- New
-
Topics
- All Categories
- Metaphysics and Epistemology
- Value Theory
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic
- Philosophy of Biology
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Computing and Information
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Philosophy of Physical Science
- Philosophy of Social Science
- Philosophy of Probability
- General Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Science, Misc
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophical Traditions
- Philosophy, Misc
- Other Academic Areas
- Journals
- Submit material
- More
Animal Well-Being
Edited by Adam Shriver (Drake University)
About this topic
| Summary | The central question for this topic area is the following: what constitutes well-being or welfare for non-human animals? Many of the same questions that have been raised about human well-being (and ill-being) can also be raised in regards to other animals, but with additional challenges posed by uncertainty about sentience in different species, debates about the relevance of various cognitive capacities which may be absent, and difficulties in measuring well-being in the absence of verbal self-report. Many of the important ideas related to this theme were developed in works that are not specifically about animal well-being but rather discuss it as part of a larger project. For example, most animal ethics accounts include some discussion of animal welfare, and many accounts of well-being in humans have implications for welfare in other species. To keep this topic area focused, however, works will be included only if they include some specific and at least somewhat extended discussion of questions about the nature of animal well-being or welfare. |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Animal Cruelty (66)
- Animal Rights (1,108)
- Speciesism (247)
- Vegetarianism (459)
- Animal Experimentation (510)
- Animal Captivity (210)
- Domestic Animals (165)
- Moral Status of Animals (576)
- Animal Ethics, Misc (378)
Contents
96 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 96 |
- Assessing Measures of Animal Welfare.Heather Browning - manuscriptWhen making decisions about action to improve animal lives, it is important that we have accurate estimates of how much animals are suffering under different conditions. The current frameworks for making comparative estimates of suffering all fall along the lines of multiplying numbers of animals used by length of life and amount of suffering experienced. However, the numbers used to quantify suffering are usually generated through unreliable and subjective processes which make them unlikely to be correct. In this paper, I (...)
- A multi-sensory enrichment program for ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) at Auckland Zoo, including a novel feeding device.Heather Browning & Lisa Moro - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 1st Australasian Regional Environmental Enrichment Conference.In modern zoos, enrichment programs have become a standard part of animal care routines. Although 'higher' primates usually receive complex enrichment programs, encompassing many types of enrichment, these are less common for prosimians. These animals often largely receive food-based enrichment, as was previously the case at Auckland Zoo, where the ring-tailed lemur enrichment schedule contained only three different items, all food-related. Lemurs tend to be considered less curious and quick to learn than other primates, as well as being less manually (...)
- Review of Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen (eds.) The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism, 2023, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [REVIEW]Richard Pettigrew - forthcoming - Mind.Effective altruists (EAs) seek to persuade the globally wealthy to donate a proportion of their income to do good, and specifically to donate it to those charit.
- The Badness of Death for Sociable Cattle.Daniel Story - forthcoming - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-20.I argue that death can be (and sometimes is) bad for cattle because it destroys relationships that are valuable for cattle for their own sake. The argument relies on an analogy between valuable human relationships and relationships cattle form with conspecifics. I suggest that the reasons we have for thinking that certain rich and meaningful human relationships are valuable for their own sake should also lead us to think that certain cattle relationships are valuable for their own sake. And just (...)
- Why you shouldn’t serve meat at your next catered event.Zachary Ferguson - 2024 - Politics, Philosophy and Economics.Much has been written about the ethics of eating meat. Far less has been said about the ethics of serving meat. In this paper I argue that we often shouldn’t serve meat, even if it is morally permissible for individuals to purchase and eat meat. Historically, the ethical conversation surrounding meat has been limited to individual diets, meat producers, and government actors. I argue that if we stop the conversation there, then the urgent moral problems associated with industrial animal agriculture (...)
- Intersubstrate Welfare Comparisons: Important, Difficult, and Potentially Tractable.Bob Fischer & Jeff Sebo - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (1):50-63.In the future, when we compare the welfare of a being of one substrate (say, a human) with the welfare of another (say, an artificial intelligence system), we will be making an intersubstrate welfare comparison. In this paper, we argue that intersubstrate welfare comparisons are important, difficult, and potentially tractable. The world might soon contain a vast number of sentient or otherwise significant beings of different substrates, and moral agents will need to be able to compare their welfare levels. However, (...)
