An Evaluation of the Theory of Animal Right in Peter Singer
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Philanthropy: the Power of Giving UGS 303
Philanthropy: The Power of Giving UGS 303 Spring 2018 Professor: Pamela Paxton Class Meetings: Mondays and Wednesdays 12:00-1:00, Friday discussion sections Classroom: CLA 1.106 Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:00-2:00 or by appointment Office: CLA 3.738 Office Phone: (512) 232-6323 Email: [email protected] To give away money is an easy matter in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter. Hence it is that such excellence is rare, praiseworthy and noble. --Aristotle, Ethics, 360 BC Course Description: Who gives? Who volunteers? Does it matter? This course will cover the scope and diversity of the nonprofit sector, as well as individual patterns of giving and volunteering. Further, although billions of dollars are distributed by individuals and charitable foundations each year, only some charitable programs are effective. Thus, a portion of the course will focus on providing students with the tools and skills to evaluate charitable programs for effectiveness. Based on their own evaluations, students will have the opportunity to distribute significant funds (provided through The Philanthropy Lab and individual donors) to charitable organizations. Students will be placed into groups that will research, discuss, and debate charities, with the whole class determining the ultimate distribution of the funds. Course Materials: Peter Singer. 2009. The Life You Can Save. New York: Random House. Available at University Co- op. Other course readings available through Canvas. Course Requirements and Grading: Class Participation (10%) As in all college courses, students should come to class having read and thought about the assigned readings. -
Givedirectly
GiveDirectly GiveDirectly provides unconditional cash transfers using cell phone technology to some of the world’s poorest people, as well as refugees, urban youth, and disaster victims. They also are currently running a historic Universal Basic Income initiative, delivering a basic income to 20,000+ people in Kenya in a 12-year study. United States (USD) Donate to GiveDirectly Please select your country & currency. Donations are tax-deductible in the country selected. Founded in Moved Delivered cash to 88% of donations sent to families 2009 US$140M 130K in poverty families Other ways to donate We recommend that gifts up to $1,000 be made online by credit card. If you are giving more than $1,000, please consider one of these alternatives. Check Bank Transfer Donor Advised Fund Cryptocurrencies Stocks or Shares Bequests Corporate Matching Program The problem: traditional methods of international giving are complex — and often inefficient Often, donors give money to a charity, which then passes along the funds to partners at the local level. This makes it difficult for donors to determine how their money will be used and whether it will reach its intended recipients. Additionally, charities often provide interventions that may not be what the recipients actually need to improve their lives. Such an approach can treat recipients as passive beneficiaries rather than knowledgeable and empowered shapers of their own lives. The solution: unconditional cash transfers Most poverty relief initiatives require complicated infrastructure, and alleviate the symptoms of poverty rather than striking at the source. By contrast, unconditional cash transfers are straightforward, providing funds to some of the poorest people in the world so that they can buy the essentials they need to set themselves up for future success. -
7 Aristotle on Greatness of Soul
7 Aristotle on Greatness of Soul Roger Crisp n the recent revival of interest in Aristotelian ethics, relatively little attention has been paid to the virtue of greatness of soul (megalopsuchia). This is partly Ibecause of the focus on the more structurally central concepts of Aristotle’s theory, in particular happiness (eudaimonia) and virtue (aret¯e). But in fact a study of greatness of soul can reveal important insights into the overall shape of Aristotelian ethics, including the place of external goods and luck in the virtuous life, and the significance of “the noble” (to kalon). Further, Aristotle describes the great-souled person in more detail than any other, and calls greatness of soul a “sort of crown of the virtues” (NE IV.3.1124a1–2). Many have found aspects of the portrait of the great-souled person in the Nicomachean Ethics repellent or absurd, but that is no good reason for the student of Aristotle to shy away from it. In this chapter, I shall elucidate Aristotle’s account of greatness of soul, addressing some puzzles internal to that account and bringing out its place in, and implications for, the ethics of Aristotle and of those modern writers influenced by him. Greatness of Soul as a Virtue To understand greatness of soul as an Aristotelian virtue requires first understand- ing Aristotle’s conception of virtue itself. Aristotle distinguishes virtues into two classes – intellectual virtues and virtues of character – corresponding to distinct aspects of the human soul (NE I.13). Greatness of soul is a virtue of character, though, like all such virtues, it requires its possessor to have the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom (phron¯esis; NE VI.13). -
