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.

The Great Decoupling: Why Minimizing Humanity ’s Dependence on the Environment May Not Be Cause for Celebration
AbstractCharacterizations of the Anthropocene often indicate both the challenges that our new epoch poses for human well-being and a sense of loss that comes from a compromised environment. In this paper I explore a deeper problem underpinning both issues, namely, that decoupling humanity from the world with which we are familiar compromises human flourishing. The environmental conditions characteristic of the Anthropocene do so, I claim, by compromising flourishing on two fronts. First, the comparatively novel conditions of the Anthropocene risk rupturing our narratives, putting at risk our sense of self and connections t...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - August 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Why Milk Consumption is the Bigger Problem: Ethical Implications and Deaths per Calorie Created of Milk Compared to Meat Production
AbstractPictures 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 associat...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - August 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture
AbstractWe know that animals are harmed in plant production. Unfortunately, though, we know very little about the scale of the problem. This matters for two reasons. First, we can ’t decide how many resources to devote to the problem without a better sense of its scope. Second, this information shortage throws a wrench in arguments for veganism, since it’s always possible that a diet that contains animal products is complicit in fewer deaths than a diet that avoids them. In this paper, then, we have two aims: first, we want to collect and analyze all the available information about animal death associated with plant ag...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - August 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

How Ecology Can Edify Ethics: The Scope of Morality
AbstractOver the past several decades environmental ethics has grown markedly, normative ethics having provided essential grounding in assessing human treatment of the environment. Even a systematic approach, such as Paul Taylor ’s, in a sense tells the environment how it is to be treated, whether that be Earth’s ecosystem or the universe itself. Can the environment, especially the ecosystem, as understood through the study of ecology, in turn offer normative and applied (environmental) ethics any edification? The study of ecology has certainly increased awareness of the fact that it is not possible for a moral agent w...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - August 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Animal Abolitionism Revisited: Neo-Colonialism and Morally Unjustified Burdens
AbstractBob Fischer has written a reply to my article ‘Animal Abolitionism and ‘Racism without Racists’’. In this article, Fischer contends that my arguments whereby animal abolitionism engages in acts of racism without racists are mistaken. I wish to reply to Fischer’s objections in this article, through four sets of contentions: (1) Fischer ’s arguments reveal some misunderstandings in terms of the concept of racism and, particularly, of ‘racism without racists’; (2) his arguments also underestimate the burdens suffered by individuals who wish to become vegan; (3) Fischer’s views on infantilisation lead...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - August 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Food Sovereignty and Gender Justice
AbstractFood sovereignty asserts the right of peoples to define and organize their own agricultural and food systems so as to meet local needs and so as to secure access to land, water and seed. A commitment to gender equity has been embedded in the food sovereignty concept from its earliest articulations. Some might wonder why gender justice should figure so prominently in a food movement. In this paper I review and augment the arguments for making gender equity a central component of food sovereignty. The most common argument is: if women constitute the majority of the world ’s food producers, then agricultural policy ...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - August 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

How Ecology Can Edify Ethics: The Scope of Morality
AbstractOver the past several decades environmental ethics has grown markedly, normative ethics having provided essential grounding in assessing human treatment of the environment. Even a systematic approach, such as Paul Taylor ’s, in a sense tells the environment how it is to be treated, whether that be Earth’s ecosystem or the universe itself. Can the environment, especially the ecosystem, as understood through the study of ecology, in turn offer normative and applied (environmental) ethics any edification? The study of ecology has certainly increased awareness of the fact that it is not possible for a moral agent w...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - July 7, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Field Deaths in Plant Agriculture
AbstractWe know that animals are harmed in plant production. Unfortunately, though, we know very little about the scale of the problem. This matters for two reasons. First, we can ’t decide how many resources to devote to the problem without a better sense of its scope. Second, this information shortage throws a wrench in arguments for veganism, since it’s always possible that a diet that contains animal products is complicit in fewer deaths than a diet that avoids them. In this paper, then, we have two aims: first, we want to collect and analyze all the available information about animal death associated with plant ag...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 15, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Great Decoupling: Why Minimizing Humanity ’s Dependence on the Environment May Not Be Cause for Celebration
AbstractCharacterizations of the Anthropocene often indicate both the challenges that our new epoch poses for human well-being and a sense of loss that comes from a compromised environment. In this paper I explore a deeper problem underpinning both issues, namely, that decoupling humanity from the world with which we are familiar compromises human flourishing. The environmental conditions characteristic of the Anthropocene do so, I claim, by compromising flourishing on two fronts. First, the comparatively novel conditions of the Anthropocene risk rupturing our narratives, putting at risk our sense of self and connections t...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 12, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Danube Region —On Stream with Animal Welfare Assessment in the Last 35 Years: A Review of Research on Animal Welfare Assessment in a Multi-lingual Area in Europe
AbstractThis review presents first ever literature survey on historical development of farm animal welfare indicators and assessment in the Danube region. This area, encompassing European Eastern countries and the Balkans, is to a large extent heterogeneous in terms of culture and language. However, international (English) publications were disproportionally small compared to the amount of research institutions and animal welfare activities present in the region. Therefore, the authors aimed at investigating the published literature, focusing on country level and on native languages. Data were collected for the 1980 –201...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 8, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Values in Climate Ethics
AbstractThe aim of the article is to give an outline of a value theory suitable for climate ethics, based on a perfectionist account on the convergence between prudential values and moral responsibility. I claim that such a convergence may generate a system of values that specify norms and obligations and attribute responsibility towards future generations, and thereby provides us with a measure of acceptable political action. (Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics)
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Exploring Influences of Different Communication Approaches on Consumer Target Groups for Ethically Produced Beef
The objective of this paper is to unveil the effectiveness of different communication treatments in regard to changing purchase behavior of different consumer groups. Different communication material for beef produced according to consumer expectations was compiled and applied in a consumer survey —incorporating a choice experiment and a questionnaire—with 676 respondents in three cities of Germany. A Latent Class Mixed Logit Model was basis to identify different consumer segments and their response to the different communication treatments. The effects of different communication treatmen ts unveil the importance to ad...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Moral Considerability and the Argument from Relevance
AbstractThe 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 reci...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Strong Patient Advocacy and the Fundamental Ethical Role of Veterinarians
AbstractThis essay examines the fundamental role of veterinarians in companion animal practice by developing the idea of veterinarians as strong advocates for their nonhuman animal patients. While the practitioner-patient relationship has been explored extensively in medical ethics, the relation between practitioner and animal patient has received relatively less attention in the expanding but still young field of veterinary ethics. Over recent decades, social and professional ethical perspectives on human-animal relationships have undergone major change. Today, the essential role of veterinarians is not entirely clear. Fu...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Can Species Have Capabilities, and What if They Can?
AbstractIn this article, I apply the environmental or expanded capabilities approach to species and examine whether species as wholes can have capabilities and what are the implications if they can. The examination provides support for the claim that species as evolutionary groups can possess capabilities. They have integrity, which refers to the functionings that enable the self-making and development (evolvement) of species, and it is conceptually possible to identify capabilities that essentially enable or contribute to species integrity. One central capability for species can be identified from conservation literature:...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 1, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research