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Philosophical Ethology: on the Extents of What It Is to Be a Pig
Society & Animals 19 (2011) 83-101 brill.nl/soan Philosophical Ethology: On the Extents of What It Is to Be a Pig Jes Harfeld Aarhus University, Denmark [email protected] Abstract Answers to the question, “What is a farm animal?” often revolve around genetics, physical attri- butes, and the animals’ functions in agricultural production. The essential and defining charac- teristics of farm animals transcend these limited models, however, and require an answer that avoids reductionism and encompasses a de-atomizing point of view. Such an answer should promote recognition of animals as beings with extensive mental and social capabilities that out- line the extent of each individual animal’s existence and—at the same time—define the animals as parts of wholes that in themselves are more than the sum of their parts and have ethological as well as ethical relevance. To accomplish this, the concepts of both anthropomorphism and sociobiology will be examined, and the article will show how the possibility of understanding animals and their characteristics deeply affects both ethology and philosophy; that is, it has an important influence on our descriptive knowledge of animals, the concept of what animal wel- fare is and can be, and any normative ethics that follow such knowledge. Keywords animal ethics, animal welfare, ethology, philosophy, sociobiology Preface The historical and theoretical background for this article is an ongoing debate in the interdisciplinary fields of biology and philosophy. On the one hand, the ideas presented in this article originate in the descriptive biological sciences— for example, classic and cognitive ethology, genetic evolutionary theory, and sociobiology. -
Rolston on Animals, Ethics, and the Factory Farm
[Expositions 6.1 (2012) 29–40] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 Unnaturally Cruel: Rolston on Animals, Ethics, and the Factory Farm CHRISTIAN DIEHM University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point In 2010, over nine billion animals were killed in the United States for human consumption. This included nearly 1 million calves, 2.5 million sheep and lambs, 34 million cattle, 110 million hogs, 242 million turkeys, and well over 8.7 billion chickens (USDA 2011a; 2011b). Though hundreds of slaughterhouses actively contributed to these totals, more than half of the cattle just mentioned were killed at just fourteen plants. A slightly greater percentage of hogs was killed at only twelve (USDA 2011a). Chickens were processed in a total of three hundred and ten federally inspected facilities (USDA 2011b), which means that if every facility operated at the same capacity, each would have slaughtered over fifty-three birds per minute (nearly one per second) in every minute of every day, adding up to more than twenty-eight million apiece over the course of twelve months.1 Incredible as these figures may seem, 2010 was an average year for agricultural animals. Indeed, for nearly a decade now the total number of birds and mammals killed annually in the US has come in at or above the nine billion mark, and such enormous totals are possible only by virtue of the existence of an equally enormous network of industrialized agricultural suppliers. These high-volume farming operations – dubbed “factory farms” by the general public, or “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)” by state and federal agencies – are defined by the ways in which they restrict animals’ movements and behaviors, locate more and more bodies in less and less space, and increasingly mechanize many aspects of traditional husbandry. -
The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams
THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF MEAT A FEMINISTVEGETARIAN CRITICAL THEORY Praise for The Sexual Politics of Meat and Carol J. Adams “A clearheaded scholar joins the ideas of two movements—vegetari- anism and feminism—and turns them into a single coherent and moral theory. Her argument is rational and persuasive. New ground—whole acres of it—is broken by Adams.” —Colman McCarthy, Washington Post Book World “Th e Sexual Politics of Meat examines the historical, gender, race, and class implications of meat culture, and makes the links between the prac tice of butchering/eating animals and the maintenance of male domi nance. Read this powerful new book and you may well become a vegetarian.” —Ms. “Adams’s work will almost surely become a ‘bible’ for feminist and pro gressive animal rights activists. Depiction of animal exploita- tion as one manifestation of a brutal patriarchal culture has been explored in two [of her] books, Th e Sexual Politics of Meat and Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. Adams argues that factory farming is part of a whole culture of oppression and insti- tutionalized violence. Th e treatment of animals as objects is parallel to and associated with patriarchal society’s objectifi cation of women, blacks, and other minorities in order to routinely exploit them. Adams excels in constructing unexpected juxtapositions by using the language of one kind of relationship to illuminate another. Employing poetic rather than rhetorical techniques, Adams makes powerful connec- tions that encourage readers to draw their own conclusions.” —Choice “A dynamic contribution toward creating a feminist/animal rights theory.” —Animals’ Agenda “A cohesive, passionate case linking meat-eating to the oppression of animals and women . -
