Offers a forthright approach to the many disquieting questions surrounding the emotional debate over animal rights. This book includes a chapter on animal agriculture, and additional discussions of animal law, companion animal issues, genetic engineering, animal pain, animal research, and other topics.

Offers a forthright approach to the many disquieting questions surrounding the emotional debate over animal rights. This book includes a chapter on animal agriculture, and additional discussions of animal law, companion animal issues, genetic engineering, animal pain, animal research, and other topics.

This study investigated the relations of cheating on an exam and using a false excuse to avoid taking an exam as scheduled to various forms of minor deviance. College students completed measures of cheating, false excuse making, and minor deviance. A factor analysis identified clusters of deviance behaviors. Cheaters scored higher than noncheaters on measures of unreliability and risky driving behaviors, and false excuse makers scored higher than other students on measures of substance use, risky driving, illegal behaviors, and personal (...) unreliability. In addition, men scored higher than women on substance abuse and illegal behaviors factors. Results are interpreted in terms of personological theories of honesty and reliability. (shrink)

This book is a philosophically sophisticated and scientifically well-informed discussion of the moral and social issues raised by genetically engineering animals, a powerful technology which has major implications for society. Unlike other books on this emotionally charged subject, the author attempts to inform, not inflame, the reader about the real problems society must address in order to manage this technology. Bernard Rollin is both a professor of philosophy, and physiology and biophysics, and writes from a uniquely well-informed perspective on (...) this topic. The style is non-technical and anecdotal and will ensure that the book can be used on a wide range of courses on bioethics, biotechnology, veterinary medicine and public policy. The book could also appeal to a general, non-academic reader with a serious interest in genetic engineering. (shrink)

In Science and Ethics, Bernard Rollin examines the ideology that denies the relevance of ethics to science. Providing an introduction to basic ethical concepts, he discusses a variety of ethical issues that are relevant to science and how they are ignored, to the detriment of both science and society. These include research on human subjects, animal research, genetic engineering, biotechnology, cloning, xenotransplantation, and stem cell research. Rollin also explores the ideological agnosticism that scientists have displayed regarding subjective experience in (...) humans and animals, and its pernicious effect on pain management. Finally, he articulates the implications of the ideological denial of ethics for the practice of science itself in terms of fraud, plagiarism, and data falsification. In engaging prose and with philosophical sophistication, Rollin cogently argues in favor of making education in ethics part and parcel of scientific training. (shrink)

Reid's response to hume has traditionally been taken as begging all of hume's questions. One can, However, Find in reid an argument against hume's phenomenalistic skepticism. Reid's appeal to common sense is an attempt to call attention to the fact that we experience objects as external to us, Not as bundles of impressions. Still, Our access to these objects does arise out of sensations, Which are mental contents. Extending berkeley's idea of the "language of nature" reid suggests that language and (...) signification present apt theoretical models for explaining perception. Using this model, One can provide an answer to the argument from illusion. (shrink)

Moral psychology is often ignored in ethical theory, making applied ethics difficult to achieve in practice. This is particularly true in the new field of animal ethics. One key feature of moral psychology is recognition of the moral primacy of those with whom we enjoy relationships of love and friendship – philia in Aristotles term. Although a radically new ethic for animal treatment is emerging in society, its full expression is severely limited by our exploitative uses of animals. At this (...) historical moment, only the animals with whom we enjoy philia – companion animals – can be treated with unrestricted moral concern. This ought to be accomplished, both for its own sake and as an ideal model for the future evolution of animal ethics. (shrink)

Although women hold more negative attitudes toward cheating than do men, they are about as likely to engage in academic dishonesty. Cognitive dissonance theory predicts that this attitude-behavior inconsistency should lead women to experience more negative affect after cheating than would men. This prediction was tested in a sample of 92 male and 78 female college students who reported having cheated on an examination during the prior 6 months. Consistent with the results of previous research, women reported more negative attitudes (...) toward cheating than did men, but cheated at the same rate. However, women did not experience more negative affect than did men, although they reported experiencing less positive affect. The gender difference in positive affect was partially mediated by the gender difference in attitudes. (shrink)