- Le pire des maux. Éthique et ontologie du spécisme.François Jaquet - 2024 - Paris: Éliott Éditions.Il est assez rare qu’un concept philosophique s’échappe de l’arène académique. C’est pourtant le cas du concept de spécisme, qui a fait une entrée remarquée dans la sphère publique au cours de la dernière décennie. Il est désormais au cœur du débat de société sur nos devoirs envers les animaux non humains. Hélas, ce concept et les enjeux qu’il soulève sont souvent mal compris. Nombreux sont les auteurs qui contestent sa légitimité alors qu’ils le maitrisent mal. D’autres l’utilisent plus volontiers (...)
- Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations; By Rachel Robison‐Greene. [REVIEW]Kyle Johannsen - 2024 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 41 (1):170-171.
- A Kantian Approach to the Moral Considerability of Non-human Nature.Toby Svoboda - 2023 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 36 (4):1-16.A Kantian approach can establish that non-human natural entities are morally considerable and that humans have duties to them. This is surprising, because most environmental ethicists have either rejected or overlooked Kant when it comes to this issue. Inspired by an argument of Christine Korsgaard, I claim that both humans and non-humans have a natural good, which is whatever allows an entity to function well according to the kind of entity it is. I argue that humans are required to confer (...)
- Animal Ethics.Cheryl Abbate - 2022 - In Routledge Handbook of Animal Welfare. pp. 353-365.What do we owe to non-human animals? How should we respond to the many injustices they face? Answering these questions requires philosophical attention to complicated questions about moral reasoning, moral status, and ethical theory. This first part of this chapter provides an overview of what both good and bad moral reasoning look like in the context of discussions about animal ethics. The second part of this chapter provides an overview of competing approaches to moral status, including anthropocentric, rationality, and sentio-centric (...)
- On the Ill-Being of Animals: From Factory Farm to Forever Home.Cheryl Abbate & C. Abbate - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46 (1):325-353.Animal welfare theorists tend to assume that most animals in captivity—especially those living in our homes and in sanctuaries—can, with sufficient care and environmental enrichment, live genuinely good lives. This misguided belief stems from the view that animal well-being should be assessed only in terms of the felt experiences of animals. Against this view, I argue that in assessing how well an animal’s life is going, we ought to consider two distinct kinds of welfare: experiential welfare and subject welfare. Once (...)
- Pigs in Paradise: Local Happy People Raising (Happy, Local) Pigs?Vaughn Baltzly & Colleen Myles - 2022 - East Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (2):23-39.Our topic is food that is "local, ethical, and sustainable." We defend a surprising claim about such a conception (at least, on certain ways of specifying its three central components): namely, that it may lend support to some varieties of “conscientious carnivorism.” We focus on an especially illustrative instance of (potentially) moral meat-eating: the case of Cinta Senese, a once-endangered pig that holds a special place in the cultural and environmental landscape in Tuscany, Italy. In Tuscany, Cinta Senese constitute a (...)
- Prospects for an Animal-Friendly Business Ethics.Brian Berkey - 2022 - In Natalie Thomas (ed.), Animals and Business Ethics. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 67-89.Despite the increased attention that has been paid in recent years to the significance of animal interests within moral and political philosophy, there has been virtually no discussion of the significance of animal interests within business ethics. This is rather troubling, since a great deal of the treatment of animals that will seem especially problematic to many people occurs in the context of business, broadly construed. In this chapter, I aim to extend the growing concern that our normative theories should (...)
- Should Animal Welfare Be Defined in Terms of Consciousness?Jonathan Birch - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):1114-1123.Definitions of animal welfare often invoke consciousness or sentience. Marian Stamp Dawkins has argued that to define animal welfare this way is a mistake. In Dawkins’s alternative view, an animal with good welfare is one that is healthy and “has what it wants.” The dispute highlights a source of strain on the concept of animal welfare: consciousness-involving definitions are better able to capture the normative significance of welfare, whereas consciousness-free definitions facilitate the validation of welfare indicators. I reflect on how (...)
