In this article we argue that the social value of health research should be conceptualized as a function of both the expected benefits of the research and the priority that the beneficiaries deserve. People deserve greater priority the worse off they are. This conception of social value can be applied for at least two important purposes: in health research priority setting when research funders, policy-makers, or researchers decide between alternative research projects; and in evaluating the ethics of proposed research proposals (...) when research ethics committees assess whether the social value of the research is sufficient to justify the risks and burdens to research participants and others. In assessing how far a proposed research project will advance the interests of people who are more disadvantaged, research priority setters and RECs should examine the diseases that the research targets and the type of research. Just as certain diseases impose a greater burden on people who are more disadvantaged, so certain types of intervention and forms of research are more likely to benefit people who are more disadvantaged. We outline which populations are likely to be representative of the global worst off and identify what types of health research, and which disease categories, are priorities for these populations. (shrink)

In the last two decades an increasing number of musicians, musicologists and philosophers in the United States of America have dealt with questions of philosophy of music on a phenomenological basis. F. Joseph Smith certainly deserves mention as one of the first and most innovative of these authors. Sections 1 and 2 of the paper sketch a portrait of Smith against the background of the current situation in America, where there is a strong awareness of the need to overcome (...) the present limits imposed by historical musicology in order to develop a new phenomenological approach. Section 3 expounds Smith 's critique against traditional theory of musical form and his attempt to redefine musical form on the basis of Husserl's treatise on passive synthesis. This, in the author's opinion, is Smith 's most important contribution to a phenomenologically oriented philosophy of music. Finally, section 4 tries to draw some critical conclusions concerning Smith 's work, with special regard to the merits and demerits of his idea of phenomenology as applied to music. (shrink)

This paper focuses on chronology, structure and purpose of Dirck Canter’s edition of comic fragmentary poets, Aristophanes and Menander in mss. Par. suppl. gr. 1013 and D’Orville 123. It studies the history of the texts and offers unpublished conjectures of Dirck Canter and Joseph Justus Scaliger to the text of the comic poets and Machon’s “Chreiai”.

This article is a critical investigation of the buildings and writings of Étienne-Joseph Gaboury, a prolific French Canadian architect who, in the 1960s, designed several modern parish churches and engaged with various liturgical documents issued in the context of the Second Vatican Council. How have the various calls of priests and theologians advocating for artistic and liturgical renewal—calls which became increasingly frequent in the North Atlantic world after World War II—been adapted and implemented in specific architectural landmarks by Gaboury, (...) such as his famous Précieux-Sang Church and Blessed Sacrament Church in Manitoba? I argue that Gaboury’s account of the origins of Christianity and his description of religious experience in both embodied and spiritual terms, found in his essay “Design for Worship”, can be understood not simply as an aggiornamento, or bringing the Church “up to date,” but also as echoes, in aesthetic and architectural terms, of some of the key tenets of the “new theology,” which were central to the changes put forth by the Second Vatican Council. I also argue that Gaboury’s interests in materiality and in the evocative power of light need to be read through the rise of phenomenology in postwar North American architecture. By looking at various archival documents, I propose that Vatican II was not a unilateral, top-down paradigm shift, or a rupture with tradition, but rather a complex and ongoing negotiation between the architect, ecclesial authorities and lay people. (shrink)

The following paper argues that issues in paradigmatic proposals for solving the new demarcation problem stem from absolutist assumptions about judgments of value legitimacy. Both the problem of uninformativeness (Larroulet Philippi 2020; Fernandez-Pinto 2014, 2015) and the problem of ambiguous judgments of cases (Hicks 2014; Intemann 2017) are explained by an absolutist pretension contained in one of the main aims of these proposals: providing criteria for differentiating legitimate from illegitimate uses of values, without qualification. After presenting the problems and showing (...) how they stem from that common source, we will sketch a way forward, inspired mainly by Joseph Rouse’s Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty (1996), advancing routes that can allow philosophers of science to evade these pitfalls and engage with scientific practice in a more salutary manner. (shrink)

Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2016) offers a vision of Donna J. Haraway's feminist intervention where Haraway posits her neologistic chthulucene to signify the interpenetration of species in response to anthropocene discourse which recuperates the patriarchal narrative of homo faber – the human as maker. The risks and tribulations of cross-species “becoming-with”, as Haraway puts it, are dramatized in Evolution. The ambiguously defined, subaqueous species of the film nurture and care for human boys then impregnate them with squid-like creatures that are incubated (...) in the child's mid-section. The film is marked by images that are difficult to anthropomorphise, eliciting corporeal engagements with tentacular sea creatures that are alienating and confronting. Evolution presents images that are in sympathy with Haraway's chthulucene, in which the subject dissolves into the matter of “humus” or “compost” that ontologically bind the human and nonhuman alike. The film signals a reverse evolution in which humans return to the sea, a temporal backwards turn that Haraway similarly advocates in her book. While Evolution plays out Haraway's chthonic vision in which it shows a subject, Nicolas, embedded in a compost community, the film nonetheless situates this subject as bounded and coherent. Evolution does not, ultimately, forego the human but offers a chance to comprehend the human's transformation in the historical moment of the anthropocene. (shrink)

Expanded reprint of the WIREs Science of Belief paper for Julien Musolino, Joseph Sommer, and Pernille Hemmer's The Science of Beliefs: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PostfacePhilippe-Joseph Salazar, Guest Editor"France: Current Writing in Philosophy and Rhetoric" could be a subtitle for this volume. As guest editor I have chosen the genre of the postface rather than that of the preface. I wanted to let writings speak for themselves, unhindered by the added filter of an introduction. Prefaces are either congratulatory or a contribution in disguise—or, worse, a puerile attempt to overshadow the rest. However, (...) by way of a summation, a few, brief remarks are in order.Some thirty years ago it would have been impossible to seek out and secure authors to write on this subject. Since then a sea change has taken place, attracting into the circles of the "rhetorical turn" many a willing partaker. In this new game, two circles gyrate and now and then rotate in unison or collide.One circle, let us call it belletristic, was set in motion by Marc Fumaroli when he released, in 1980, his epoch-making Âge de l'éloquence. It was as if a new chord had been struck, catching most by surprise, heralding the sudden irruption of new thinking about the mainstay of French culture, the "classical age," that is, the seventeenth century, the sacrosanct age of Racine, Descartes, Louis XIV, and Nicolas Poussin. Fumaroli's work in rhetoric, aesthetics, and social commentary went to the heart of French literature and culture: it offered an hermeneutic opportunity to run against the grain of structuralism and Bourdieusian analyses, while it simultaneously brought to [End Page 424] light "rhetorical" layers, both religious and civil, of French culture that militant secularism and social positivism had long cast aside as pernicious or preposterous. It also served as a powerful antidote to "cultural studies." His influence is deep and wide and long lasting. Nancy Struever, who alongside Fumaroli founded the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, draws on her intimate knowledge of the French school to provide here a profound and critical account of his work in which she underscores how Fumaroli transformed, from the standpoint of the history of rhetoric, the study of Western European culture and social life forms—the award of the Balzan Prize to Fumaroli came on the heels of his Histoire de la rhétorique dans l'Europe moderne. He has, for all intents and purposes, created the French school of rhetoric studies, which has nurtured an ever-growing circle of scholars, now in its second generation, with a relief cohort at the ready (Salazar 2007).The other circle took a while longer to gain balance and establish momentum. It concerns itself with the complex relation between philology and philosophy. Indeed, French classical philology had long been resistant to the presence of philosophy and so too philosophy to philology. This uneasy and reciprocal indifference or even distrust can be traced back to the Discourse on Method, in which Descartes invented French philosophical prose, as Pierre Cahné puts it, a situation later aggravated by the spell German metaphysics cast over French philosophy in the nineteenth century. However, it was the enduring presence of Hegel in the 1930s, together with the material and intellectual rescue French philosophers offered Heidegger after 1945, and a sustained interest in Nietzsche and Husserl, that created the conditions for a new dalliance between philology and philosophy. It has been a multifaceted game: some Hellenists, like Nicole Loraux and Marcel Detienne, chose to develop an anthropological meditation on ancient Greece, bringing forth, in the process, rhetorical categories that before them were mere indicators (mètis, epitaphios). On the periphery stood Émile Benveniste with his philological enquiry into Indo European words as mental structures—his Vocabulaire remains a constant source of inspiration. Latinists had a problem of their own: their commonly shared notion that Latin was not a philosophical language, together with their vociferous prejudice against non-Ciceronian Latin, had consigned medieval and Renaissance thinkers and modes of thinking to the bogs of impure language. However, Latin scholars such as Alain Michel sought to unravel the Roman aesthetics inherent in a rhetorical way of life; this school of new Latinists propelled a remarkable revival of Neo-Latinity, which has [End Page 425] had a long-lasting influence on Renaissance studies... (shrink)