The history of the regulation of animal research is essentially the history of the emergence of meaningful social ethics for animals in society. Initially, animal ethics concerned itself solely with cruelty, but this was seen as inadequate to late 20th-century concerns about animal use. The new social ethic for animals was quite different, and its conceptual bases are explored in this paper. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 represented a very minimal and in many ways incoherent attempt to regulate animal (...) research, and is far from morally adequate. The 1985 amendments did much to render coherent the ethic for laboratory animals, but these standards were still inadequate in many ways, as enumerated here. The philosophy underlying these laws is explained, their main provisions are explored, and future directions that could move the ethic forward and further rationalize the laws are sketched. (shrink)

It’s no wonder descriptions of riding often resemble the words of Asian mystics and Jedi knights: The ride causes your senses to open completely. You experience only the present, the now. Readers who prefer revving a Harley to meditating in a Zen garden know that biking is just as contemplative as chanting in the lotus position. Here, philosopher-bikers explore this seeming dichotomy, expounding on intriguing questions such as: Why are the motorcycles the real stars of Easy Rider? What would Marx (...) and Foucault say about Harley riders’ tight leather garb? What’s it like to live a dual life as a philosophy professor who wrenches his own 1965 Electra Glide? Would Jesus hang out in a biker bar or a coffeehouse? And more importantly, would He ride a Harley or a Honda? These witty, provocative essays give readers and riders a new appreciation of what it means to become one with the road. (shrink)

The advent of cloning animals has created a maelstrom of social concern about the ethical issues associated with the possibility of cloning humans. When the ethical concerns are clearly examined, however, many of them turn out to be less matters of rational ethics than knee-jerk emotion, religious bias, or fear of that which is not understood. Three categories of real and spurious ethical concerns are presented and discussed: 1) that cloning is intrinsically wrong, 2) that cloning must lead to bad (...) consequences, and 3) that cloning harms the organism generated. The need for a rational ethical framework for discussing biotechnological advances is presented and defended. (shrink)

First published in 1970, Bernard E. Jones’s selection of Gifford lectures includes excerpts from the writings of over ninety scholars who occupied a Gifford Chair between 1888 and 1968. Lord Gifford had asked his lecturers to be ‘honest to God’, insisting that they should be ‘earnest enquirers after truth’ and had always envisaged the lectures being published. Dr Jones’s anthology is arranged under headings suggested by phrases from Lord Gifford’s will. The selection, which includes names such as William James, (...) A.N. Whitehead, Temple, Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Niebuhr and Tillich, was made in such a way that the reader would be able to really grasp what natural theology is about. Bernard Ewart Jones served as a Methodist minister, before being appointed to the Lewins Chair of Philosophy at his old college, Hartley Victoria, Manchester. He was awarded a doctorate by the University of Leeds in 1966 for his thesis on ‘The Concept of Natural Theology in Gifford Lectures’. (shrink)

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of political as opposed to civil disobedience that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that has dominated our collective imagination in this country since before the cold war. Civil disobedience accepts the legitimacy of the political structure and of our political institutions but resists the moral authority of the resulting laws. It is “civil” in its disobedience—civil in the etymological sense of taking place within a shared (...) political community, within the classical Latin framework of civilitas, within an art of civil government. Civil disobedience accepts the verdict and condemnation that the civilly disobedient bring upon themselves. It respects the legal norm at the very moment of resistance and places itself under the sanction of that norm. If it resists the legal sanction that it itself entails, it is, in effect, no longer truly civil disobedience. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.” Civil disobedience does not aim to displace the law-making institutions or the structure of legal governance but rather to challenge the governing laws by demonstrating their injustice.Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed. It rejects the idea of honoring or expressing the “highest respect for law.” It refuses to willingly accept the sanctions meted out by the legal and political system. It challenges the conventional way that political governance takes place, that laws are enforced. It turns its back on the political institutions and actors who govern us all. It resists the structure of partisan politics, the traditional demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and, beyond that, the very ideologies that have dominated the postwar period. (shrink)

Numerous ethical issues have emerged from the industrialization of animal agriculture. Those issues ultimately rest in large measure upon overuse of antibiotics. How this has occurred is discussed in detail in this paper.