- The Animals in our Living Rooms: Friends or Family?Abbate Cheryl - 2022 - In Diane Jeske (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship. New York, NY: Routledge.Many human–animal relationships closely resemble parent–child relationships. Yet, as I argue in this chapter, normatively speaking, parenting is not the kind of practice we should strive to mirror in our loving relationships with companion animals. Rather, we should strive to form friendships with animals. This is because friendships, unlike parent–child relationships, are characterized by mutuality, choice, equality, and respect for differences, and these are ideals we should try to foster in our loving relationships with all animals (human and nonhuman).$56.42 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation
Bookmark - Why the Court Should Free Happy.Gary Comstock, Adam Lerner & Peter Singer - 2022 - Inside Sources.Should the law recognize an elephant’s right to be released from solitary confinement? The New York State Court of Appeals—the highest court in the State of New York—will consider this question on May 18. At issue is an Asian elephant named Happy. But happy she is not. Every human being has a right to bodily liberty because they have strong interests that this right protects. Since Happy has the same strong interests, the Court should recognize Happy’s right to be freed (...)
- A Brief in Support of Happy’s Appeal.Gary Comstock, Adam Lerner & Peter Singer - 2022 - Nonhuman Rights Project.We present ethical reasons that the court should grant the Nonhuman Rights Project’s (NhRP) request for habeas corpus relief for Happy, an elephant. Happy has a basic interest in not being confined, an interest that should be legally protected just as the human interest in not being confined is legally protected. Since the decision in The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Breheny failed to weigh Happy’s interests properly, we ask this body to correct the error.
- The Problem of Justifying Animal-Friendly Animal Husbandry.Konstantin Deininger - 2022 - Transforming Food Systems: Ethics, Innovation and Responsibility.Intense or industrial animal husbandry is morally bad. This consensus in animal ethics led to the emergence of veganism which is recently in decline in favour of ‘conscientious carnivorism’ which advocates eating animal products from animal-friendly animal husbandry in response to the moral problems of industrial farming. Advocates of animal-friendly husbandry justify rearing and killing ‘happy animals’ by highlighting that the animals live pleasant lives and would not have existed if not reared for human consumption. In this paper, I tackle (...)
- Compensation and Limits on Harm in Animal Research.Jake Earl - 2022 - Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 32 (3):313-327.Although researchers generally take great care to ensure that human subjects do not suffer very serious harms from their involvement in research, the situation is different for nonhuman animal subjects. Significant progress has been made in reducing unnecessary animal suffering in research, yet researchers still inflict severe pain and distress on tens of thousands of animals every year for scientific purposes. Some bioethicists, scientists, and animal welfare advocates argue for placing an upper limit on the suffering researchers may impose on (...)
- Review of How to Count Animals, more or less. [REVIEW]Benjamin Elmore - 2022 - Between the Species 25 (1):111-118.In How to Count Animals, more or less, Shelly Kagan sketches and argues for a hierarchical account of moral status. Although the book is fairly lengthy at 304 pages of text, Kagan is correct in calling it a sketch, since what this book provides us with is a foray into one aspect that a comprehensive ethical theory must include, in his view, if it is to be plausible. Even so, the work that he does, if one accepts hierarchy, opens up (...)
- Suffering and Meaning in the Lives of Wild Animals.Molly Gardner - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46:355-371.This article advances some considerations that undermine the overall justification for what I call “beneficent interventions,” or interventions aimed at reducing the suffering of wild animals. I first appeal to Susan Wolf’s (2010) account of meaning in life to argue that wild animals can and do have meaning in their lives. I then argue that the meaning in animal lives can offset their suffering, making their lives more worth living. This source of positive value in the lives of wild animals (...)
- Suffering and Meaning in the Lives of Wild Animals.Molly Gardner - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46:355-371.This article advances some considerations that undermine the overall justification for what I call “beneficent interventions,” or interventions aimed at reducing the suffering of wild animals. I first appeal to Susan Wolf’s (2010) account of meaning in life to argue that wild animals can and do have meaning in their lives. I then argue that the meaning in animal lives can offset their suffering, making their lives more worth living. This source of positive value in the lives of wild animals (...)
- Wilderness, Morality, and Value; By Joshua Duclos.Kyle Johannsen - 2022 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
- Was evolution worth it?Guy Kahane - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):249-271.The evolutionary process involved the suffering of quadrillions of sentient beings over millions of years. I argue that when we take this into account, then it is likely that when the first humans appeared, the world was already at an enormous axiological deficit, and that even on favorable assumptions about humanity, it is doubtful that we have overturned this deficit or ever will. Even if there’s no such deficit or we can overturn it, it remains the case that everything of (...)