A Global Approach to Ethics
A Global Approach to Ethics PETER SINGER Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and at Oxford University, he has taught at Oxford, La Trobe, and Monash Universities. Since 1999 he has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. From 2005 he has also held the part-time position of Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. Peter Singer first became recognized internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. Subsequently, he has written many books including: Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; How Are We to Live?; The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason); and most recently, The Life You Can Save. A NEw wORLD poration to pay to clean it up, and compensate when the United those affected. If that is a fair principle—that States and For most of the eons of human existence, people the polluter should pay, that those who cause the living only short distances apart might as well, problem are responsible for fixing it—then the de- Australia refused for all the difference they made to each other’s veloped nations should be paying the costs of to sign the Kyoto lives, have been living in separate worlds. A river, global warming. They are not only the biggest Protocol, they a mountain range, a stretch of forest or desert, a polluters now, they have been for the past cen- were making other sea—those were enough to cut people off from tury or more. -
Ethics Matter: a Conversation with Peter Singer
Ethics Matter: A Conversation with Peter Singer http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/transcripts/0435.html/:pf_print... Ethics Matter: A Conversation with Peter Singer Peter Singer , Julia Taylor Kennedy October 6, 2011 Introduction Remarks Questions and Answers Introduction JULIA KENNEDY: I'm Julia Taylor Kennedy, program officer here at the Council. I wanted to also welcome everyone who's watching our webcast today. Peter Singer I'm looking forward to a really great town hall discussion. We've had a lot of great back-and-forths in our first couple of these, and so we're looking forward to hearing your insights and questions in the second half of today's program. When we here at the Carnegie Council drew up our wish list of scholars to bring as part of this series Ethics Matter, philosopher Peter Singer sat at the very top. I could spend this entire session telling you about his extensive publishing and lecturing career. But I do want to give him a chance to speak, so instead here are a few highlights. He was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He is Julia Taylor Kennedy currently on faculty at Princeton University and the University of Melbourne and has taught many other places. He became well known internationally after publishing Animal Liberation in 1975, which has been called "the Bible of the animal rights movement." He has since published widely in every form of media, both mass and niche. He has published in the Carnegie Council's Journal of Ethics & International Affairs and has spoken here in the past. -
The Definition of Effective Altruism
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/08/19, SPi 1 The Definition of Effective Altruism William MacAskill There are many problems in the world today. Over 750 million people live on less than $1.90 per day (at purchasing power parity).1 Around 6 million children die each year of easily preventable causes such as malaria, diarrhea, or pneumonia.2 Climate change is set to wreak environmental havoc and cost the economy tril- lions of dollars.3 A third of women worldwide have suffered from sexual or other physical violence in their lives.4 More than 3,000 nuclear warheads are in high-alert ready-to-launch status around the globe.5 Bacteria are becoming antibiotic- resistant.6 Partisanship is increasing, and democracy may be in decline.7 Given that the world has so many problems, and that these problems are so severe, surely we have a responsibility to do something about them. But what? There are countless problems that we could be addressing, and many different ways of addressing each of those problems. Moreover, our resources are scarce, so as individuals and even as a globe we can’t solve all these problems at once. So we must make decisions about how to allocate the resources we have. But on what basis should we make such decisions? The effective altruism movement has pioneered one approach. Those in this movement try to figure out, of all the different uses of our resources, which uses will do the most good, impartially considered. This movement is gathering con- siderable steam. There are now thousands of people around the world who have chosen -
