Philosophy Commons^™

Does Lack Of Enrichment Invalidate Scientific Data Obtained From Rodents By Compromising Their Welfare?, Ann L. Baldwin Phd

Between the Species

In countries where major animal research is conducted, comprehensive laws exist to ensure that the animals’ physical needs are satisfactorily met. However, animals also require an environment that allows them to fulfill their behavioral needs; this will be the focus of the article. Two studies are described in detail, one on rats and the other on genetically modified mice, which were performed by the author to compare the effects of enriched and un-enriched cage environments on rodent physiology. Evidence is presented showing that if research rodents are housed in cages lacking structures that allow them to perform their normal behaviors, …

Why Animal Ethics Committees Don't Work, Denise Russell

Between the Species

Abstract

Animal ethics committees have been set up in many countries as a way to scrutinize animal experimentation and to assure the public that if animals are used in research then it is for a worthwhile cause and suffering is kept to a minimum. The ideals of Refinement, Reduction and Replacement are commonly upheld. However while refinement and reduction receive much attention in animal ethics committees the replacement of animals is much more difficult to incorporate into the committees’ deliberations. At least in Australia there are certain structural reasons for this but it is likely that most of the reasons …

Telling It Like It Is: A Proposal To Improve Transparency In Biomedical Research, John Hadley

Between the Species

Recent proposals to improve public communication about animal-based biomedical research have been narrowly focused on reforming biomedical journal submission guidelines. My suggestion for communication reform is broader in scope reaching beyond the research community to healthcare communicators and ultimately the general public. The suggestion is for researchers to provide journalists and public relations practitioners with concise summaries of their ‘animal use data’. Animal use data is collected by researchers and intended for the public record but is rarely, if ever, given significant media exposure. By providing healthcare communicators with specific details about their animal use, researchers can play a role …

Animals-As-Patients: Improving The Practice Of Animal Experimentation, Jane Johnson, Christopher Degeling

Between the Species

In this paper we propose a new way of conceptualizing animals in experimentation – the animal-as-patient. Construing and treating animals as patients offers a way of successfully addressing some of the entrenched epistemological and ethical problems within a practice of animal experimentation directed to human clinical benefit. This approach is grounded in an epistemological insight and builds on work with so-called ‘pet models’. It relies upon the occurrence and characterization of analogous human and nonhuman animal diseases, where, if certain criteria of homology and mechanism are met, the animal simultaneously becomes a patient and a spontaneous model of the human …

Utilitarianism And Replaceability Or Are Animals Expendable?, Stefan Sencerz

Between the Species

In her very interesting paper, “Peter Singer on Expendability,” L. A. Kemmerer re-examines Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument implying that some being are replaceable and the implications of this argument for the issue of treating animals. I attempt to defend Singer, and more generally utilitarianism (including the principle of replaceability), against these objections. I argue that, given a utilitarian outlook, some animals are indeed replaceable. But I also argue that few animals are replaceable in practice.

Negotiating The Anthropological Limit. Derrida, Stiegler, And The Question Of The Animal, Nathan Van Camp

Between the Species

Although much has been written about the so-called political, ethical and religious turns in the thinking of Jacques Derrida, few have noticed that his late writings were marked by what we could tentatively call a “zoological turn.” This is surprising given that in The Animal That Therefore I Am Derrida clearly stated that the question as to what distinguishes the human from the animal has for him always been the most important question of philosophy. This essay will attempt to offer a preliminary exploration of this still largely uncharted aspect of Derrida’s thought. Starting from a brief overview of Derrida’s …

All Too Human: "Animal Wisdom" In Nietzsche's Account Of The Good Life, Jonathan D. Singer

Between the Species

In this paper I argue that a certain understanding of “animality” – or that a certain problematization of the traditional human-animal hierarchy and divide – is central to Nietzsche’s account of the good life. Nietzsche’s philosophical project is primarily directed against those “metaphysical oppositions of values” that traditionally structure how we think, feel and live, and in this paper I submit that, for Nietzsche, the classical opposition between the human and the animal is the most basic and the most pernicious, for it undergirds the oppositional hierarchy between rationality and irrationality that has turned human life against itself. I draw …

Review Of Philosophy & Animal Life, Leif A. Devaney

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Articulating Animals: Animals And Implicit Inferences In Brandom’S Work, Joel D. Musser

Between the Species

Brandom denies animals implicit reasoning by emphasizing their inability to make inferences explicit, and in so doing, denigrates animals by likening their behavior to that of machines and artifacts. With disturbing regularity and ease, Brandom equates pigeons and parrots to machines and thermostats in their inability to express implicit/explicit inferences: neither the pigeon nor the machine can “provid[e] reasons for making other moves in the language game.”