- Subjective Theories of Ill-Being.Anthony Kelley - 2022 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 46:109-135.According to subjectivism about ill-being, the token states of affairs that are basically bad for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your negative attitudes. This article explores the prospects for this family of theories and addresses some of its challenges. This article (i) shows that subjectivism about ill-being can be derived from a more general doctrine that requires a negatively valenced relationship between any welfare subject and the token states that are of basic harm to that (...)
- Animals as Stakeholders.Joshua Smart - 2022 - In Natalie Thomas (ed.), Animals and Business Ethics. Palgrave-Macmillan.Animals have moral status, and we have corresponding obligations to take their interests into account. I argue that Stakeholder Theory provides a moderate, yet principled way for businesses to do so. Animals ought to be treated as stakeholders given that they affect and are affected by the achievement of the objectives of the businesses in which they are involved. Stakeholder Theory therefore requires taking those interests into account. It does not, however, require that they be given the same weight as (...)
- CHANGING THE LEGAL STATUS OF ANIMALS: LEGISLATION AND LITIGATION.Zorana Todorovic - 2022 - Teme 46 (3):835−849.This paper addresses the issue of the legal status of non-human animals and the possibility of changing it from the status of things or property to the status of non-things, or better, sentient beings. Key arguments for the change of their status are discussed, including the argument from marginal cases, as well as scientific evidence indicating that many animals are sentient beings. Two ways of initiating such changes seem most promising: legislation, i.e. modification of the civil codes, and litigation, i.e. (...)
- The Harm of Desire Modification in Non-human Animals: Circumventing Control, Diminishing Ownership and Undermining Agency.Marc G. Wilcox - 2022 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 35 (3):1-15.It is seemingly bad for animals to have their desires modified in at least some cases, for instance where brainwashing or neurological manipulation takes place. In humans, many argue that such modification interferes with our positive liberty or undermines our autonomy but this explanation is inapplicable in the case of animals as they lack the capacity for autonomy in the relevant sense. As such, the standard view has been that, despite any intuitions to the contrary, the modification of animals’ desires (...)
- Freedom and animal welfare.Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2021 - Animals 4 (11):1148.The keeping of captive animals in zoos and aquariums has long been controversial. Many take freedom to be a crucial part of animal welfare and, on these grounds, criticise all forms of animal captivity as harmful to animal welfare, regardless of their provisions. Here, we analyse what it might mean for freedom to matter to welfare, distinguishing between the role of freedom as an intrinsic good, valued for its own sake and an instrumental good, its value arising from the increased (...)
- The Philosophers' Brief in Support of Happy's Appeal.Gary Comstock, Sue Donaldson, Andrew Fenton, Tyler M. John, L. Syd M. Johnson, Robert C. Jones, Will Kymlicka, Letitia M. Meynell, Nathan Nobis, David M. Peña-Guzmán, James Rocha, Bernard Rollin, Jeff Sebo & Adam Shriver - 2021 - New York State Appellate Court.We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. The Supreme Court, Bronx County, declined to grant habeas corpus relief and order Happy’s transfer to an elephant sanctuary, relying, in part, on previous decisions that denied habeas relief for the NhRP’s chimpanzee clients, Kiko and Tommy. Those decisions use incompatible conceptions of ‘person’ which, when properly understood, are either philosophically inadequate or, in fact, compatible with Happy’s personhood.
- Animal capabilities and freedom in the city.Nicolas Delon - 2021 - Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 22 (1):131-153.Animals who live in cities must coexist with us. They are, as a result, entitled to the conditions of their flourishing. This article argues that, as the boundaries of cities and urban areas expand, the boundaries of our conception of captivity should expand too. Urbanization can undermine animals’ freedoms, hence their ability to live good lives. I draw the implications of an account of “pervasive captivity” against the background of the Capabilities Approach. I construe captivity, including that of urban animals, (...)
