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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Fish Sentience Denial: Muddy Moral Water, Robert C. Jones Sep 2019

Fish Sentience Denial: Muddy Moral Water, Robert C. Jones

Robert C. Jones, PhD

Sneddon et al. (2018) authoritatively summarize the compelling and overwhelming evidence for fish sentience, while methodically dismantling one rather emblematic research paper (Diggles et al. 2017) intended to discount solid evidence of fish sentience (Lopez-Luna et al. 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, & 2017d). I explore the larger practical moral contexts within which these debates take place and argue that denials of animal sentience are really moral canards.


Aquatic Animals, Cognitive Ethology, And Ethics: Questions About Sentience And Other Troubling Issues That Lurk In Turbid Water, Marc Bekoff Sep 2016

Aquatic Animals, Cognitive Ethology, And Ethics: Questions About Sentience And Other Troubling Issues That Lurk In Turbid Water, Marc Bekoff

Marc Bekoff, PhD

In this general, strongly pro-animal, and somewhat utopian and personal essay, I argue that we owe aquatic animals respect and moral consideration just as we owe respect and moral consideration to all other animal beings, regardless of the taxonomic group to which they belong. In many ways it is more difficult to convince some people of our ethical obligations to numerous aquatic animals because we do not identify or empathize with them as we do with animals with whom we are more familiar or to whom we are more closely related, including those species (usually terrestrial) to whom we refer …


Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis Mar 2015

Carl Cohen’S ‘Kind’ Arguments For Animal Rights And Against Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Nathan M. Nobis, PhD

Carl Cohen’s arguments against animal rights are shown to be unsound. His strategy entails that animals have rights, that humans do not, the negations of those conclusions, and other false and inconsistent implications. His main premise seems to imply that one can fail all tests and assignments in a class and yet easily pass if one’s peers are passing and that one can become a convicted criminal merely by setting foot in a prison. However, since his moral principles imply that nearly all exploitive uses of animals are wrong anyway, foes of animal rights are advised to seek philosophical consolations …


Tom Regan On ‘Kind’ Arguments Against Animal Rights And For Human Rights, Nathan Nobis Jan 2014

Tom Regan On ‘Kind’ Arguments Against Animal Rights And For Human Rights, Nathan Nobis

Nathan M. Nobis, PhD

Tom Regan argues that human beings and some non-human animals have moral rights because they are “subjects of lives,” that is, roughly, conscious, sentient beings with an experiential welfare. A prominent critic, Carl Cohen, objects: he argues that only moral agents have rights and so animals, since they are not moral agents, lack rights. An objection to Cohen’s argument is that his theory of rights seems to imply that human beings who are not moral agents have no moral rights, but since these human beings have rights, his theory of rights is false, and so he fails to show that …


Ethical Analysis Of Petas Holocaust On Your Plate Campaign.Pdf, Carrie P. Freeman Dec 2006

Ethical Analysis Of Petas Holocaust On Your Plate Campaign.Pdf, Carrie P. Freeman

Carrie P. Freeman

Little existing research explores the special ethical challenges most applicable to social movement organizations as they struggle to use persuasive communication campaigns to redefine accepted social practices into social problems. As a case study, this paper evaluates People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) controversial 2003-04 international "Holocaust on Your Plate" vegetarian campaign to determine its strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of public relations ethics, using TARES principles and ethical theory as a guide. Issues of respect and minimizing harm take center stage. Both speciesist and nonspeciesist perspectives are considered.

Note: this can be cited as a conference …