Online research in philosophy

The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals—and other people—as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of difference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals.

I offer some reasons for the theory that, compared with human beings, non-human animals have some but lesser intrinsic value. On the basis of this theory, I first argue that we do not know how to compare an animal's claim to be free from a more serious type of harm (e.g., death), and a human's claim to be free from some lesser type of harm (e.g., non-fatal morbidity). For we need to take account of these parties' intrinsic value, and their competing types of claim. Yet, there exists no known way for making such comparison, when a human's intrinsic value is higher than that of an animal, whereas the type of claim an animal has is morally weightier than the type of claim a human has. Second, I explain why utilitarianism is unhelpful in making such comparison. Third, in the case where some animals can be sacrificed for saving a larger number of humans, it is crucial to ask whether animals have the right to life, and I argue that this question is more perplexing than we might think. My conclusion is that the various difficulties mentioned above have a deeper source than we have so far acknowledged, and that this reflects that the moral reality is less tidy and more complex than many theories portray.

This essay critically evaluates the theodicies of John Hick, Richard Swinburne and process theism regarding animal suffering and evils. Their positions on animals are found to be flawed and/or inadequate because they cannot explain the mass suffering and unnecessary deaths to animals throughout time. I also offer a positive contribution. That is, God’s putative love for all humans and animals does not entail that he loves every single human and animal. It is very possible that God treats humans and animals similarly in regard to evils. This theory partly explains human tragedies such as the Holocaust and much unnecessary animal and human suffering.

Several writers on animal ethics defend the abolition of most or all animal agriculture, which they consider an unethical exploitation of sentient non-human animals. However, animal agriculture can also be seen as a co-evolution over thousands of years, that has affected biology and behavior on the one hand, and quality of life of humans and domestic animals on the other. Furthermore, animals are important in sustainable agriculture. They can increase efficiency by their ability to transform materials unsuitable for human consumption and by grazing areas that would be difficult to harvest otherwise. Grazing of natural pastures is essential for the pastoral landscape, an important habitat for wild flora and fauna and much valued by humans for its aesthetic value. Thus it seems that the environment gains substantially when animals are included in sustainable agricultural systems. But what about the animals themselves? Objections against animal agriculture often refer to the disrespect for animals’ lives, integrity, and welfare in present intensive animal production systems. Of the three issues at stake, neither integrity nor animal welfare need in principle be violated in carefully designed animal husbandry systems. The main ethical conflict seems to lie in the killing of animals, which is inevitable if the system is to deliver animal products. In this paper, we present the benefits and costs to humans and animals of including animals in sustainable agriculture, and discuss how to address some of the ethical issues involved.

A theory of the beliefs of non-human animals is not closed to us, only because we do not have beliefs of their kind. Starting from a theory of human beliefs and working on a building block model of propositional attitudes a theory of animal beliefs is viable. Such a theory is an example of the broader conception of a heterophenomenological approach to animal cognition. The theory aims at outlining the crucial differences between human and animal beliefs as well as the relations between these attitudes and theories of them. By this it contributes both to a theory of human cognition and to a theory of the evolutionary origin of human cognition. The capacities of animals can thus be appreciated without making animals minor humans. Human cognition can be seen in its uniqueness without cutting the ties to its evolutionary origin.

A theory of the beliefs of non-human animals is not closed to us, only because we do not have beliefs of their kind. Starting from a theory of human beliefs and working on a building block model of propositional attitudes a theory of animal beliefs is viable. Such a theory is an example of the broader conception of a heterophenomenological approach to animal cognition. The theory aims at outlining the crucial differences between human and animal beliefs as well as the relations between these attitudes and theories of them. By this it contributes both to a theory of human cognition and to a theory of the evolutionary origin of human cognition. The capacities of animals can thus be appreciated without making animals minor humans. Human cognition can be seen in its uniqueness without cutting the ties to its evolutionary origin.

Keeley has recently argued that the philosophical issue of how to analyse the concept of a sense can usefully be addressed by considering how scientists, and more specifically neuroethologists, classify the senses. After briefly outlining his proposal, which is based on the application of an ordered set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for modality differentiation, I argue, by way of two complementary counterexamples, that it fails to account fully for the way the senses are in fact individuated in neuroethology and other relevant sciences. I suggest substantial modifications to Keeley.

The senses, or sensory modalities, constitute the different ways we have of perceiving the world, such as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But how many senses are there? How many could there be? What makes the senses different? What interaction takes place between the senses? This book is a guide to thinking about these questions. Together with an extensive introduction to the topic, the book contains the key classic papers on this subject together with nine newly commissioned essays. One reason that these questions are important is that we are receiving a huge influx of new information from the sciences that challenges some traditional philosophical views about the senses. This information needs to be incorporated into our view of the senses and perception. Can we do this whilst retaining our pre-existing concepts of the senses and of perception or do we need to revise our concepts? If they need to be revised, then in what way should that be done? Research in diverse areas, such as the nature of human perception, varieties of non-human animal perception, the interaction between different sensory modalities, perceptual disorders, and possible treatments for them, calls into question the platitude that there are five senses, as well as the pre-supposition that we know what we are counting when we count them as five (or more). This book will serve as an inspiring introduction to the topic and as a basis from which further new research will grow.

When the human understanding of beasts in the past is studied, what are revealed is not only the foundations of our own perception of animals, but humans contemplating their own status. This book argues that what is revealed in a wide range of writing from the early modern period is a recurring attempt to separate the human from the beast. Looking at the representation of the animal in the law, religious writings, literary representation, science and political ideas, what emerges is a sense of the fragility of humanity, a sense of a species which always requires an external addition--property, civilization, education--to be fully human.

When we take the term literally, “aesthetic education” refers to the senses. The etymological root of “aesthetic” is, aesthesis (ai[sqhsi"), the Greek word signifying “perception by the senses.” The corresponding verb is aisthanomai (aijsqanovmai), which means “to apprehend by the senses,” i.e., to see, hear, touch, etc.1 What does it mean to educate the senses? The senses, as Aristotle noted, are what we share with animals.2 The question of their education, thus, involves the notion of our “animal” nature. We see the animals about us. We note our similarities. We assert that that part of them is within us. Doing so, we draw a line between our animal and human nature. The question of aesthetic education concerns this line, both the line and its trespass. The line is between the educator and the educated, the human and the animal. The human, in educating the senses, we could say, educates the animal within it. It humanizes it. It extends its territory. The human, however, includes the animal. Could we not also see this education as the advance of the animal to the human, the extension of its territory? To answer such questions we must come to terms not just with the animal but also the human. Without this, we cannot know the role of humanistic education, understood literally as the” education of the human.” What I propose in this paper is suggest some answers to the question of the relation of the animal to the human. The claim I will be making is that aesthetic education, the education of our sensibility, is humanistic education in the etymological sense of the word, “e-ducate.” It is what first “leads or draws out” the human. It is the condition of the possibility of the being of..