthropomorphism in animal ethics are analyzed in this paper. Some analogies made between (...) people and non-human animals in present theories of animal ethics are clear instances of psychological anthropomorphism. Other analogies are implicit cases of cultural anthropomorphism. It is argued that animal ethics needs to take the wider discourse of critical anthropomorphism into account in order to sophisticate the understanding and use of anthropomorphic projections. Anthropomorphism is an efficient tool of communication, and it may be made an adequate one as well. (shrink)

Predation poses a serious challenge for animal ethics of whatever ilk. For animal rights theory especially, the problem is potentially fatal as animal rights appear to require or permit interfering in nature to prevent predation, an implication that appears to be absurd. Several philosophers have written to deflect this challenge by showing how that implication is not absurd or how the allegedly entailed prescription to intervene does not follow from animal rights theory. A number of philosophers have taken different routes (...) to arrive at the same conclusion that intervention in wildlife predation is not morally permissible or required on the rights view. In this paper, I explore a route hitherto unused to the conclusion that intervention in predation is neither required nor permitted by animal rights theory. I deploy the Hohfeldian analytical framework of rights as well as aspects of the theory of self- or other- defence. This, in my view is the most thorough-going rights perspective on the predation problem. I expose some ad hoc, incoherent, utilitarian, and even speciesist arguments among animal rights solutions to the predation problem. The approach I have used avoids these flaws. Taking animal rights seriously means guarding against any tacit speciesism. I think using Hohfeld’s framework goes some way in keeping rights analysis free of implicit bias that might pollute our arguments in favour of human beings. (shrink)

Advocates of the questioning of the dominant anthropocentric perspective of the world have been increasingly strongly presenting ethical demands for a new solution of the relationship between humans and other beings, saying that adherence to the Western philo-sophical and theological traditions has caused the current environmental, and not just environmental, crisis. The attempts are being made to establish a new relationship by relativizing the differences between man and the non-human living beings, often by attributing specifically human traits and categories, such (...) as dignity, moral status and rights to non-human living beings. The author explores antecedents of the standpoints that deviate from the mainstream Western philosophy, in terms of non-anthropocentric extension of ethics, and finds them in the fragments of first physicists, which emphasize kinship of all varieties of life. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Democritus, in this context, considered certain animals and plants as sacred, i.e. they believed that they are, in a sense, responsible for what they do and that they apart from being able to be driven by a natural desire, being able to breathe, feel, be sad and happy, also have a soul, power of discernment, awareness, the ability to think, understanding and mind. Finally, the author believes that solutions or mitigation of the mentioned crisis are not in the simple Aesopeian levelling of animals and plants "upwards", but in an adequate paideutic approach which in humans will develop an inherent ethical model of accepting non-human living beings as creatures who deserve moral and decent treatment and respect. (shrink)

This paper is a summary of my book 'Wild Animal Ethics'.

Wild animal reproduction poses an important moral problem for animal rights theorists. Many wild animals give birth to large numbers of uncared-for offspring, and thus child mortality rates are far higher in nature than they are among human beings. In light of this reproductive strategy – traditionally referred to as the ‘r-strategy’ – does concern for the interests of wild animals require us to intervene in nature? In this paper, I argue that animal rights theorists should embrace fallibility-constrained interventionism: the (...) view that intervention in nature is desirable but should be constrained by our ignorance of the inner workings of ecosystems. Though authors sometimes assume that large-scale intervention requires turning nature into an enormous zoo, I suggest an alternative. With sufficient research, a new form of gene editing called CRISPR promises to one day give us the capacity to intervene without perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties. (shrink)

This paper presents the idea of a decision-support system for a livestock farm, called “ethical accounting”, to be used as an extension of traditional cost accounting. “Ethical accounting” seeks to make available to the farmer information about how his decisions affect the interests of farm animals, consumers and future generations. Furthermore, “ethical accounting” involves value-based planning. Thus, the farmer should base his choice of production plan on reflections as to his fundamental objectives, and he should make his final decision only (...) after having seriously considered the various consequences for the affected parties. (shrink)