Présentation du numéro spécial de la revue Philosophiques à la mémoire de Joseph Nicolas Kaufmann (1941-2002).

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

Topics covered in Discrete Mathematics have become essential tools in many areas of studies in recent years. This is primarily due to the revolution in technology, communications, and cyber security. The book treats major themes in a typical introductory modern Discrete Mathematics course: Propositional and predicate logic, proof techniques, set theory (including Boolean algebra, functions and relations), introduction to number theory, combinatorics and graph theory. An accessible, precise, and comprehensive approach is adopted in the treatment of each topic. The ability (...) of abstract thinking and the art of writing valid arguments are emphasized through detailed proof of (almost) every result. Developing the ability to think abstractly and roguishly is key in any areas of science, information technology and engineering. Every result presented in the book is followed by examples and applications to consolidate its comprehension. The hope is that the reader ends up developing both the abstract reasoning as well as acquiring practical skills. All efforts are made to write the book at a level accessible to first-year students and to present each topic in a way that facilitates self-directed learning. Each chapter starts with basic concepts of the subject at hand and progresses gradually to cover more ground on the subject. Chapters are divided into sections and subsections to facilitate readings. Each section ends with its own carefully chosen set of practice exercises to reenforce comprehension and to challenge and stimulate readers. As an introduction to Discrete Mathematics, the book is written with the smallest set of prerequisites possible. Familiarity with basic mathematical concepts (usually acquired in high school) is sufficient for most chapters. However, some mathematical maturity comes in handy to grasp some harder concepts presented in the book. (shrink)

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...) and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. (shrink)

To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning.

We aim to do two things in this article. On the positive end, our goal is to explain how some seemingly incompatible aspects of belief live together, by presenting distinct mechanistic explanations of each of them: in particular we want to show how belief can be discerning, credulous, rational, and irrational. After clarifying our positive view, we take aim at some competitor views in the second half of the paper, particularly offering critiques of epistemic vigilance and social marketplace accounts of (...) belief. We conclude by inviting proponents to provide an architecture for belief that can be tested against existing models. (shrink)

What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate question or as an ultimate question. The question is about the mental and social mechanisms that produce moral judgments and interactions, and has been investigated by psychologists and social scientists. The question is about the fitness consequences that explain why humans have morality, and has been discussed by evolutionary biologists in the context of the evolution of cooperation. Our goal here is to contribute to a fruitful (...) articulation of such proximate and ultimate explanations of human morality. We develop an approach to morality as an adaptation to an environment in which individuals were in competition to be chosen and recruited in mutually advantageous cooperative interactions. In this environment, the best strategy is to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation equally. Those who offer less than others will be left out of cooperation; conversely, those who offer more will be exploited by their partners. In line with this mutualistic approach, the study of a range of economic games involving property rights, collective actions, mutual help and punishment shows that participants' distributions aim at sharing the costs and benefits of interactions in an impartial way. In particular, the distribution of resources is influenced by effort and talent, and the perception of each participant's rights on the resources to be distributed. (shrink)