- Wild Animal Ethics: Well-Being, Agency, and Freedom.Nicolas Delon - 2021 - Philosophia 50 (3):875-885.Commentary on Kyle Johannsen, Wild Animal Ethics (Routledge, 2020). I want to unpack what we should understand by wild animal well-being, and how different interpretations of what matters about it shape the sorts of interventions we endorse. I will not offer a theory of wild animal well-being or even take a stance on the best approach to theories of well-being as they pertain to wild animals. My aim is to bring into view a concern that WAE has largely overlooked: agency (...)
- Humanitarian Assistance for Wild Animals.Kyle Johannsen - 2021 - The Philosophers' Magazine 93:33-37.I argue that most wild animals live bad lives, and that we should intervene in nature to improve their wellbeing.
- Moral Status, Luck, and Modal Capacities: Debating Shelly Kagan.Harry R. Lloyd - 2021 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (2):273-287.Shelly Kagan has recently defended the view that it is morally worse for a human being to suffer some harm than it is for a lower animal (such as a dog or a cow) to suffer a harm that is equally severe (ceteris paribus). In this paper, I argue that this view receives rather less support from our intuitions than one might at first suppose. According to Kagan, moreover, an individual’s moral status depends partly upon her ‘modal capacities.’ In this (...)
- Las éticas centradas en el sufrimiento y sus implicaciones para el cuestionamiento del uso de los animales.Mat Rozas, Ángeles Cancino Rodezno & Oscar Horta - 2021 - Revista de Filosofía 38 (99):81-97.En este artículo se explica en qué consisten las éticas centradas en el sufrimiento, presenta algunas de las principales razones a su favor y expone cuáles son sus implicaciones con respecto a la consideración moral de los animales. Se argumenta que conforme a estas éticas los usos como recursos de los animales lesivos para estos deberán ser rechazados. A continuación, se examinan las posiciones que aceptan el uso de los animales siempre que este tenga lugar reduciendo los daños infligidos a (...)
- How Much Does Slaughter Harm Humanely Raised Animals?Coleman Solis - 2021 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (2):258-272.Some believe that it is immoral to harm animals, but it is not immoral to kill humanely raised domesticated animals. Implicit in this is the assumption that it is possible to raise and slaughter animals without harming them significantly. In recent years, a number of philosophers – DeGrazia, Harman, Bradley, and others – have claimed that slaughter harms an animal in proportion to the amount of valuable future life that an animal loses in dying, which seems to challenge this assumption. (...)
- The Moral Status of Animals: Degrees of Moral Status and the Interest-Based Approach.Zorana Todorovic - 2021 - Philosophy and Society 2 (32):282–295.This paper addresses the issue of the moral status of non-human animals, or the question whether sentient animals are morally considerable. The arguments for and against the moral status of animals are discussed, above all the argument from marginal cases. It is argued that sentient animals have moral status based on their having interests in their experiential well-being, but that there are degrees of moral status. Two interest-based approaches are presented and discussed: DeGrazia’s view that sentient animals have interests in (...)
- Developmental Programming, Evolution, and Animal Welfare: A Case for Evolutionary Veterinary Science.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2021 - Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 1.The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring phenotype and the environment, which can have long-lasting health and welfare effects. Examples (...)
- Phenomenology Applied to Animal Health and Suffering.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2021 - In Susi Ferrarello (ed.), Phenomenology of Bioethics: Technoethics and Lived Experience. Springer. pp. 73-88.What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. In recent years, the phenomenology of health and disease has become a major topic in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, owing much to the work of Havi Carel (2007, 2011, 2018). Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to (...)
- How to Help when it Hurts: ACT Individually (and in Groups).C. E. Abbate - 2020 - Animal Studies Journal 9 (1):170-200.In a recent article, Corey Wrenn argues that in order to adequately address injustices done to animals, we ought to think systemically. Her argument stems from a critique of the individualist approach I employ to resolve a moral dilemma faced by animal sanctuaries, who sometimes must harm some animals to help others. But must systemic critiques of injustice be at odds with individualist approaches? In this paper, I respond to Wrenn by showing how individualist approaches that take seriously the notion (...)
- Raw Veganism: The Philosophy of the Human Diet.Carlo Alvaro - 2020 - New York, NY: Routledge.Human beings are getting fatter and sicker. As we question what we eat and why we eat it, this book argues that living well involves consuming a raw vegan diet. With eating healthfully and eating ethically being simpler said than done, this book argues that the best solution to health, environmental, and ethical problems concerning animals is raw veganism―the human diet. The human diet is what humans are naturally designed to eat, and that is, a raw vegan diet of fruit, (...)
