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.

Ethics of Dietary Guidelines: Nutrients, Processes and Meals
AbstractDietary guidelines are mostly issued by agrifood departments or agencies of governments, and are the result of power play between interest groups and values. They have considerable influence over food preferences and purchases of consumers. Ethical problems are at stake not only with respect to power strategies and their influence on consumers. In this paper I will consider three different types of guidelines: a nutrient oriented type (like the Dutch or American ones), a process oriented type (Scrinis in Nutritionism: the science and politics of dietary advice, Columbia University Press, New York,2013) and a meal o...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - July 21, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Time for a New EU Regulatory Framework for GM Crops?
AbstractIn recent years, the EU legislation on genetically modified (GM) crops has come under severe criticism. Among the arguments are that the present legislation is inconsistent, disproportionate, obsolete from a scientific point of view, and vague in terms of its scope. In this paper, the EU GM legislation (mainly the “Release Directive”, 2001/18/EC) is analysed based on five proposed criteria: legal certainty, non-discrimination, proportionality, scientific adaptability, and inclusion of non-safety considerations. It is argued that the European regulatory framework does not at present satisfy the criteria of legal...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - July 20, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Sharing the Earth: A Biocentric Account of Ecological Justice
AbstractAlthough ethical and justice arguments operate in two distinct levels —justice being a more specific concept—they can easily be conflated. A robust justification of ecological justice (justice to nature) requires starting at the roots of justice, rather than merely giving, for example, an argument for why certain non-human beings have moral standing of some kind. Thus, I propose that a theory of ecological justice can benefit from a four-step justification for the inclusion of non-human beings into the community of justice, starting with Hume’s circumstances of justice. I will further argue that the resulting...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 30, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Pedigree Dog Breeding Debate in Ethics and Practice: Beyond Welfare Arguments
AbstractPedigree dog breeding has been the subject of public debate due to health problems caused by breeding for extreme looks and the narrow genepool of many breeds. Our research aims to provide insights in order to further the animal-ethical, political and society-wide discussion regarding the future of pedigree dog breeding in the Netherlands. Guided by the question ‘How far are we allowed to interfere in the genetic make-up of dogs, through breeding and genetic modification?’, we carried out a multi-method case-driven research, reviewing literature as well as identifying the perceptions of pedigree dog breeding of...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 28, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

One Health Goes to India
AbstractIn this paper, the author reports on a One Health trip to India that he recently led as part of Yale-NUS Learning Across Boundaries Program. It is an attempt not only to integrate OH education into non-medical programs but also to integrate environmental ethics education into OH curricula. (Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics)
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 17, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Sustainability Matrix: Interest Groups and Ethical Theories as the Basis of Decision-Making
AbstractDuring the past few decades, the global food system has confronted new sustainability challenges related not only to public health and the environment but also to ethical concerns over the treatment of farmed animals. However, the traditional threedimensional framework of sustainable development is ill equipped to take ethical concerns related to non-human animals into account. For instance, the interests of farmed animals are often overridden by objectives associated with social, economic or environmental sustainability, despite their vast numbers and influence on contemporary societies. Moreover, sustainability p...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - June 2, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Food Allergy Risk Management in the EU Labelling Legislation
AbstractFood allergy represents an increasing public health issue, and a large number of food control authorities have provided regulations aimed to minimize the risk of allergic reaction for sensitized consumers. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations together with the World Health Organization established the Codex Alimentarius Commission whose main goal is to protect the consumers ’ health. To purse this task the Commission listed the foods and ingredients causing the most severe allergic reactions that should be labelled. It has been reported that some cases of specific foods hypersensitivity dis...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 18, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

