Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons^™

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

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

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

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

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

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

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

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

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

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Sentience And Sentient Minds, John Anthony Webster

Animal Sentience

My commentary builds on Rowan et al.’s (2022) comprehensive review to address the question ‘what do we mean by sentience?’ It suggests how we might recognise degrees of sentience within the animal kingdom, ranging from primitive sensations such as hunger and pain to more complex emotions that determine quality of life.

Defending Human Difference By Raising The Bar, Joe Gough

Animal Sentience

Chapman & Huffman (C&H) offer a theory of why we humans want to believe that we are different: to justify our cruelty to animals. This commentary offers further supporting evidence of this and examines more closely what the claim that humans are ‘different’ amounts to. It also considers some methodological issues in animal psychology closely related to C&H ‘s theory. These problems result from a common strategy for defending hypotheses about human difference.

Philosophy In The Narrative Mode: Alexander The Great As An Ethical Character From Roman To Medieval Islamicate Literature, Anna Ayşe Akasoy

Publications and Research

Histories of Arabic and Islamic philosophy tend to focus on texts which are systematic in nature and conventionally classified as philosophy or related scholarly disciplines. Philosophical principles, however, are also defining features of texts associated with other genres. Within the larger field of philosophy, this might be especially true of ethics and within the larger body of literature this might be especially the case for stories. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the very purpose of storytelling is to reinforce and disseminate moral conventions. Likewise, the moral philosopher can be conceptualized as a homo narrans.

The aim of this …

Creolizing Modern Buddhism: A Reply To Yarran Hominh & A. Minh Nguyen, Evan Thompson

Comparative Philosophy

In reply to Hominh and Nguyen, I argue that “creolizing” methods in the study and practice of Buddhism should not be opposed to historicist and contextualist modes of investigation and understanding. Rather, historicism and contextualism can and should inform creolizing approaches.

Cosmopolitanism, Creolization, And Non-Exceptionalist Buddhist Modernisms: On Evan Thompson’S Why I Am Not A Buddhist, Yarran Hominh, A. Minh Nguyen

Comparative Philosophy

In his recent book, Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson argues that inter-tradition or cross-cultural philosophical dialogue ought to be governed by cosmopolitan conversational norms that do not subsume any one tradition’s deep commitments under those of any other tradition, but rather bring those commitments into the discussion so that they can be challenged and defended. He argues on this basis for the application of a deeply contextualist and historicist interpretive methodology to Buddhist texts, concepts, and theories in dialogue with philosophy and contemporary cognitive sciences. Buddhist modernism, in eschewing that deeply contextualist and historicist methodology, falls …

Sameness, Difference And Environmental Concern In The Metaphysics And Ethics Of Spinoza And Chan Buddhism, Michael Hemmingsen

Comparative Philosophy

In this paper I contrast the metaphysical philosophies of Benedict de Spinoza and the ‘sudden enlightenment’ tradition of Chan Buddhism. Spinoza’s expressivist philosophy, in which everything can be conceived via a lineage of finite causes terminating in substance as a metaphysical ground of all things, emphasises the relative sameness of all entities. By contrast, Chan’s philosophy of emptiness, which rests on the dependent co-origination of all entities, renders such comparison fundamentally meaningless. Having no source beyond dependent co-origination to generate a thing’s distinct nature leads to a metaphysics in which, rather than being relatively similar or different, all things …

Scarcity Or Economic Insecurity? Two Yardsticks For Measuring Capitalism’S Performance, Costas Panayotakis

Publications and Research

This article argues that capitalism’s relationship to economic insecurity is as important for the evaluation of that system as its relationship to scarcity. Critically analyzing the neoclassical and Marxist focus on capitalism’s relationship to scarcity, the article describes how capitalism’s relationship to economic insecurity offers a more cogent elaboration of these traditions’ shared belief that the economic system should serve people. In particular, while critical of the neoclassical portrayal of capitalism as a system using scarce resources efficiently, this paper also argues, against Marxism, that an alternative to capitalism might be preferable even if scarcity is not abolished.