Justice Towards Animals Demands Veganism
Justice Towards Animals Demands Veganism Gary Steiner Adapted from Gary Steiner, Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism: A Vegan Manifesto (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2012). In November 2009, the Sunday immediately prior to the Thanksgiving holiday traditionally celebrated in the United States, I published an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miserable’. ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miserable,’ New York Times, 22 November, 2009, ‘Week in Review’ 12. The traditional Thanksgiving meal is centred around turkey, and my aim in writing the opinion piece was to challenge the supposed moral legitimacy of the practice of killing and consuming animals such as turkeys. I went so far in the piece as to argue that consuming turkeys and other animals raised in ‘free range’ circumstances is in effect no better morally than consuming animals raised in traditional intensive factory farming circumstances—for, after all, in both cases we kill sentient creatures with lives that are meaningful to them just as our lives are meaningful to us, even if non-human animals such as turkeys cannot, as we humans can, reflect on the ways in which their lives are meaningful to them. I received a torrent of responses to my opinion piece, most of which were from people who were supportive of my views. A small but extremely vehement proportion of the responses was from individuals who excoriated me for my views, typically on the grounds that because many animals kill and eat animals, and because human beings are animals, it is therefore perfectly acceptable for human beings to eat non-human animals. -
Roger Crisp While Several Excellent Books on Sidgwick Have Been
book reviews 233 Roger Crisp The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 234 pp. isbn: 9780198716358. Hardback: £35.00. While several excellent books on Sidgwick have been published in recent years, The Cosmos of Duty is the first comprehensive study of Sidgwick’s masterpiece, The Methods of Ethics (me). This book will obviously be of interest to Sidgwick scholars and those who do research on the history of ethics. But given the con- tinuing relevance of Sidgwick’s arguments, as well as Crisp’s fruitful engage- ment with current literature on topics such as non-naturalism, hedonism, and virtue ethics, anyone with a general interest in moral philosophy would benefit from reading this book. To alleviate problems presented by the complicated structure of the Meth- ods, Crisp adopts a thematic approach; each chapter is devoted to a topic (or topics) explored in various places throughout Sidgwick’s treatise. The book begins with a helpful elucidation of the general framework of Sidgwick’s project, including his views on metaethics, moral concepts, and the aims of philosophical ethics (Chapter 1). Crisp argues that while Sidgwick might have done better to frame the book as about ultimate principles rather than meth- ods, he was right to focus on the triad of utilitarianism, deontology, and ego- ism (pp. 21–28). One of the chief merits of the book is its detailed coverage of parts of the Methods that do not always receive adequate attention, such as Sidgwick’s discussion of free will (Chapter 2) and his accounts of virtue and the individual virtues respectively (Chapters 5 and 6). -
A Carnivore's Manifesto
232 BETWEEN THE SPECIES Review of Eat This Book: A Carnivore’s Manifesto Dominique Lestel (translated by Gary Steiner) Columbia University Press, 2016 160 pages, paperback Angus Taylor University of Victoria (retired) Volume 23, Issue 1 Winter 2019 http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/ 233 Angus Taylor 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. There is a kind of gestalt-shift between the two positions which makes it hard to change, and hard to raise questions on the matter at all without becoming embattled. Mary Midgley (1983, 27) In Eat This Book: A Carnivore’s Manifesto, French philoso- pher Dominique Lestel sets out to demolish the fundamental claims of ethical vegetarianism (including veganism) and to propose as an alternative what he calls ethical carnivorism. The book is translated from the French by prominent animal-rights philosopher Gary Steiner. In his preface, Steiner—echoing a point made by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty—says, “The best way to test one’s own convictions is to open oneself completely to the challenge posed by one’s most strenuous critics or oppo- nents—to confront doubt rather than to seek to extinguish it...” (xv). Those interested in seeking truth, says Steiner, will pay attention to the challenge posed by this work. I fully agree with the general sentiment. That said, too much of this relatively short book strikes me as less a reasoned chal- lenge than a veritable “Gish gallop” of assertions, characteriza- tions, and questions aimed at ethical vegetarianism, tumbling over each other with little in the way of analysis or argument. -
