Psychology Commons^™

Ethics And Care: For Animals, Not Just Mammals, Jennifer A. Mather

Speciesism and Breed Discrimination Collection

In the last few decades, we have made great strides in recognizing ethics and providing care for animals, but the focus has been mainly on mammals. This stems from a bias of attention not only in research but predominantly in non-scientists’ attention (to ‘popular’ animals), resulting partly from discussion about and depiction of animals in publications addressed to the public. This is somewhat due to political pressure, and can result in uneven conservation efforts and biases in targets for welfare concerns. As a result, there has been a huge backlash again, with concerns about pain sensitivity and welfare in fish, …

Discourse And Wolves: Science, Society, And Ethics, William S. Lynn

Human and Animal Bonding Collection

Wolves have a special resonance in many human cultures. To appreciate fully the wide variety of views on wolves, we must attend to the scientific, social, and ethical discourses that frame our understanding of wolves themselves, as well as their relationships with people and the natural world. These discourses are a configuration of ideas, language, actions, and institutions that enable or constrain our individual and collective agency with respect to wolves.

Scientific discourse is frequently privileged when it comes to wolves, on the assumption that the primary knowledge requirements are matters of ecology, cognitive ethology, and allied disciplines. Social discourse …

The Metaphysics Of Anthropocentrism: A Review Of Paul Ehrenfeld's "The Arrogance Of Humanism" And Mary Midgley's "Beast And Man", Bernard E. Rollin

Attitudes Towards Animals Collection

Our attitudes and behavior toward nature and toward other forms of life are clearly in the forefront of contemporary ethical concern. It thus becomes necessary to examine critically the metaphysics which has traditionally grounded these attitudes. Unquestionably, the key feature of the dominant underlying conceptual scheme has been the positing of a clear-cut dichotomy between man and the natural world. For most of the Greeks, man is radically separated from nature- he lives in the realm of nomos, convention, somehow above the realm of physis, nature. He can reason, communicate, choose, create a social order, apprehend ultimate reality, and even …