The spectacle of the relentless use and abuse of animals in various human enterprises led some human beings to formulate animal welfare policies and to offer philosophical arguments on the basis of which the humane treatment of animals could be defended rationally. According to the animal welfare concept, animals should be provided some comfort and freedom of movement in the period prior to the moment when they are killed. This concept emphasizes the physiological, psychological, and natural aspects of animal life (...) with the focus on freedom. Ironically, however it is not concerned with the rights of animals; nor is it interested in their remaining alive. So, animals are least benefitted by such provisions, which is the major concern for those who defend animal rights. It seems dubious to demand comfort for a being in life, but not security for its actual life, since rights and freedom are essential for the maintenance of a normal life. This paper aims to critically analyze the animal welfare system, which prioritizes only freedom; to demonstrate how animal welfare is incomplete without animal rights and how they are closely related to each other; and to bridge the gap between animal welfare and animal rights. The underlying principle of animal welfare concept is restricted by its anthropocentric framework with the result that the ethical element is missing. Mere ‘freedom’ is not sufficient for constituting an ideal animal welfare domain. In order to achieve real animal well-being, it is necessary to consider both the rights as well as the welfare of animals. (shrink)

Many public debates become polarized, degenerating into a pattern of mutual suspicion and name-calling that preclude communication or compromise. The debate over animal research has typically followed this path. To understand how polarization might be avoided, we examine the factors that helped prevent it in one local controversy: Cambridge, Massachusetts in the late 1980s. These factors include the personal style of the leader of the main animal protection group, the financing for the group, the group's ability to win a symbolic (...) victory in the form of a relatively toothless city ordinance, and, especially, the relative avoidance by both sides of rigid ideological posturing in favor of "casuistic" argumentation about specific cases and policies. (shrink)

Oscar Horta has argued that speciesism is wrong by definition. In his view, there can be no more substantive debate about the justification of speciesism than there can be about the legality of murder, for it stems from the definition of “speciesism” that speciesism is unjustified just as it stems from the definition of “murder” that murder is illegal. The present paper is a case against this conception. I distinguish two issues: one is descriptive and the other normative. Relying on (...) philosophers’ use of the term, I first answer the descriptive question negatively: speciesism is a purely descriptive concept. Then, based on both its main functions in the philosophical and public debates and an analogy with racism, I answer the normative question negatively: speciesism should remain a purely descriptive concept. If I am correct, then speciesism neither is nor should be wrong by definition. (shrink)

Meat production in South Africa is on an increasing trend. In South Africa rising wealth, urbanisation and a growing middle class means South Africans are eating more processed and high-protein foods, especially meat and dairy products. These foods are more land- and water-intensive than fruit, vegetable and grain crops, and further stress existing resources. Traditional agricultural farms cannot keep up with the increasing demand for animal products and these farms are being replaced with concentrated animal feeding operations. There are a (...) wide variety of problems caused by intensive livestock production. The concerns regarding factory farming in South Africa are social issues affecting food security, health concerns, environmental concerns and ethical concerns. In order to ensure food security in future we need to consider these concerns and support more sustainable systems to produce our food. Animal agriculture, like many other industries, works on the principles of supply and demand. By decreasing the demand for these products, we can decrease their production. Individuals can do this by becoming vegetarian or vegan, but also by simply cutting down one’s consumption of meat, eggs, and milk produced in intensive livestock farms. Less meat would be produced, and there would be less harm to local communities, lower risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, less land degradation and decrease of biodiversity, less damage to our water supplies and fewer animals living lives of suffering in factory farms. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to take normative aspects of animal welfare in corporate practice from a blind spot into the spotlight, and thus connect the fields of business ethics and animal ethics. Using insights from business ethics and animal ethics, it argues that companies have a strong responsibility towards animals. Its rationale is that animals have a moral status, that moral actors have the moral obligation to take the interests of animals into account and thus, that as moral (...) actors, companies should take the interests of animals into account, more specifically their current and future welfare. Based on this corporate responsibility, categories of corporate impact on animals in terms of welfare and longevity are offered, including normative implications for each of them. The article concludes with managerial implications for several business sectors, including the most animal-consuming and animal-welfare-threatening industry: the food sector. Welfare issues are discussed, including the issue of killing for food production. (shrink)