Asceticism and the Other: Angels and Animals in the Egyptian Ascetic Tradition by Daniel Becerra Graduate Program in Religion Du
Asceticism and the Other: Angels and Animals in the Egyptian Ascetic Tradition by Daniel Becerra Graduate Program in Religion Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ J. Warren Smith, Supervisor ___________________________ Ellen Muehlberger ___________________________ Maria Doerfler ___________________________ Jennifer Knust ___________________________ Zlatko Pleše Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 ABSTRACT Asceticism and the Other: Angels and Animals in the Egyptian Ascetic Tradition by Daniel Becerra Graduate Program in Religion Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ J. Warren Smith, Supervisor ___________________________ Ellen Muehlberger ___________________________ Maria Doerfler ___________________________ Jennifer Knust ___________________________ Zlatko Pleše An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Religion in the Graduate School of Duke University 2019 Copyright by Daniel Becerra 2019 Abstract The study of Christian asceticism in late antiquity has traditionally been anthropocentric, meaning there is a pervasive focus on ascetic practice as experienced and undertaken by humans in pursuit of a more holy self. More recent scholarly efforts have begun to examine the role of non-human agents -
YEARBOOK of The
YEARBOOK of the IRISH PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Special Issue Humans and Other Animals Fealsúnacht Φ 2017/18 Edited by: Noel Kavanagh Cara Nine Noel Kavanagh 4 Elderwood, Philosophy Department of Humanities University College Cork Carlow College, St. Patrick’s Cork College St., Co. Cork Carlow, Co. Carlow IRELAND IRELAND E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] Board of Editorial Advisors: Maeve Cooke (UCDublin) Richard Kearney (Boston College) William Desmond (KULeuven) Cynthia Macdonald (QUBelfast) John Dillon (TCDublin) Dermot Moran (UCDublin) John Hayes (MI Limerick) Graham Parkes (UCCork) Teresa Iglesias (UCDublin) Peter Simons (TCDublin) Markus Wörner (NUIGalway) The Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society is a publication of the Irish Philosophical Society. It publishes peer-reviewed articles on a bi-annual basis, often originating in the Society’s conferences, and shares the Society’s purpose of promoting philosophy in Ireland. Papers to be considered for publication should be sent to the General Editor, or to the Associate Editor at their respective addresses above. Please comply with the Society’s style guide available on the society’s website and include an abstract of c. 100 words. See, www.irishphilosophicalsociety.ie The price of the Yearbook to members of the Irish Philosophical Society is €10; to non-members: €25. Institutional membership and subscription can be arranged. Please contact: Katherine Furman (Honorary Secretary) 4 Elderwood, Philosophy University College Cork Co. Cork IRELAND Email: [email protected] The views and opinions expressed in the articles do not necessarily represent those of the editors. The articles published are indexed in the Philosopher’s Index. -
1 INTRODUCTION Symposium on David Phillips's Sidgwickian Ethics Henry Sidgwick's the Methods of Ethics Has Many Admirers. In
1 INTRODUCTION Symposium on David Phillips’s Sidgwickian Ethics Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics has many admirers. In the foreword to the Hackett edition of the book, John Rawls claims that of the works devoted to defending classical utilitarianism The Methods of Ethics is “the most philosophically profound.” More recently, in On What Matters, Derek Parfit states that The Methods of Ethics is the best book on ethics ever written, since it contains “the largest number of true and important claims.” Despite these accolades, there exist only a small number of attempts to systematically engage with the ethical doctrines in The Methods of Ethics, including F. H. Hayward’s The Ethical Philosophy of Sidgwick: Nine Essays, Critical and Expository, chapter six of C. D. Broad’s Five Types of Ethical Theory, and J. B. Schneewind’s Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Each of these rewards repeated study, but they are no longer current. In the nearly four decades since Schneewind’s book was written, there have been many innovations in philosophical ethics. In addition, a good number of excellent article- and chapter-length discussions of specific doctrines in Sidgwick have appeared, as has Bart Schultz’s monumental achievement, Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe. An Intellectual Biography, that treats of Sidgwick’s life and entire corpus. This has for some time represented an opportunity for a new systematic book-length treatment of Sidgwick’s ethics and its relation to contemporary work in meta-ethics and normative ethics. David Phillips’s newly published Sidgwickian Ethics (2011) has exploited this opportunity.