The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western (...) societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce. (shrink)

First published in 1970, Bernard E. Jones’s selection of Gifford lectures includes excerpts from the writings of over ninety scholars who occupied a Gifford Chair between 1888 and 1968. Lord Gifford had asked his lecturers to be ‘honest to God’, insisting that they should be ‘earnest enquirers after truth’ and had always envisaged the lectures being published. Dr Jones’s anthology is arranged under headings suggested by phrases from Lord Gifford’s will. The selection, which includes names such as William James, (...) A.N. Whitehead, Temple, Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Niebuhr and Tillich, was made in such a way that the reader would be able to really grasp what natural theology is about. Bernard Ewart Jones served as a Methodist minister, before being appointed to the Lewins Chair of Philosophy at his old college, Hartley Victoria, Manchester. He was awarded a doctorate by the University of Leeds in 1966 for his thesis on ‘The Concept of Natural Theology in Gifford Lectures’. (shrink)

The development of animal ethics has been characterized by both progress and absurdity. More activity in animal welfare has occurred in the past 50 years than in the previous 500, with large numbers of legislative actions supplanting the lone anti-cruelty laws. Nonetheless, there remains a tendency to confuse animal ethics with human ethics. I found this to be the case when my colleagues and I were drafting federal law requiring control of pain in invasive research. The history of animal ethics (...) vacillates between Descartes’ denial of thought and feeling in animals and British empiricism, including the great skeptic David Hume, who affirmed in no uncertain terms the existence of animal mind. This approach was continued in British empiricism, culminating in the work of Charles Darwin. But despite Darwinian domination of biology and psychology, psychology was captured by denial of mind and consciousness by JB Watson, father of behaviorism. Denial of thought and feeling in animals continued in 20th century science and medicine while society in general became ever more firm in asserting their existence. (shrink)

Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today’s critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more. Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic (...) and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Only critical theory can guide us toward a more self-reflexive pursuit of justice. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, “What is to be done?” we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, “What more am I to do?” Critique and Praxis advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Joining his decades of activism, social-justice litigation, and political engagement with his years of critical theory and philosophical work, Harcourt has written a magnum opus. (shrink)

Although 20th-century empiricists were agnostic about animal mind and consciousness, this was not the case for their historical ancestors – John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and, of course, Charles Darwin and George John Romanes. Given the dominance of the Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary continuity, one would not expect belief in animal mind to disappear. That it did demonstrates that standard accounts of how scientific hypotheses are overturned – i.e., by empirical disconfirmation or by exposure of logical (...) flaws – is inadequate. In fact, it can be demonstrated that belief in animal mind disappeared as a result of a change of values, a mechanism also apparent in the Scientific Revolution. The “valuational revolution” responsible for denying animal mind is examined in terms of the rise of Behaviorism and its flawed account of the historical inevitability of denying animal mentation. The effects of the denial of animal consciousness included profound moral implications for the major uses of animals in agriculture and scientific research. The latter is particularly notable for the denial of felt pain in animals. The rise of societal moral concern for animals, however, has driven the “reappropriation of common sense” about animal thought and feeling. (shrink)