- The natural behavior debate: Two conceptions of animal welfare.Heather Browning - 2020 - Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 23 (3):325-337.The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare – some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect welfare, but (...)
- Improving invertebrate welfare.Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2020 - Animal Sentience 29 (4).Mikhalevich & Powell (2020) argue that it is wrong, both scientifically and morally, to dismiss the evidence for sentience in invertebrates. They do not offer any examples, however, of how their welfare should be considered or improved. We draw on animal welfare science to suggest some ways that would not be excessively demanding.
- Is Humane Slaughter Possible?Heather Browning & Walter Veit - 2020 - Animals 10 (5):799.One of the biggest ethical issues in animal agriculture is that of the welfare of animals at the end of their lives, during the process of slaughter. Much work in animal welfare science is focussed on finding humane ways to transport and slaughter animals, to minimise the harm done during this process. In this paper, we take a philosophical look at what it means to perform slaughter humanely, beyond simply reducing pain and suffering during the slaughter process. In particular, we (...)
- Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, by Christine M. Korsgaard. [REVIEW]Andrew Chignell - 2020 - Mind 130 (517):363-373.A review of "Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals," by Christine M. Korsgaard. New York: Oxford, 2018. Pp. 271.
- Pervasive Captivity and Urban Wildlife.Nicolas Delon - 2020 - Ethics, Policy and Environment 23 (2):123-143.Urban animals can benefit from living in cities, but this also makes them vulnerable as they increasingly depend on the advantages of urban life. This article has two aims. First, I provide a detailed analysis of the concept of captivity and explain why it matters to nonhuman animals—because and insofar as many of them have a (non-substitutable) interest in freedom. Second, I defend a surprising implication of the account—pushing the boundaries of the concept while the boundaries of cities and human (...)
- Valuing humane lives in two-level utilitarianism.Nicolas Delon - 2020 - Utilitas 32 (3):276-293.I examine the two-level utilitarian case for humane animal agriculture (by R. M. Hare and Gary Varner) and argue that it fails on its own terms. The case states that, at the ‘intuitive level’ of moral thinking, we can justify raising and killing animals for food, regarding them as replaceable, while treating them with respect. I show that two-level utilitarianism supports, instead, alternatives to animal agriculture. First, the case for humane animal agriculture does not follow from a commitment to two-level (...)
- Consider the agent in the arthropod.Nicolas Delon, Peter Cook, Gordon Bauer & Heidi Harley - 2020 - Animal Sentience 29 (32).—Commentary on Mikhalevich and Powell on invertebrate minds.— Whether or not arthropods are sentient, they can have moral standing. Appeals to sentience are not necessary and retard progress in human treatment of other species, including invertebrates. Other increasingly well-documented aspects of invertebrate minds are pertinent to their welfare. Even if arthropods are not sentient, they can be agents whose goals—and therefore interests—can be frustrated. This kind of agency is sufficient for moral status and requires that we consider their welfare.
- A Defense of Free-Roaming Cats from a Hedonist Account of Feline Well-being.C. E. Abbate - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (3):439-461.There is a widespread belief that for their own safety and for the protection of wildlife, cats should be permanently kept indoors. Against this view, I argue that cat guardians have a duty to provide their feline companions with outdoor access. The argument is based on a sophisticated hedonistic account of animal well-being that acknowledges that the performance of species-normal ethological behavior is especially pleasurable. Territorial behavior, which requires outdoor access, is a feline-normal ethological behavior, so when a cat is (...)
- Valuing animals as they are—Whether they feel it or not.C. E. Abbate - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3):770-788.Dressing up animals in ridiculous costumes, shaming dogs on the internet, playing Big Buck Hunter at the local tavern, feeding vegan food to cats, and producing and consuming “knockout” animals, what, if anything, do these acts have in common? In this article, I develop two respect-based arguments that explain how these acts are morally problematic, even though they might not always, if ever, affect the experiential welfare of animals. While these acts are not ordinary wrongs, they are animal dignitary wrongs.
| 1 — 50 / 96 |
PhilPapers logo by Andrea Andrews and Meghan Driscoll.
This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
All rights reserved by The PhilPapers Foundation
Server: philpapers-web-64dd777598-vk9kt uwo