Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 
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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.Precision Livestock Farming and Farmers ’ Duties to Livestock
AbstractPrecision livestock farming (PLF) promises to allow modern, large-scale farms to replicate, at scale, caring farmers who know their animals. PLF refers to a suite of technologies, some only speculative. The goal is to use networked devices to continuously monitor individual animals on large farms, to compare this information to expected norms, and to use algorithms to manage individual animals (e.g. via changes in climate, feeding, or reproductive decisions) automatically. Supporters say this could not only create an artificial version of the partially mythologized image of the good steward caring for his or her an...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 16, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Wild Animal Suffering is Intractable
This article is concerned with large-scale interventions to prevent WAS and their tractability and the deepepistemic problem they raise. We concede that suffering gives us a reason to prevent it where it occurs, but we argue that the nature of ecosystems leaves us with no reason to predict that interventions would reduce, rather than exacerbate, suffering. We consider two interventions, based on gene editing technology, proposed as holding promise to prevent WAS; raise epistemic concerns about them; discuss their potential moral costs; and conclude by proposing a way forward: to justify interventions to prevent WAS, we nee...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 12, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
An Overview of Engineering Approaches to Improving Agricultural Animal Welfare
AbstractIn this essay, we provide an overview of how production systems can be re-engineered to improve the welfare of the animals involved. At least three potential options exist: (1) engineering their environments to better fit the animals, (2) engineering the animals themselves to better fit their environments, and (3) eliminating the animals from the system by growing meat in vitro rather than on farms. The morality of consuming animal products and the conditions under which agricultural animals are maintained remain highly contentious, and when concerns about animal welfare are coupled with concerns about sustainabili...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Engineering Life Expectancy and Non-identity Cases
AbstractIn his paper “Eating Animals the Nice Way” McMahan (Daedalus 137(winter): 66–76,2008) explores whether there are ways of routinely using non-human animals for human consumption that are morally acceptable. He dismisses a practice of benign animal husbandry, in which animals are killed prematurely and believes that a practice in which animals were engineered to drop down dead instantaneously at the same age would be equally wrong, even though it would not involve killing. Yet, McMahan considers his intuition that both practices are equally wrong with regard to our duties towards (or regarding) the involved ani...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Introduction to the Special Edition on Engineering and Animal Ethics
(Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics)
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 9, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Beyond Castration and Culling: Should We Use Non-surgical, Pharmacological Methods to Control the Sexual Behavior and Reproduction of Animals?
AbstractThis paper explores ethical issues raised by the application of non-surgical, pharmaceutical fertility control to manage reproductive behaviors in domesticated and wild animal species. We focus on methods that interfere with the effects of GnRH, making animals infertile and significantly suppressing sexual behavior in both sexes. The paper is anchored by considering ethical issues raised by four diverse cases: the use of pharmaceutical fertility control in (a) male slaughter pigs, (b) domesticated stallions and mares, (c) male companion dogs and (d) female white-tailed deer. Ethical concerns explored include animal...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 9, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Is CRISPR an Ethical Game Changer?