On a Failed Defense of Factory Farming
AbstractTimothy Hsiao attempts to defend industrial animal farming by arguing that it is not inherently cruel. We raise three main objections to his defense. First, his argument rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of cruelty. Second, his conclusion, though technically true, is so weak as to be of virtually no moral significance or interest. Third, his contention that animals lack moral standing, and thus that mistreating them is wrong only insofar as it makes one more disposed to mistreat other humans, is untenable on both philosophical and biological grounds. (Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics)
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 17, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Environmental Ethics and Biomimetic Ethics: Nature as Object of Ethics and Nature as Source of Ethics
AbstractWhile the contemporary biomimicry movement is associated primarily with the idea of taking Nature as model for technological innovation, it also contains a normative or ethical principle —Nature as measure—that may be treated in relative isolation from the better known principle of Nature as model. Drawing on discussions of the principle of Nature as measure put forward by Benyus (Biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature, Harper Perennial, New York,1997) and Jackson (Consulting the genius of place: an ecological approach to a new agriculture, Counterpoint, Berkeley,2010, Nature as measure: the selected essays ...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 17, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Environmentally Virtuous Agriculture: How and When External Goods and Humility Ethically Constrain (or Favour) Technology Use
AbstractThis paper concerns virtue-based ethical principles that bear upon agricultural uses of technologies, such as GM crops and CRISPR crops. It does three things. First, it argues for a new type of virtue ethics approach to such cases. Typical virtue ethics principles are vague and unspecific. These are sometimes useful, but we show how to supplement them with more specific virtue ethics principles that are useful to people working in specific applied domains, where morally relevant domain-specific conditions recur. We do this while still fulfilling the need for principles and associated practical reasoning to flexibly...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 17, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

A Virtue of Precaution Regarding the Moral Status of Animals with Uncertain Sentience
AbstractWe address the moral importance of fish, invertebrates such as crustaceans, snails and insects, and other animals about which there is qualified scientific uncertainty about their sentience. We argue that, on a sentientist basis, one can at least say that how such animals fare make ethically significant claims on our character. It is a requirement of a morally decent (or virtuous) person that she at least pays attention to and is cautious regarding the possibly morally relevant aspects of such animals. This involves having a moral stance, in the sense of patterns of perception, such that one notices such animals as...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 17, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Corporate Social Responsibility: Exploring a Framework for the Agribusiness Sector
AbstractCorporate social responsibility (CSR) has long been an issue for research and practice. More recently, in response to growing public scrutiny, it has also gained importance in the agribusiness sector. Research has highlighted a growing gap between public perceptions of farming and food production processes and the realities of modern agriculture and the food industry. This can threaten the reputation and legitimacy of companies operating in this sector. One proactive means for companies to meet societal expectations is to make an active commitment to society and its needs by implementing a CSR policy. However, ther...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - May 17, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Climate Change and the Need for Intergenerational Reparative Justice
AbstractEnvironmental philosophies concerning our obligations to each other and the natural world too rarely address the aftermath of environmental injustice. Ideally we would never do each other wrong; given that we do, as fallible and imperfect agents, we require non-ideal ethical guidance. Margaret Walker ’s work on moral repair and Annette Baier’s work on cross-generational communality together provide useful hermeneutical tools for understanding and enacting meaningful responses to intergenerational injustice, and in particular, for anthropogenic climate change. By blending Baier’s cross-gene rational approach w...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - April 17, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

The Issue of No Moral Agency in Climate Change
AbstractThe dominant methodological assumptions in climate ethical debates are rational-individualistic. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the rational-individualistic methodological framework is compatible with a theory of moral responsibility for climate change. I employ three fitness criteria of moral agency: (1) a normatively significant choice, (2) sufficient knowledge and (3) control. I demonstrate that the rational-individualistic methodology does not provide a framework in which rational agents meet the three criteria. I conclude that rational-individualistic agents are not fit to be held morally responsi...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - April 12, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research

Taxing Meat: Taking Responsibility for One ’s Contribution to Antibiotic Resistance
AbstractAntibiotic use in animal farming is one of the main drivers of antibiotic resistance both in animals and in humans. In this paper we propose that one feasible and fair way to address this problem is to tax animal products obtained with the use of antibiotics. We argue that such tax is supported both by (a) deontological arguments, which are based on the duty individuals have to compensate society for the antibiotic resistance to which they are contributing through consumption of animal products obtained with the use of antibiotics; and (b) a cost-benefit analysis of taxing such animal products and of using revenue ...
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics - March 16, 2017 Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research