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animal ethics

A sow and her piglets in a bed of straw

National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: When Eating Meat is OK: A Defence of Benign Carnivorism

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This article received an Honourable Mention in the undergraduate category of the 10th National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics. Written by David Logan. Benign Carnivorism (BC) is a practice where a farmer (i) creates animals with pleasurable lives worth living, (ii) painlessly kills them after a significant proportion of their natural lifespan, and (iii)… Read More »National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics: When Eating Meat is OK: A Defence of Benign Carnivorism

Who Gets to Be a Person?

Written by Muriel Leuenberger

 

The question of who gets to be a person is one of those old but never outdated classics in philosophy. Throughout history, philosophers have discussed which human beings are persons, when human beings start to be persons, when they are no longer the same person, and whether non-human beings can be persons – and the discussion continues.

The task of defining the concept of a person can be approached from a purely ontological angle, by looking at what kind of entities exist in the world. There are those beings we want to call persons – what unites them and what separates them from non-persons? This ontological project has, at least at first sight, nothing to do with how the world should be and purely with how it is.

But many moral practices are connected to this concept. Persons deserve praise and blame, they should not be experimented on without their consent, they can make promises, they should be respected. The status of personhood is connected to a moral status. Because of the properties persons have they deserve to be treated and can act in a certain way. Personhood is what can be called a thick concept. It combines descriptive and normative dimensions. To be a person one must meet certain descriptive conditions. But being a person also comes with a distinctive moral status.

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No, Plant-Based Meals Do Not Undermine Freedom of Choice

No, Plant-Based Meals Do Not Undermine Freedom of Choice

Written by Joanna Demaree-Cotton

 

Last month, TV personality Jeremy Clarkson took centre-stage in our local county politics with an argument against plant-based meals. His fury—expressed on television, on Twitter, and in a strongly-worded column in The Sun—was sparked by the Oxfordshire County Council’s decision to provide only plant-based meals at council-catered events as a move towards environmental sustainability.

 

Local farmers—including Jeremy Clarkson, whose farm in Oxfordshire was the focus of his latest TV venture Clarkson’s Farm—protested the measures. There is nothing surprising about this. There’s a straightforward conflict of interest here. It’s in the interests of people who make a living from selling animal products to promote diets based around animal products. (As local arable farmer John Richardson was reported to have said at the protest, “[we’re] just trying to promote the good food we produce”.)

 

More curious, however, is the claim that it’s morally wrong to have policies committing to plant-based catering. More specifically, one of Clarkson’s arguments was that deciding to provide plant-based catering is morally wrong because it interferes with freedom of choice. Standing with protesting farmers, Clarkson reportedly argued:

 

“I think people have to have choice. If people want to eat seeds and weeds, fine. If people want to eat meat, fine. … You can’t dictate. You might be a vegetarian but you can’t make everyone else a vegetarian just because you are.”

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Guest Post: No, We Don’t Owe It To The Animals to Eat Them

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Written by Adrian Kreutz, New College, University of Oxford

That eating animals constitutes a harm has by now largely leaked into public opinion. Only rarely do meat eaters deny that. Those who deny it usually do so on the grounds of an assumed variance in consciousness or ability to suffer between human and non-human animals. Hardly anyone, however, has the audacity to argue that killing animals actually does them good, and that therefore we must continue eating meat and consuming animal products. Hardly anyone apart from UCL philosopher Nick Zangwill, that is, who in a recent article published in Aeon argues that “eating animals’ benefits animals for they exist only because human beings eat them”. One’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, right? Let me unpack and debunk his argument.Read More »Guest Post: No, We Don’t Owe It To The Animals to Eat Them

Video Series: How To Prevent Future Pandemics

First interview in the new  Thinking Out Loud series on ‘Animals and Pandemics’: Katrien Devolder in conversation with Jeff Sebo, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU, on how our treatment of animals increases the risk of future pandemics arising, and on what we should do to reduce that risk!

Assessing and Respecting Sentience After Brexit

Thanks to a generous grant from Open Philanthropy, last year the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities co-sponsored a workshop with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) examining the ethical and legal implications of recent advancements in our ability to assess the mental states and well-being of nonhuman animals.  The impetus for the meeting was that since 2009, the United Kingdom had been operating under article 13 of the Lisbon Treaty which states that the European Union and member states, ”shall, since animals are sentient beings, pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals.” However, after voting to leave the European Union, the United Kingdom was tasked with deciding which rules and provisions to retain, and controversy erupted several years ago when MPs voted against transferring this provision of the Lisbon Treaty to the United Kingdom post-Brexit.

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Hornless Cattle – Is Gene Editing The Best Solution?

In this talk [AUDIO + SLIDES], Prof. Peter Sandøe (Philosophy, Copenhagen University), argues that, from an ethical viewpoint, gene editing is the best solution to produce hornless cattle. There are, however, regulatory hurdles. (Presented at the workshop ‘Gene Editing and Animal Welfare’, 19 Nov. 2019, Oxford – organised by Adam Shriver, Katrien Devolder, and The… Read More »Hornless Cattle – Is Gene Editing The Best Solution?

Panpsychism and Moral Status

Panpsychism is the view that sentience is ubiquitous in the world. Some people find it attractive because it sidesteps the challenge for dualists of explaining why there are two radically different types of things in the world, physical things and mental things.  And panpsychism seems to avoid some of of the challenges that face physicalist… Read More »Panpsychism and Moral Status

Pain for Ethicists #2: Is the Cerebral Cortex Required for Pain? (Video)

Here’s my presentation from the UQAM 2018 Summer School in Animal Cognition organised by Stevan Harnad: I also highly recommend Jonathan Birch’s talk on Animal Sentience and the Precautionary Principle and Lars Chittka’s amazing presentation about the minds of bees. Thanks again to EA Grants for supporting this research as well as my home institutions Uehiro & WEH. And… Read More »Pain for Ethicists #2: Is the Cerebral Cortex Required for Pain? (Video)