The Ethical Consistency of Animal Equality
1 The ethical consistency of animal equality Stijn Bruers, Sept 2013, DRAFT 2 Contents 0. INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................................ 5 0.1 SUMMARY: TOWARDS A COHERENT THEORY OF ANIMAL EQUALITY ........................................................................ 9 1. PART ONE: ETHICAL CONSISTENCY ......................................................................................................... 18 1.1 THE BASIC ELEMENTS ................................................................................................................................. 18 a) The input data: moral intuitions .......................................................................................................... 18 b) The method: rule universalism............................................................................................................. 20 1.2 THE GOAL: CONSISTENCY AND COHERENCE ..................................................................................................... 27 1.3 THE PROBLEM: MORAL ILLUSIONS ................................................................................................................ 30 a) Optical illusions .................................................................................................................................... 30 b) Moral illusions .................................................................................................................................... -
The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1-23-2013 The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion Howard Lesnick University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Ethics in Religion Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Society Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, and the Religion Law Commons Repository Citation Lesnick, Howard, "The Reality of Moral Imperatives in Liberal Religion" (2013). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 339. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/339 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE REALITY OF MORAL IMPERATIVES IN LIBERAL RELIGION HOWARD LESNICK Fordham Professor of Law University of Pennsylvania Abstract This paper uses a classic one-liner attributed to Dostoyoevski’s Ivan Karamozov, "Without God everything is permitted," to explore some differences between what I term traditional and liberal religion. The expansive connotations and implications of Ivan’s words are grounded in the historic association of wrongfulness and punishment, and in a reaction against the late modern challenge to the inexorability of that association, whether in liberal religion or in secular moral thought. The paper argues that, with its full import understood, Ivan’s claim begs critical questions of the meaning and source of compulsion and choice, and of knowledge and belief regarding the specific content of religiously grounded moral norms. -
Martha Nussbaum, the Lion and the Lamb
The lion and the lamb1 Wider implications of Martha Nussbaum’s animal ethics Marcel Wissenburg Professor of Political Theory, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and Socrates Professor of Humanist Philosophy, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]; website: www.wissenburg.com. Introduction Martha Nussbaum’s recent attempts to translate her list of human capabilities into one for animals contain many quite controversial assumptions and prescriptions. If one takes her arguments to their logical extremes, as I intend to do here, the controversial and some might say absurd aspects may easily overshadow the ‘sensible’ parts of the argument. Admittedly, Nussbaum’s theory is demanding, at least as demanding as other types of animal ethics - but having demanding implications (or, depending on one’s point of view, controversial or absurd consequences) cannot by itself count as an argument against a prescriptive theory. Such qualifications may simply reflect temporal and local prejudice. Demanding a degree of - say - education for women on the basis of their capacity for rationality promised in its days to have utterly absurd implications and consequences, and yet once the premise was accepted, the only course of action left was to redefine absurdity. Taking a theory to its extremes by applying a ceteris paribus condition, i.e., by assuming that other things are equal, is a valid and helpful philosophical technique, in this case because it helps to highlight that what Nussbaum has to offer has, like ripples in a pool, ramifications far beyond the sectarian struggles among animal rights2 campaigners. First, the premises that do the real work in effecting ‘absurd’ implications turn out to be premises that competitors - consequentialists and deontologists alike - may find acceptable and can only reject at a high price. -
Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum EDUCATION 1964-1966 Wellesley College 1966-1967 New York University, School of the Arts 1967-1969 New York University, Washington Square College. B.A. 1969. 1969-1975 Harvard University, M.A. 1971, Ph.D. 1975 (Classical Philology) 1972-1975 Harvard University, Society of Fellows, Junior Fellow 1973-1974 St. Hugh's College, Oxford University: Honorary Member of Senior Common Room EMPLOYMENT 1999-- University of Chicago, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics Appointed in Law School and Philosophy Department, 2012 -- Appointed in: Law School, Philosophy Department, and Divinity School, -2012 Associate Member, Classics Department (1995 -- ) Associate Member, Department of Political Science (2003 -- ) Associate Member, Divinity School, (2012 --) Member, Committee on Southern Asian Studies (Affiliate 1999 –2005, full Member 2006--) Board Member,, Center for Gender Studies 1999-2002 Board Member, Human Rights Program, 2002--; Co-Chair, 2007-8; Founder and Coordinator, Center for Comparative Constitutionalism, 2002 – 2007 (spring) Visiting Professor of Law and Classics, Harvard University 2004 (spring) Visiting Professor, Centre for Political Science, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India 1996-1998 University of Chicago, Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics (Appointed in Law School, Philosophy Department, and Divinity School, Associate in Classics) 1996 (spring) Oxford University, Weidenfeld Visiting Professor 1995-1996 University of Chicago, Professor of Law and Ethics (Appointed in Law School, -
Review of Marti Kheel: “Nature Ethics: an Ecofeminist Perspective” [2008
Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Volume VI, Issue 1, 2008 Book Review: Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective, Kheel, Marti (Rowman Littlefield 2008) Lynda Birke1 “There are plenty more where that came from.” So I was told when, as a trainee biologist, I became upset at the death of a lab rat. So too said the Division of Wildlife to a woman concerned to find orphaned fox kits in Colorado - the example with which Kheel begins this book. It is a widespread assumption that as long as there are enough animals to make up a robust population of the species, then the loss of one or two simply does not matter. And there is another message: that emotional responses, such as my grief for the rat or the unknown woman’s empathy for baby foxes, do not matter. What is important, it would seem, is survival of species or ecosystems. There is undoubtedly a tension between such a stance in writing about environmental ethics, and the concerns of animal liberation. For the latter, individual suffering and death matters a great deal, and there cannot be a justification for killing animals in the name of any greater good. In Nature Ethics, feminist activist and writer Marti Kheel explores ideas about nature in the work of environmentalist thinkers: but, significantly, she seeks to do so through challenging the assumption that individuals are not important. Her task is to find an ethics which pays attention to both nature in general and simultaneously to individual animals and their suffering. Kheel’s odyssey began with concern about how humans treat other animals (whom she calls “other-than-humans”), but she found neither environmental nor animal liberation philosophy to be helpful. -
Working with and for Animals: Getting the Theoretical Framework Right
Denver Law Review Volume 94 Issue 4 Article 5 December 2020 Working with and for Animals: Getting the Theoretical Framework Right Martha C. Nussbaum Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/dlr Recommended Citation Martha C. Nussbaum, Working with and for Animals: Getting the Theoretical Framework Right, 94 Denv. L. Rev. 609 (2017). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Denver Law Review by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. WORKING WITH AND FOR ANIMALS: GETTING THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK RIGHT MARTHA C. NUSSBAUMt Friends of animals have lots to complain about and lots of work to do. To the familiar list of horrors-torture of animals in the meat indus- try, misery inflicted on puppies by puppy mills, the damages of research using animals, the manifold harms endemic to the confinement of apes and elephants in zoos, we have some further issues that have only be- come issues in the past few decades: depletion of whale stocks by har- pooning, the confinement of orcas and dolphins in marine theme parks, the poaching of elephants and rhinos for the international black market, the illicit trafficking of elephants from Africa into U.S. zoos, the devasta- tion of habitat for many large mammals through climate change.' New issues arise all the time. The world needs an ethical revolution, a con- sciousness raising movement of truly international proportions. But bad behavior also needs law. -