Is there a moral requirement to assist wild animals suffering due to natural causes? According to the laissez-faire intuition, although we may have special duties to assist wild animals, there are no general requirements to care for them. If this view is right, then our positive duties toward wild animals can be only special, grounded in special circumstances. In this article I present the contribution argument which employs the thought that the receipt of benefits from wild animals is one such (...) kind of special circumstance. If this argument is correct, then the circle of moral agents required to assist some wild animals is significantly widened. (shrink)

This article calls for an end to the use of the term ‘invasive species’, both in the scientific and public discourse on wildlife conservation. There are two broad reasons for this: the first problem with the invasive species narrative is that this demonisation of ‘invasives’ is morally wrong, particularly because it usually results in the unjust killing of the animals in question. Following on from this, the second problem is that the narrative is also incoherent, both from scientific and philosophical (...) perspectives. At the heart of both of these issues is the problem that the invasive species narrative oversimplifies what are in fact very complex biological processes. As a result, the policies carried out with the stated aim of ‘controlling’ these animals are often unethical. In light of the current global species decline, this article asserts that the way we think and talk about these animals should be changed and the term ‘invasive species’ should be discontinued, in the hope that this leads to changes in practice. (shrink)

By 2050, global livestock production is expected to double—growing faster than any other agricultural sub-sector—with most of this increase taking place in the developing world. As the United Nation’s four-hundred-page report, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options , documents, livestock production is now one of three most significant contributors to environmental problems, leading to increased greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, water pollution, and increased health problems. The paper draws on the UN report as well as a flurry of other (...) recently published studies in order to demonstrate the effect of intensive livestock production on global warming and on people’s health. The paper’s goal is to outline the problems caused by intensive livestock farming and analyze a number of possible solutions, including legislative changes and stricter regulations, community mobilizing, and consumers choosing to decrease their demand for animal products. (shrink)

Faith in the universal moral equality of people enjoys close to unanimous consensus in present moral and political philosophy. Yet its philosophical justification remains precarious. The search for the basis of equality encounters insurmountable difficulties. Nothing short of a miracle seems required to stabilize universal equality in moral status amidst a vast space of distinctions sprawling between people. The difficulties of stabilizing equality against differentiation are not specific to any particular choice regarding the basis of equality. To show this, I (...) will provide a general diagnosis of the difficulty together with its application to the arguably best attempt at a solution, namely to ground moral equality in a form of subjectivity. In his recent book Equality for Nonegalitarians, George Sher advances the view that “we are moral equals because we are equally centers of consciousness. …The fact that we are equals in this respect—that each is a world unto himself—…explains why each person’s interests are of equal moral importance”. Yet the worlds we are unto ourselves can no more withstand the force of differentiation than previous candidates suggested in the literature, and the reasons why run deeper than even some critics have recognized. The prospects for vindicating universal moral equality remain bleak. (shrink)

I claim that there is pro tanto moral reason for parents to not raise their child on a vegan diet because a vegan diet bears a risk of harm to both the physical and the social well-being of children. After giving the empirical evidence from nutrition science and sociology that supports this claim, I turn to the question of how vegan parents should take this moral reason into account. Since many different moral frameworks have been used to argue for veganism, (...) this is a complex question. I suggest that, on some of these moral frameworks, the moral reason that some parents have for not raising their child on a vegan diet on account of this risk is plausibly as strong as the reason they have for raising their child on a vegan diet. In other words, the moral reason I outline is weighty enough to justify some vegan parents in plausibly finding it permissible to not raise their child on a vegan diet. (shrink)