AbstractBy many accounts, CRISPR gene-editing technology is revolutionizing biotechnology. It has been hailed as a scientific game changer and is being adopted at a break-neck pace. This hasty adoption has left little time for ethical reflection, and so this paper aims to begin filling that gap by exploring whether CRISPR is as much an ethical game changer as it is a biological one. By focusing on the application of CRISPR to non-human animals, I argue that CRISPR has and will continue to result in significant shifts in the ethical debate landscape. For instance, the fact that many CRISPR edits are non-transgenic has impor...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - February 8, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Home, Ecological Self and Self-Realization: Understanding Asymmetrical Relationships Through Arne N æss’s Ecosophy
AbstractIn this paper, we discuss N æss’s concept of ecological self in light of the process of identification and the idea of self-realization, in order to understand the asymmetrical relationship among human beings and nature. In this regard, our hypothesis is that Næss does not use the concept of the ecological self to justify ontology of processes, or definitively overcome the idea of individual entities in view of a transpersonal ecology, as Fox argues. Quite the opposite: Næss’s ecological self is nothing but an echo of the theme of the home and of belonging to a place (i.e., dwelling), and, therefore, it deal...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 29, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Geopolitics and Social Resistance: Flows of Latin America ’s Natural Resources
AbstractThis review essay looks at Christopher Boyer ’s Political landscapes: forests, conservation and community in Mexico, (Duke University Press, Durham,2015), Thomas Miller Klubock ’s La Frontera: forests and ecological conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory (Duke University Press, Durham,2014), Pablo Lapegna ’s Soybeans and power: genetically modified crops, environmental politics and social movements in Argentina (Oxford University Press, New York,2016) and Elspeth Probyn ’s Eating the ocean (Duke University Press, Durham,2016) as each provide a holistic study of how political ecology and marginalized peo...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 25, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Anthropocentrism: More than Just a Misunderstood Problem
AbstractAnthropocentrism, in its original connotation in environmental ethics, is the belief that value is human-centred and that all other beings are means to human ends. Environmentally -concerned authors have argued that anthropocentrism is ethically wrong and at the root of ecological crises. Some environmental ethicists argue, however, that critics of anthropocentrism are misguided or even misanthropic. They contend: first that criticism of anthropocentrism can be counterproductive and misleading by failing to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate human interests. Second, that humans differ greatly in their ...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 18, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
A Public Survey on Handling Male Chicks in the Dutch Egg Sector
AbstractIn 2035 global egg demand will have risen 50% from 1985. Because we are not able to tell in the egg whether it will become a male or female chick, billons of one day-old male chicks will be killed. International research initiatives are underway in this area, and governments encourage the development of an alternative with the goal of eliminating the culling of day-old male chicks. The Netherlands holds an exceptional position in the European egg trade, but is also the only country in the European Union where the downside of the egg sector, the practice of killing day-old male chicks, is a recurrent subject of soci...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 16, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Can Friends be Copied? Ethical Aspects of Cloning Dogs as Companion Animals
AbstractSince the first successful attempt to clone a dog in 2005, dogs have been cloned by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) for a variety of purposes. One of these is to clone dogs as companion animals. In this paper we discuss some of the ethical implications that cloning companion dogs through SCNT encompasses, specifically in relation to human –dog relationships, but also regarding animal welfare and animal integrity. We argue that insofar as we understand the relationship with our companion dogs as one of friendship, the meaningfulness of cloning a companion dog is seriously questionable. Cloning may both disrup...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 12, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Ethics and Politics of Food Purchasing Choices in Italian Consumers ’ Collective Action
AbstractCurrently, many consumers have expressed strong opinions about food production process, its distribution, and guaranteeing models. Consumers ’ concerns about ecological and social sustainability issues can have significant impacts on both food demand and food policies. The choice of approach to an asset or service could determine the orientation of the markets; therefore, it is particularly important to pay attention to novel, collecti ve, social movements which are practicing alternatives to the mainstream models of production, distribution, and consumption. Farmers markets, solidarity-based purchasing groups, b...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 12, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
The Great Indian Agrarian Crisis and Tales of Two Villages: Comparative Studies
AbstractThe world is really feeling the heat, not only in the form of climate change, but because of fuming farmers ’ unrest. Farmers’ suicides have become a common way of expressing their anger and anxiety as no one is there to take heed to their problems. This research paper tries to examine the in-depth analysis of the great agrarian crisis in India and how it was completely mistaken in understanding the r eal cause. With the comparative studies of the two villages of India, with a completely different technological, economical and cultural background, a deep observation was made possible in finding out that, it is ...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 12, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
Precaution and Fairness: A Framework for Distributing Costs of Protection from Environmental Risks
AbstractWhile there is an extensive literature on how the precautionary principle should be interpreted and when precautions should be taken, relatively little discussion exists about the fair distribution of costs of taking precautions. We address this issue by proposing a general framework for deciding how costs of precautions should be shared, which consists of a series of default principles that are triggered according to desert, rights, and ability to pay. The framework is developed with close attention to the pragmatics of how distributions will affect actual behaviours. It is intended to help decision-makers think m...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - January 10, 2018 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research
