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Sentience Politics : A Fishy Perspective, Culum Brown 2022 Macquarie University

Sentience Politics : A Fishy Perspective, Culum Brown

Animal Sentience

The plight of fishes has almost certainly got worse since Bentham (1789) coined the phrase “The question is not Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but Can they suffer?” Despite the fact that fishes are increasingly recognised as sentient animals worthy of protection under animal welfare legislation in many countries around the world, fishing practices are almost universally exempt activities. The human population continues to grow, and, surprisingly, per capita intake of fish is still increasing (FAO 2020). The source of this fish is not wild stocks (catches of which have remained more or less stagnant for …


All Living Organisms Are Sentient, Arthur S. Reber, Frantisek Baluska, William B. Miller Jr. 2022 University of British Columbia

All Living Organisms Are Sentient, Arthur S. Reber, Frantisek Baluska, William B. Miller Jr.

Animal Sentience

We argue that all living organisms, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to Homo sapiens, have valenced experiences—feelings as states of preference—and are capable of cognitive representations. Bacteria can learn, form stable memories, and communicate, hence solve problems. Rowan et al.'s statement that "Subjective feelings are just that — subjective — and are available only to the animal (or human) experiencing them" is true but irrelevant. When we see a fish flopping about in the bottom of a boat we immediately recognize suffering without having a glimpse of the nature of piscine distress. Some controlled anthropomorphism can go a …


The Science Of Animal Sentience And The Politics Of Animal Welfare Should Be Kept Separate, Marian Stamp Dawkins 2022 University of Oxford

The Science Of Animal Sentience And The Politics Of Animal Welfare Should Be Kept Separate, Marian Stamp Dawkins

Animal Sentience

Although linked historically by Rowan et al., the scientific study of animal sentience and political campaigns to improve animal welfare should be kept separate, for at least two reasons. First, the separation makes it clear that standards of evidence acceptable for ethical or political decisions on animal welfare can be lower than those required for a rigorously scientific approach to animal sentience. Second, it helps to avoid confirmatory bias in the form of giving undue weight to results that are in line with pre-conceived ideas and political views.


Animal Sentience In Indian Culture: Colonial And Post-Colonial Changes, Nanditha Krishna 2022 C.P. Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation

Animal Sentience In Indian Culture: Colonial And Post-Colonial Changes, Nanditha Krishna

Animal Sentience

The Indian tradition has respected animal sentience and non-injury toward all life. It is repeated consistently in Sanskrit literature and the later literature of the Jains and the Buddhists. Change came with the advent of Islamic rule followed by the British, who built slaughterhouses. The hunting of wildlife increased and several wild predator species were wiped out. The result was the series of legislations for animals which were initially proposed by the SPCAs and later by NGOs. In 1976, the Constitution of India was amended to make the protection of wildlife and compassion for living creatures a fundamental duty. However, …


The Dissonance Between Knowing Animals Are Sentient Beings Yet Eating Them, Yana Bender, Juliane Bräuer 2022 Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology

The Dissonance Between Knowing Animals Are Sentient Beings Yet Eating Them, Yana Bender, Juliane Bräuer

Animal Sentience

Animal sentience is linked to the bigger picture of climate and health crises and “carnism” is a factor in the dissonance among (1) knowing animals are sentient, (2) caring about their feelings, and (3) not acting accordingly. We discuss our responsibility as researchers and as individual human beings.


The Reality And Prevalence Of Animal Sentience, Antonio Damasio 2022 University of Southern California

The Reality And Prevalence Of Animal Sentience, Antonio Damasio

Animal Sentience

Rowan et al use findings from neurobiology, clinical neurology, and general biology to argue for the extensive presence of sentience in animals, but they are wisely cautious concerning when in the phylogenetic scale that emergence occurred.