This paper is a reading of Aristotle's book on justice (Book V of the Ethics) as what he says it is, a study of the disposition or inclination towards doing just (or unjust) acts. In that light, the content of Aristotle's famous treatments of distributive and corrective justice are only incidental, for their true role is as clues to a meaningful picture of the Just and the Unjust person. Aristotle's treatment of Being Just as a specific virtue is the most (...) detailed treatment he offers of any moral virtue. Being Just as distributive justice emerges as a commitment to the equal treatment of all citizens, but to an equality tempered by always contentious considerations of merited reward. Being Just as corrective justice is a commitment to protecting and repairing the sphere of each person's dignity and opportunity from damaging and sometimes malicious interactions. But more is required. For Being Just means overcoming the disordered and misdirected desire that both Aristotle and Plato call "pleonexia", wanting - tyrant-like - more-of-and-more-than. If that is overcome by re-directed libido, the virtuous will then have to integrate more subtle elements if they are to achieve an inclination to this tempered, but real equality. These elements are two. One is present only implicitly, the passion Aristotle calls nemesis, a demand that the world - and justice within the world - must never permit an evil person to go unpunished or a good one, to suffer harm. That passion cannot be admitted, but at best can only be temporarily stilled. The second impediment arises from the dynamic of human communities that are made up of diverse and actively striving individuals: such citizens, haunted by suspicion grounded in their own pleonexia, demand that the community be one of laws. That creates a true dilemma, for in Aristotle's estimation, no set of rules can cabin any virtue. The Rule of Law is in tension with the particularity of justice in real life, and that tension is ultimately only bearable through the invention of equity, the trusted deviation from the law to preserve the law. In making this abstract I have had to leave untouched the subject matter of the first and two last chapters, but in my paper I do treat these. More importantly, I also show how all political community and the inclination to seek to be a Just Person rests on a gracious act of reciprocal commitment. (shrink)

This dissertation studies how Aristotle understands and justifies his Rhetorical Art. It proceeds by explicating the Art in its intellectual context. Rhetoric emerges as a dynamic investigation of human affairs working through the "given" in speech and thought to a plausible account, while giving consideration to the opinions and characters of both speaker and audience within the horizon of a particular occasion. The basic dynamic determines a structure which is comparable to Socrates' requirements in the Phaedrus. That this is the (...) structure and dynamic is supported by considering the fundamentally contingent nature of human experience, understanding the inference types , common sense principles and starting points by which such experience is explicated, and placing such experience in three mutually exclusive genres. Aristotle's art is essentially the resulting plausible account while actual composition is supplementary. ;Aristotle limits the art by reference to dialectic and ethical life. When it is seen that Aristotle's Organon is not a science of logic and the Posterior Analytics is a rarely applicable mode of presentation, the point of dialectic becomes accessible. It too involves strenuous grappling with speech and thought, but its highest purpose lies in peirastic. Peirastic and sophistry are uses of dialectic which have a contrasting moral color. Peirastic aims at the discovery of ignorance and, at the same time, the difference between accident and essence and knowledge and opinion: Being educated is essentially knowing what one does not know. ;What Socrates only alludes to as political art, Aristotle attempts to expound as praxis perfected into phronesis. Even Aristotle does no more than suggest the nature of phronesis negatively as simultaneously a seeking, a finding and an act which is both self-determination and self-knowledge, and none of these separately; it is profoundly disruptive of existing opinion and most clearly to be seen in the rejection of the laws and rules upon which, as deliberation, it is dependent. The Art differs from Gorgias' rhetoric in its emphasis on the plausible and in its subordination to an ethical self-determination that gains the weight of experience appropriated by intelligence and virtue. (shrink)

Historically, society has not had a robust, institutionalized ethic for how animals should be treated. Before the Animal Welfare Act, the only laws constraining animal use in society were the anticruelty laws forbidding sadistic, deviant, purposeless, deliberate, unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering on animals, or outrageous neglect. These laws, both by statute and by judicial interpretation, did not apply to socially accepted animal uses such as research or agriculture. Because the overwhelming use of animals in society was in agriculture, (...) aimed at providing food, fiber, locomotion, and power, and because the key to agricultural success was having healthy animals, good husbandry and good care were enforced by the most powerful sanction, self‐interest; the anticruelty laws were only there for society to manage sadists and psychopaths unmoved by self‐interest. But with the emergence of new kinds of “normal” animal use—such as intensive agriculture and animal research, both of which caused animal pain and suffering that did not fall under the anticruelty ethic—society was forced to create a new ethic for animals that went “beyond cruelty.” The Animal Welfare Act was a start, but it did not address all of the ethical concerns that society has had about the treatment of animals. As evidence of the need for a new ethic for animals, thousands of bills pertaining to animal welfare have been promulgated across the United States in the last decade. The new ethic for animals essentially applies much of our social ethic for humans, mutatis mutandis, to the treatment of animals and embodies the desired protections in the legal system. (shrink)