A Kantian View Of Transgenderism, Michael S. Mendoza

Liberty Theological Review

• The recent popularity of sex reassignment surgery is logically untenable and immoral when understood in the light of Kantian philosophy. From a Kantian perspective of synthetic a priori judgments, I argue that a biological male cannot rationally claim to “feel like a woman inside.” As a male, any female is part of the noumenal world and cannot be known apart from perception. The statement “I feel like a woman inside” assumes all women feel the same on the inside. Kant’s explanation of the noumenal and phenomenal excludes the possibility of knowing that all women or men feel the same inside …

Laura Mason (1957-2021): An Appreciation

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

Animals In Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression And Vegan Liberation In Britain's First Colony By Corey Lee Wren, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems And How To Fix Them, Martin Caraher

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

Irish Country Furniture And Furnishing 1700-2000 By Claudia Kinmonth, Clodagh Doyle

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

Silence In The Kitchen: How Students Innovated And Created Despite Covid-19., Anna Cruickshank, Pauline Danaher

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

The COVID-19 lockdown has changed the educational landscape forever; everything that we thought we could not do online, it turned out we could. When the Irish Government announced that all third-level educational institutes were to close in March 2020 and that lecturers would move theory-based lectures online, it seemed a daunting challenge. Most lecturing staff had little experience of lecturing with online platforms and no time to prepare the students for new ways of working and attending class. Little did we know that twelve months later, as the crisis raged on, that an even bigger decision had to be grappled …

"This Wizard Of The Cooking Stove": How P.G. Wodehouse Contributed To The Field Of Gastronomy Through Anatole, The French Chef, In The Jeeves-And-Wooster Series, Elizabeth Wilson, Anke Klitzing

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s premise that Balzac, a realist fiction author, contributed to the cultural field of gastronomy by his ethnographically accurate depictions of restaurants in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, prompts asking whether this may be true for other fiction authors that painstakingly reflect the foodways of their time and place, such as English author P.G. Wodehouse through his character, the French chef Anatole, in the Jeeves-and-Wooster series. Thematic analysis found three gastronomic themes surrounding Anatole that could be confirmed as historically accurate. The highly-skilled chef employed in the country houses of the Edwardian upper class possessed cultural capital through his professional capabilities …

Food, Comfort And Community: Media Coverage Of Last Meals For The Dying, Tina Sikka

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

This article examines the media coverage of food in the context of community-based end of life rituals and death meals that are increasingly being observed by those undergoing a medically assisted death (medical assistance in dying: MAID). I employ a reconstituted form of media analysis that aims to identify and unpack the socio-cultural themes, values, and assumptions that underpin these food events. These include the central frame of plenty, community/family, personality, comfort, and gender. My objective is to provoke a discussion about how media coverage acts as a site from which to understand the significance of food in the context …

Dependent Or Independent: Exploring The Culture Of Local Coffee Shops In China, Hui Zhi, Huan Chen

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

Despite the short history of coffee in China, the Chinese coffee market has been expanding and gradually becoming an important overseas market for coffee transnational corporations such as Nestlé and Starbucks since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the number of independent coffee shops owned by individuals in China is inflating in response to the increasing demand of high-quality coffee. The popularity of independent coffee shops reflects a struggle between local and global cultures. Although previous studies about independent coffee shops in other Asian countries and areas, such as Japan and Taiwan, are abundant, no study has yet addressed independent coffee shops in …

Editorial, Michelle Share, Dorothy Cashman, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

Cover And Table Of Contents

European Journal of Food Drink and Society

No abstract provided.

A Conflict Of Disinterest: The Problem Of Party In The Early American Republic, Darren Morgan

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

This study examines the lost classical republican virtue of disinterestedness—its early role in the nation’s founding, its eventual subordination to partisanship, and its enduring legacy in the realm of politics. Two seminal documents shaped Americans’ early ideas regarding disinterestedness, namely James Madison’s Federalist, No. 10 and George Washington’s “Farewell Address;” however, these cornerstones of impartial politics built upon a long history of classical republican thought from both ancient Rome and mother England. The eventual impracticality of such a virtue quickly gave way to a more enticing and interested form of politics in the early republic—one where lines were rapidly …

A Critique Of Audi's Ethical Intuitionism, Caleb Yarbrough

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Robert Audi’s 2005 book The Good in the Right is a formidable representative of the recently resurgent theory ethical intuitionism (EI). Its renown is not unearned; Audi has developed a novel version of EI that preserves some of the most appealing features of Rossian EI while making a few key changes that help it to stand up better to some criticisms. This paper will explore Audi’s position and articulate a variety of objections to it that, taken together, prevent it from being a serious contender on the metaethical stage. The first section will discuss some of the difficulties with Audi’s …