I contest, however, that animals are paradigmatically more than any similarity or analogy to mechanical processing, just as humans are paradigmatically more than any reductive analogy to animals. The human/animal distinction need not …

Contractualism And The Moral Status Of Animals, Jennifer Swanson

Between the Species

While contractualism seems to solve some of the more pressing concerns of other moral theories, it does not conclusively address the moral status of non-human animals. Peter Carruthers claims that contractualism excludes animals from having full moral status. I argue that Carruthers’ arguments are fatally flawed due to his reliance on contradictory claims, unlikely assumptions, and flagrant violations of the contractualist method. However, Carruthers also claims that we can treat animals wrongly and that it deserves moral criticism. This claim is based in indirect moral significance. However, this position makes it impossible for Carruthers to avoid endorsing two extremely counter-intuitive …

The Bee-Haviour Of Scientists: An Analogy Of Science From The World Of Bees, Ben Trubody

Between the Species

I am going to compare the strategies and communication bees use in order to locate and retrieve nectar to the world of science and the scientist. The analogy is intentionally anthropomorphic but I wish to argue that if successful bees made assumptions they would be similar to those of the scientist: flowers can be regarded as facts, nectar as knowledge, honey as technology and their ‘waggle-dance’ as communication of ideas. I would like to say that this is to be used as an analogy and should not be taken to be a statement of the scientific method as an emergent …

Moral Agency In Mammalia, Mark D. Reid

Between the Species

About the extent of moral agency in the animal kingdom, one view is that only humans are moral agents. Holding a different view, I argue that moral agency depends on the capacity for other-regard and the capacity to be attuned to significance—such that things matter to one. I derive a criterion where a creature is a moral agent if she performs an action that promotes others’ significant interests and brings great costs to herself where she is aware of these significant interests and imposed costs. Failure to confirm that she has this awareness is a weakness of examples of moral …

Animals In The Kingdom Of Ends, Heather M. Kendrick

Between the Species

Kant claimed that human beings have no duties to animals because they are not autonomous ends in themselves. I argue that Kant was wrong to exclude animals from the realm of moral consideration. Animals, although they do not set their own ends and thus cannot be regarded as ends in themselves, do have ends that are given to them by nature. As beings with ends, they stand between mere things that have no ends, and rational beings that are ends in themselves. I propose a broader version of Kant's kingdom of ends, in which rational beings respect the ends of …

Between The Moment And Eternity: How Schillerian Play Can Establish Animals As Moral Agents, Jaime Denison

Between the Species

While concerned with how man achieves his status as a moral being, Friedrich Schiller develops a concept of play that serves as a bridge between our sensuous existence to the rational, realizing moral freedom. In what ways might we extend this concept to the non-human animal? Current research by play theorists and ethologists has shown that play behaviour in animals is both complex and crucial in determining social patterns, and Schiller’s account may have anticipated these observations. I argue that through Schiller’s theory of play and our current research on animal play, it is possible to undermine the systematic removal …

Extreme Humanism: Heidegger, Buber, And The Threshold Of Language, Frank Garrett

Between the Species

Throughout this essay I attempt to bring into focus what I see as the thorniest point of proximity between two giants in twentieth-century ontology; that is, the nature of language in the delineation between human beings and animals within the work of Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber. I consider Heidegger’s conception of world in an attempt to understand how he sees the abyss—as well as the bridge—between animals and humankind. Buber’s more encompassing view of being seems to be a fruitful catalyst for moving Heidegger closer to something at which he hints but from which he withdraws. By exploring the …

A Difference That Makes A Difference: Welfare And The Equality Of Consideration, Elijah Weber

Between the Species

In Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, L.W. Sumner defends two significant constraints on one’s theory of welfare: formality and generality. An adequate theory of welfare, claims Sumner, must give a constitutive account of the “good-for” relation. This constitutive account must be sufficiently general that any entity whose status as a welfare subject is uncontroversial falls within its scope. This paper will argue that Sumner’s proposed constraints are particularly significant to utilitarian arguments for the equal moral considerability of non-human animals. In the absence of these constraints, the inconsistency that is alleged to follow from denying moral considerability to non-human animals, while …

Innocent And Innocuous: The Case Against Animal Research, Joel Marks

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Husbandry To Industry: Animal Agriculture, Ethics And Public Policy, Jes Harfeld

Between the Species

The industrialisation of agriculture has led to considerable alterations at both the technological and economical levels of animal farming. Several animal welfare issues of modern animal agriculture – e.g. stress and stereotypical behaviour – can be traced back to the industrialised intensification of housing and numbers of animals in production. Although these welfare issues dictate ethical criticism, it is the claim of this article that such direct welfare issues are only the forefront of a greater systemic ethical problem inherent to industrialisation. Consequently, this article provides an analysis of the foundational ethical problems in animal agriculture which derive from (I) …