Care Ethics, Religion, And Spiritual Traditions, Inge van Nistelrooij, Maureen Sander-Staudt, Maurice Hamington 2022 University of Humanistic Studies

Care Ethics, Religion, And Spiritual Traditions, Inge Van Nistelrooij, Maureen Sander-Staudt, Maurice Hamington

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Care Ethics, Religion, and Spiritual Traditions is a collection of original essays that address the intersection between contemporary feminist care ethics and religious morality. Feminist care ethics is one of the most dynamic areas in modern theory. This relational approach to morality emphasizes context, emotion, and imagination over consequences, rules, and rights has only been around for about four decades, with its definition still being negotiated. Still, the respect for this approach is demonstrated by its widespread inclusion in moral discourse. Historically, care has been an overlooked concept in philosophy, but religion's ambivalence toward care ethics is even more pronounced. …


The Question Is Not “Can Humans Talk?” Or “Can They Suffer?” But “Can They Reason?”, Clive Phillips 2022 Estonian University of Life Sciences

The Question Is Not “Can Humans Talk?” Or “Can They Suffer?” But “Can They Reason?”, Clive Phillips

Animal Sentience

In their target article, Rowan et al (2022) make a welcome attempt to chart the development of Western progress over the past two hundred years toward formally recognizing that animals feel. They outline the heroic efforts of Compassion in World Farming to gain for animals the status of sentient beings rather than merely human property. A broader view exists, from human prehistory to the present day, in which animals have been (and still are) understood to be sentient by indigenous peoples as well as by some Eastern religions. Growing recognition in the West that animals feel represents a new age …


The Female Perspective On Self-Worth, Zixuan Wang 2022 Claremont Colleges

The Female Perspective On Self-Worth, Zixuan Wang

CMC Senior Theses

How do we determine the value of ourselves? It is intuitive that our perception of self-worth has an implicit effect on our development as individuals. This thesis explores the process through which women determine their self-worth and why it is problematic.


Altruism In The Good Life: An Archetype Of Virtuous Friendship, Elliott Thornburg 2022 Claremont Colleges

Altruism In The Good Life: An Archetype Of Virtuous Friendship, Elliott Thornburg

CMC Senior Theses

What does it mean to live a good life shared with others? The question fundamentally motivates my inquiry into the ancient ethical theories of Aristotle and the early Stoics. Aristotle’s account of eudaimonia presented in Nicomachean Ethics is selected over the early Stoics for the conception of human nature integral to it honors the importance of partiality in human development and flourishing. The altruism central to an Aristotelian’s perfect friendships by way of goodwill is defended to demonstrate virtuous people have genuine altruistic concern for the sake of their friends as explained by self-referential altruism. Finally, an archetype of kinds …


Why The Recognition Of Sentience Is So Important For Animal Welfare, Mark Jones 2022 Born Free Foundation

Why The Recognition Of Sentience Is So Important For Animal Welfare, Mark Jones

Animal Sentience

Rowan et al. (2022) provide a useful summary of the history and development of the philosophical, public, and legal recognition of animal sentience and its importance in improving the welfare of animals. Here I argue for the incorporation of the precautionary principle in sentience recognition, and the wider significance of sentience recognition to the current climate, biodiversity and human health crises.


Wild Animal Welfare, Clare Palmer, Peter Sandøe 2022 Texas A & M University - College Station

Wild Animal Welfare, Clare Palmer, Peter Sandøe

Animal Sentience

Rowan et al’s article provides an overview of developments in the science of animal sentience and its links to animal welfare policy, especially regarding farm animals. But changing ideas of animal sentience and welfare are also important for managing wild and other free-living animals. We ask how the welfare of these animals differs from that of farmed animals, especially how the ability to make autonomous choices may matter. We suggest that more research into wild animal welfare is needed to make informed policy decisions, for example, about using animals in rewilding projects and choosing between policies of culling and fertility …


Righting Health Policy: Bioethics, Political Philosophy, And The Normative Justification Of Health Law And Policy, D. Robert MacDougall 2022 CUNY New York City College of Technology

Righting Health Policy: Bioethics, Political Philosophy, And The Normative Justification Of Health Law And Policy, D. Robert Macdougall

Publications and Research

In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics’ tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. On this account the legitimacy of health laws does …


The Birds, The Bees, The Trees, And The Breeze: Expanding The Moral Universe Throught Rsk Anlysis, Jared Gibbs 2022 University of Montana

The Birds, The Bees, The Trees, And The Breeze: Expanding The Moral Universe Throught Rsk Anlysis, Jared Gibbs

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.


