Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Varieties of the Cruelty-Based Objection to Factory Farming
AbstractTimothy  Hsiao defends industrial animal agriculture (hereafter, factory farming) from the “strongest version of the cruelty objection” (J Agric Environ Ethics 30(1):37–54,2017). The cruelty objection, following Rachels (in: Sapontzis S (ed) Food for thought: the debate over eating meat, Prometheus, Amherst,2004), is that, because it is wrong to cause pain without a morally good reason, and there is no morally good reason for the pain caused in factory farming (e.g., people do not need to eat meat in order to live healthy, flourishing lives), factory farming is morally indefensible.In this paper, I do not di...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 27, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Progress and Absurdity in Animal Ethics
AbstractThe development of animal ethics has been characterized by both progress and absurdity. More activity in animal welfare has occurred in the past 50  years than in the previous 500, with large numbers of legislative actions supplanting the lone anti-cruelty laws. Nonetheless, there remains a tendency to confuse animal ethics with human ethics. I found this to be the case when my colleagues and I were drafting federal law requiring control of pa in in invasive research. The history of animal ethics vacillates between Descartes’ denial of thought and feeling in animals and British empiricism, including the great sk...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 27, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Aristotle ’s Ethics and Farm Animal Welfare
AbstractAlthoughtelos has been important in farm animal ethics for several decades, clearer understanding of it may be gained from the close reading of Aristotle ’s primary texts on animals. Aristotle observed and classified animals informally in daily life and through planned evidence gathering and collection development. During this work he theorized his concept oftelos, which includes species flourishing and a good life, and drew on extensive and detailed assessments of animal physiology, diet and behaviour. Aristotle believed that animals, like humans, have purpose, and thattelos is natural and unchanging. Moreover, ...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 26, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Ethics of Biosurveillance
AbstractGovernments must keep agricultural systems free of pests that threaten agricultural production and international trade. Biosecurity surveillance already makes use of a wide range of technologies, such as insect traps and lures, geographic information systems, and diagnostic biochemical tests. The rise of cheap and usable surveillance technologies such as remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS)  presents value conflicts not addressed in international biosurveillance guidelines. The costs of keeping agriculture pest-free include privacy violations and reduced autonomy for farmers. We argue that physical and digital...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 17, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Trade-Off Between Chicken Welfare and Public Health Risks in Poultry Husbandry: Significance of Moral Convictions
AbstractWelfare-friendly outdoor poultry husbandry systems are associated with potentially higher public health risks for certain hazards, which results in a dilemma: whether to choose a system that improves chicken welfare or a system that reduces these public health risks. We studied the views of citizens and poultry farmers on judging the dilemma, relevant moral convictions and moral arguments in a practical context. By means of an online questionnaire, citizens (n  = 2259) and poultry farmers (n = 100) judged three practical cases, which illustrate the dilemma of improving chicken welfare or reducing public hea...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 1, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Rethinking the Ethical Challenge in the Climate Deadlock: Anthropocentrism, Ideological Denial and Animal Liberation
AbstractAs critical research has revealed, climate change scepticism and inaction are not about science but ideas, and specifically the ideas that conform our worldview. Drawing on key theoretical approaches to climate change denial from the social sciences and humanities, this paper discusses the ideological dimension and, more especially, the anthropocentric denial underlying our failure to respond to climate change. We argue that the speciesist anthropocentrism inherent in the current dominant ethics is what prevents humanity from reacting to the main human-induced drivers of global warming. Encouraged to do so by curre...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - April 26, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Veganism and Children: Physical and Social Well-Being
AbstractI 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 d...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - April 25, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Doctrine of Double Effect and Killing Animals for Food
AbstractProducing food on a large scale without killing any animals seems currently impossible. This poses a challenge for deontological positions that involve a prohibition against killing sentient creatures: it seems that according to these positions omnivorous, vegetarian and vegan diets all rely on food produced in impermissible ways. In order to meet this challenge, deontologists might introduce consequentialist considerations into their theories, for example some principles that effectively require to kill as few animals as possible. This is the kind of strategy Tom Regan has pursued. However, we argue that the chall...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - April 10, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Biodiversity? Yes, But What Kind? A Critical Reassessment in Light of a Challenge from Microbial Ecology
AbstractBiodiversity has become one of the most important conservation values that drive our ecological management and directly inform our environmental policy. This paper highlights the dangers of strategically appropriating concepts from ecological sciences and also of uncritically inserting them into conservation debates as unqualified normative landmarks. Here, I marshal evidence from a cutting-edge research program in microbial ecology, which shows that if species richness is our major normative target, then we are faced with extraordinary ethical implications. This example challenges our well-received beliefs about b...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - April 10, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Correction to: Is There a Relation Between Ecological Practices and Spirituality? The Case of Benedictine Monasteries
In the original publication of this article, the equally contributed article note was missed. (Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics)
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - April 10, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Just Fanciers: Transformative Justice by Way of Fancy Rat Breeding as a Loving Form of Life
AbstractA growing trend within feminist animal studies is to eschew the abolitionism/welfarism binary in favor of attending carefully to the politics of existing interspecies relationships in context. This literature maintains that domestication produces special interspecies relationships which generate ongoing responsibilities for human companions and communities. With the goal of clarifying how tending to these ongoing responsibilities to domesticated animals can qualify as enduring forms of interspecies justice, this paper unpacks the politics of these special relationships and obligations in context, specifically, that...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - March 31, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Conservation Biologists and the Representation of At-Risk Species: Navigating Ethical Tensions in an Evolving Discipline
AbstractConservation biology is a discipline with the explicit goal of protecting species from extinction. We examine how conservation biologists represent at-risk species, how they navigate values and ethical tensions in the discipline, and how they might be more effective in reaching conservation goals. While these topics are discussed in the literature, we offer a unique empirical examination of how individuals perceive and perform conservation work. We conducted 29 interviews with conservation biologists and found that most respondents viewed their work as providing information but also felt that other species have int...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - March 1, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Little Chernobyl of Romania: The Legacy of a Uranium Mine as Negotiation Platform for Sustainable Development and the Role of New Ethics
AbstractThe study uncovers the drama of Stei Baita (Romania), a former uranium mine, which experienced during the communism period, an intensive industrialization. This shaped the territorial pattern, cultural, economic and social relationships, with a tremendous impact on the quality of the environment which was sacrificed against a rapid of a so-called economic growth. Stei Baita is a classic example of legacy mine land and the authors aim is to capture and assess all important aspects of sustainable development within this study-case of disadvantaged community living in a radon prone area. More specifically, authors int...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 28, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Goodness of Means: Instrumental and Relational Values, Causation, and Environmental Policies
AbstractInstrumental values are often considered to be inferior to intrinsic values. One reason for this is that instrumental values are extrinsic and rely on two factors: (a) a means –end relationship that is (b) conducive to something of final or intrinsic value. In this paper, I will investigate the conditions under which bearers of instrumental value are given different value or owed different levels of respect. Such conditions include the number of means that are conducive to something of final or intrinsic value as well as the form of causality that is implied. It will be suggested that different numbers and causal...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 28, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Animal Ethics of Temple Grandin: A Protectionist Analysis
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 traditiona...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 27, 2019 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research