Cosmopolitanism and Nonhuman Animals ANGIE PEPPER
Beyond Anthropocentrism: ANGIE PEPPER Cosmopolitanism and Nonhuman Animals Abstract: All cosmopolitan approaches to global distributive justice are premised on the idea that humans are the primary units of moral concern. In this paper, I argue that neither relational nor non-relational cosmopolitans can unquestioningly assume the moral primacy of humans. Furthermore, I argue that, by their own lights, cosmopolitans must extend the scope of justice to most, if not all, nonhuman animals. To demonstrate that cosmopolitans cannot simply ‘add nonhuman animals and stir,’ I examine the cosmopolitan position developed by Martha Nussbaum in Frontiers of Justice. I argue that while Nussbaum explicitly includes nonhuman animals within the scope of justice, her account is marked by an unjustifiable anthropocentric bias. I ultimately conclude that we must radically reconceptualise the primary unit of cosmopolitan moral concern to encompass most, if not all, sentient animals. Keywords: Global justice; cosmopolitanism; nonhuman animals; sentience; relational and non-relational; capabilities approach • Introduction All cosmopolitan approaches to global distributive justice are premised on the notion that individuals are the primary units of moral concern. Specifically, most mainstream cosmopolitans consider these individuals to be genetically human. That is to say, cosmopolitans tend to view only humans as the proper subjects of justice and deal only with justice as it applies to inter-human relationships. However, as I will demonstrate, the omission -
Vulnerability, Care, Power, and Virtue: Thinking Other Animals Anew
Vulnerability, Care, Power, and Virtue: Thinking Other Animals Anew by Stephen Thierman A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto © Copyright by Stephen Thierman 2012 Vulnerability, Care, Power, and Virtue: Thinking Other Animals Anew Stephen Thierman Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2012 Abstract This thesis is a work of practical philosophy situated at the intersection of bioethics, environmental ethics, and social and political thought. Broadly, its topic is the moral status of nonhuman animals. One of its pivotal aims is to encourage and foster the “sympathetic imaginative construction of another’s reality”1 and to determine how that construction might feed back on to understandings of ourselves and of our place in this world that we share with so many other creatures. In the three chapters that follow the introduction, I explore a concept (vulnerability), a tradition in moral philosophy (the ethic of care), and a philosopher (Wittgenstein) that are not often foregrounded in discussions of animal ethics. Taken together, these sections establish a picture of other animals (and of the kinship that humans share with them) that can stand as an alternative to the utilitarian and rights theories that have been dominant in this domain of philosophical inquiry. 1 Josephine Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,” in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 179. ii In my fifth and sixth chapters, I extend this conceptual framework by turning to the work of Michel Foucault. -
Full Article
04_HIROKAWA.DOCX 2/22/2011 10:36 AM PROPERTY AS CAPTURE AND CARE Keith H. Hirokawa* I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................ 176 II. SEEING CAPTURE AND CARE IN PROPERTY ...................... 180 A. Legitimate Property Expectations in Transfers of Title: Capture, Relationship, and Responsibility ............... 185 1. Adverse Possession ............................................. 187 2. Termination of Co-Tenancy: Partition................ 189 3. Conveyancing: Caveat Emptor and Informational Duties .................................................................. 192 B. Interests in the Property of Others: Capture, Context, and Community ................................................................ 196 1. Nuisance Law ...................................................... 197 2. Eminent Domain and Public Use ....................... 202 C. Interests in Natural Resources: Capture, Nature, and Collaboration ............................................................ 206 1. The Public Trust ................................................. 209 2. Groundwater: Capture and Correlative Rights .. 212 D. Regulatory Care of Market Captures: Land Use and Environmental Law .................................................. 220 1. The Local Exchange Between Capture and Care: Land Use Control ......................................................... 223 2. The Federal Negotiation: Environmental Law and Pollution Prevention ........................................... 227 III. REMARKS ON SKETCHES OF A PROPERTY