The Ethics Of The Ecology Of Fear Against The Nonspeciesist Paradigm: A Shift In The Aims Of Intervention In Nature, Oscar Horta

Between the Species

Humans often intervene in the wild for anthropocentric or environmental reasons. An example of such interventions is the reintroduction of wolves in places where they no longer live in order to create what has been called an “ecology of fear”, which is being currently discussed in places such as Scotland. In the first part of this paper I discuss the reasons for this measure and argue that they are not compatible with a nonspeciesist approach. Then, I claim that if we abandon a speciesist viewpoint we should change completely the way in which we should intervene in nature. Rather than …

Animals And Animals, Laurence Thomas

Between the Species

Speciesism is the wrong of not acknowledging the moral qualities that non-human animals possess that are similar or equivalent or even superior to the moral qualities that human beings possess. However, since it is manifestly clear that no one thinks that apes are in any way obligated to human beings, it clearly cannot be a form of speciesism to be mindful of the differences on the basis of which that is so. In opposition to the advocates of the Great Ape Project, my aim in this essay is to establish the quite minimal claim that apes should not have the …

The Hunt: A Short Story, Josephine Donovan

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Review Of Marti Kheel’S Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective, Rachel Fernflores

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Review Of Jean Kazez's Animalkind: What We Owe To Animals, James Stanescu

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Animals As Friends, Cynthia Townley

Between the Species

Whether animals, especially companion animals, count as friends depends on the conception of friendship as well as on the conception of animals. Some accounts of friendship can include (other than human) animals more easily than others. I present an argument in favour of characterising some animal-human connections as friendships, and address some of the standard objections to this characterisation. It might seem that under any conception of friendship, characterising animals as (potential) friends would likely lead to better treatment of animals, as various kinds of ill-treatment or use would not be consistent with treating someone as a friend. However, concern …

Second Nature And Animal Life, Stefano Di Brisco

Between the Species

I am concerned in this paper with McDowell's account of human uniqueness in nature in terms of a fundamental difference between humans and animals. I try to show that the concept of that difference is relevant for a Wittgensteinian understanding of the place of rationality in nature. I then develop an internal criticism of McDowell's transcendental way of approaching this topic by using Diamond's insights about the importance of the details for a realistic philosophical account of human mindedness. My aim is to show that the difference between humans and animals is constitutive of our understanding of what it means …

Discourse First, Cages Second: A New Locus For Animal Liberation, Brianne Donaldson

Between the Species

The Animal that was named, categorized, and excluded from the human community by the Greeks has seeped into society at multiple points. This Animal now exists in a paradoxical limbo where she is both excluded from social standing and moral consideration while at the same time being included, utilized and discussed within all sectors of society from advertising to philosophy, neuroscience to the pet industry, religion to farming. Thus, animals have been caught up in multiple mechanisms of explanatory terminology, symbolic use, and physical captivity which all work together to create a Discourse of the Animal, which is employed both …

Review Of Wesley J. Smith's A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy: The Human Cost Of The Animal Rights Movement, Angus Taylor

Between the Species

No abstract provided.

Feral Animals And The Restoration Of Nature, Roger J.H. King

Between the Species

Projects to restore nature inevitably disrupt the plants and animals that inhabit the land to be restored. This essay addresses the significance of feral animals. Can feral animals remain in a restored nature? I argue that an answer depends on what we mean by nature and restoration. I present several different conceptions of nature and discuss what their differences mean for the goals of restoration. While the presence of feral animals is not compatible with the dualist conception of nature as that which is untouched by humans, other conceptions are more accommodating. Restoration to a benchmark of nature prior to …

Nonhuman Animals In Adam Smith’S Moral Theory, Alejandra Mancilla

Between the Species

By giving sympathy a central role, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) can be regarded as one of the ‘enlightened’ moral theories of the Enlightenment, insofar as it widened the scope of moral consideration beyond the traditionally restricted boundary of human beings. This, although the author himself does not seem to have been aware of this fact. In this paper, I want to focus on two aspects which I think lead to this conclusion. First, by making sentience the requisite to be taken into moral consideration, nonhuman animals in Smith’s moral theory can count as moral patients towards whom …

How Ought We To Live With Nonhuman Animals? Peter Singer’S Answer: Animal Liberation Part I, Lesley Mclean

Between the Species

In this paper and the next I discuss Peter Singer’s approach to answering the question of how one ought to live with nonhuman animals. In the first paper I situate Singer’s work within the larger historical context of moral concern for animals, looking at previous public consensus on the issue, its breakdown and its re-emergence with Singer in the 1970s. In the second paper, I take a closer look at Singer’s highly influential book, Animal Liberation (1975), and argue that as activist literature, his chapter on animal experimentation for example can be seen as morally persuasive in ways other than …