Critics of industrial animal agriculture have argued that its practices are cruel, inhumane, or otherwise degrading to animals. These arguments sometimes form the basis of a larger case for the complete abolition of animal agriculture, while others argue for more modest welfare-based reforms that allow for certain types of industrial farming. This paper defends industrial farming against the charge of cruelty. As upsetting as certain practices may seem, I argue that they need not be construed as cruel or inhumane. Any (...) link between industrial farming and cruelty or inhumanity is contingent on certain cultural, behavioral, and psychological facts that are person-dependent. For many people working in animal agriculture, these facts do not obtain. To be sure, industrial animal agriculture has real moral hazards that must be carefully avoided, but all that this shows is that working with animals is not for everyone. (shrink)

The argument from relevance expresses an intuition that, although shared by many applied ethicists, has not been analyzed and systematized in the form of a clear argument thus far. This paper does this by introducing the concept of value relevance, which has been used before in economy but not in the philosophical literature. The paper explains how value relevance is different from moral relevance, and distinguishes between direct and indirect ways in which the latter can depend on the former. These (...) clarifications allow the argument to explain in detail how we can make two claims. The first one is that being a recipient of value should be the only criterion for full moral considerability. This follows if we accept that value relevance should determine, directly or indirectly, moral relevance. The second claim is that, given what the main theories of wellbeing imply regarding what entities can be recipients of value, sentience is both a sufficient and a necessary criterion for full moral considerability. The paper argues that this conclusion stands even if we hold views that consider other values different from sentience. (shrink)

The Disenhancement Problem in Agriculture: A Reply to Thompson Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-8 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0138-2 Authors Soraj Hongladarom, Department of Philosophy and Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757.

In this paper I examine the connection between accounts of biological teleology and the biocentrist claim that all living beings have a good of their own. I first present the background for biocentrists’ appeal to biological teleology. Then I raise a problem of scope for teleology-based biocentrism and, drawing in part on recent work by Basl and Sandler, I discuss Taylor and Varner’s responses to this problem. I then challenge Basl and Sandler’s own response to the scope problem for its (...) reliance on a selectionist account of organismic teleology. Finally I examine the prospects for a biocentrist response to the problem of scope based on an alternative organisational account of internal teleology. I conclude by assessing the prospects for teleology-based biocentrism. (shrink)

The transgressive ontological character of hybrids—entities crossing the ontological binarism of naturalness and artificiality, e.g., biomimetic projects—calls for pondering the question of their ethical status, since metaphysical and moral ideas are often inextricably linked. The example of it is the concept of “moral considerability” and related to it the idea of “intrinsic value” understood as a non-instrumentality of a being. Such an approach excludes hybrids from moral considerations due to their instrumental character. In the paper, we revisit the boundaries of (...) moral considerability by reexamining the legitimacy of identifying intrinsic value with a non-instrumental one. We offer the concept of “functional value,” which we define as a simultaneous contribution to the common good of the ecosystem and the possibility to disclose the full variety of aspects of a being’s identity. We argue that such a value of hybrids allows us to include them into the scope of moral considerability. (shrink)

In this paper I look at moral debates about animal disenhancement. In particular, I propose that given the particular social institutions in which such disenhancement will operate, we ought to reject animal disenhancement. I do this by introducing the issue of animal disenhancement and presenting arguments in support of it, and showing that while these arguments are strong, they are unconvincing when we look at the full picture. Viewing animal disenhancement in a context such as high intensity food production, we (...) see that the arguments in support of it fall short of other ethical considerations, leading me to conclude that the moral and pragmatic reasons weigh against animal disenhancement. (shrink)