Sentience And The Science-Policy Interface, Jonathan Birch 2022 London School of Economics and Political Science

Sentience And The Science-Policy Interface, Jonathan Birch

Animal Sentience

I contrast my picture of the relationship between the science and policy of animal sentience with that of Marian Stamp Dawkins, who thinks “the science of animal sentience and the politics of animal welfare should be kept separate” because they involve irreconcilably different standards of evidence. On my alternative picture, (i) the science of animal sentience, like any other empirical science, delivers evidence but not certainty; (ii) this evidence allows us to make better practical decisions, both within and outside science and (iii) the quality standards we apply to the evidence should be high in all contexts, including the formulation …


Toward A Dialectical Account Of Nature, Georgia Rae Grimm 2022 University of Montana

Toward A Dialectical Account Of Nature, Georgia Rae Grimm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The protection of nature has been a central aim of environmentalism for well over a century. However, the concept of nature has been subjected to abundant critiques in recent literature, threatening the conceptual tenability of this goal. In this paper, I discuss why I find the concept of nature too valuable to dismiss and offer an account of nature that I believe remedies existent critiques. In Chapter 1, I recount arguments for the protection of nature and illustrate their dualistic underpinnings. In Chapter 2, I discuss issues with dualistic accounts of nature and demonstrate why Steven Vogel’s monistic alternative is …


Procurement Fraud Prevention Strategies In Ghanaian Gold Mining Companies, ALFRED EKOW TAYLOR 2022 Walden University

Procurement Fraud Prevention Strategies In Ghanaian Gold Mining Companies, Alfred Ekow Taylor

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Procurement fraud occurs at various stages of the procurement lifecycle and can be very costly to organizations. Business managers are concerned with the enormous impact of procurement fraud on business revenue. Grounded in Cressey’s fraud triangle theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies business managers use to detect, control, and prevent procurement fraud successfully. The participants were six procurement managers in Ghanaian gold mining companies who successfully detected, controlled, and prevented procurement fraud. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and a review of company documents. Through thematic analysis, three themes emerged: (a) internal control …


Ethical Leadership Effects On Medical Laboratory Personnel Accountability Behaviors, Claude-Marthe Daverdine Cherizard 2022 Walden University

Ethical Leadership Effects On Medical Laboratory Personnel Accountability Behaviors, Claude-Marthe Daverdine Cherizard

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Ethical scandals have continued to generate disturbances in the corporate world and have encouraged ethics studies in organizations. Research has shown there is a relationship between ethical leadership and employee accountability in a variety of organizational settings, including healthcare. However, in medical laboratories that relationship has not been explored. A quantitative study was conducted to examine if medical laboratory employee perceptions of manager ethical leadership was associated with their own accountability behavior. A total of 69 participants responded online to three instruments to measure the study variables: ethical leadership was assessed by the Ethical Leadership at Work Questionnaire, employee accountability …


Black Skin, White Masks And The Paradoxical Politics Of Black Historiography, Tacuma Peters 2022 CUNY Hunter College

Black Skin, White Masks And The Paradoxical Politics Of Black Historiography, Tacuma Peters

Publications and Research

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks has the paradoxical status of being a text that rejects historiography and History as a primary means of facilitating radical political transformation while also being a key point of departure for histories concerning modern colonial and decolonial thought. This reflection is an examination of the tensions in Black Skin, White Masks as a political work and as an intervention into philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, and existential debates. Prompted by the 70th anniversary of the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, I examine the richness of the past two decades of historiographical scholarship on slavery, …


Phil 2103, Ethics, Syllabus, D. Robert MacDougall 2022 CUNY New York City College of Technology

Phil 2103, Ethics, Syllabus, D. Robert Macdougall

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.


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