This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I argue that, once (...) we unpack the internal relation between directed duties, moral status, and flourishing, relations can ground personhood and include nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Most people believe that suffering is intrinsically bad. In conjunction with facts about our world and plausible moral principles, this yields a pro tanto obligation to reduce suffering. This is the intuitive starting point for the moral argument in favor of interventions to prevent wild animal suffering. If we accept the moral principle that we ought, pro tanto, to reduce the suffering of all sentient creatures, and we recognize the prevalence of suffering in the wild, then we seem committed to (...) the existence of such a pro tanto obligation. Of course, competing values such as the aesthetic, scientific or moral values of species, biodiversity, naturalness or wildness, might be relevant to the all-things-considered case for or against intervention. Still, many argue that, even if we were to give some weight to such values, no plausible theory could resist the conclusion that WAS is overridingly important. This article is concerned with large-scale interventions to prevent WAS and their tractability and the deep epistemic problem they raise. We concede that suffering gives us a reason to prevent it where it occurs, but we argue that the nature of ecosystems leaves us with no reason to predict that interventions would reduce, rather than exacerbate, suffering. We consider two interventions, based on gene editing technology, proposed as holding promise to prevent WAS; raise epistemic concerns about them; discuss their potential moral costs; and conclude by proposing a way forward: to justify interventions to prevent WAS, we need to develop models that predict the effects of interventions on biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and animals’ well-being. (shrink)

F. Enriques and G. de Santillana have begun in collaboration the composition of a general history of scientific thought. The first volume of this work, which has been recently published, is concerned with the science of antiquity,1 and to a large extent covers the same ground as the history of ancient philosophy, as the frontiers of philosophy and natural science, at any rate until the time of Aristotle, were not yet clearly differentiated. But the two historians are interested in bringing (...) into prominence a great many problems and personalities that the history of philosophy generally leaves on one side, although they help to complete and vivify the picture of the mentality of the ancients. Mathematics, medicine, geography, astronomy, applied mechanics, and physics, in short all the particular scientific studies that were just beginning to detach themselves from the parent trunk of general philosophy are studied by the authors in their individual developments and through the personalities of their cultivators. The explanations are clear and simple and can be followed even by readers unversed in science; the information is at first hand and is supplemented by a careful discussion of sources. The scientific questions are not isolated from the historical setting of the civilization of antiquity, but are shown in relation to matters of philosophy, religion, art, and moral and political life. The bibliography, intended for the more purely scientific and technical departments of philosophy, forms a very useful and timely completion of the bibliography of philosophic thought in general. (shrink)

About a year ago some important philosophical works were published in Italy which, both in the agreement and in the divergence of the trends they indicate, may be useful for characterizing the present situation of Italian philosophy. I think it opportune, therefore, for the information of the English reader, to give a fuller notice of these books than usual. One of them is by Ugo Spirito, La vita come amore , with the subtitle “The downfall of Christian civilization ”. Ugo (...) Spirito, who was one of the most intelligent and restless pupils of Giovanni Gentile, announced his secession from idealism in 1937.In that year he published a book entitled La vita come ricerca , in which, as sole alternative to idealistic philosophy, henceforth considered untenable, he pointed to a philosophy of never concluded enquiry, which, while positing numerous problems, never solves them. The intention of the book was to conclude in the impossibility of philosophy as “system” or as “metaphysics”, on the supposition that all the possibilities of metaphysics had been exhausted in the course of its historical development, culminating in Gentile. In a certain sense this presupposition remains in the book now under examination; but here it is a question of defining positively the way that philosophy, and with it human life, ought to take, which is, according to Spirito, the way of love. (shrink)

About a year ago some important philosophical works were published in Italy which, both in the agreement and in the divergence of the trends they indicate, may be useful for characterizing the present situation of Italian philosophy. I think it opportune, therefore, for the information of the English reader, to give a fuller notice of these books than usual. One of them is by Ugo Spirito, La vita come amore, with the subtitle “The downfall of Christian civilization ”. Ugo Spirito, (...) who was one of the most intelligent and restless pupils of Giovanni Gentile, announced his secession from idealism in 1937.In that year he published a book entitled La vita come ricerca, in which, as sole alternative to idealistic philosophy, henceforth considered untenable, he pointed to a philosophy of never concluded enquiry, which, while positing numerous problems, never solves them. The intention of the book was to conclude in the impossibility of philosophy as “system” or as “metaphysics”, on the supposition that all the possibilities of metaphysics had been exhausted in the course of its historical development, culminating in Gentile. In a certain sense this presupposition remains in the book now under examination; but here it is a question of defining positively the way that philosophy, and with it human life, ought to take, which is, according to Spirito, the way of love. (shrink)

In the series Collezione di Filosofia published by Taylor of Turin since 1947, some of the most significant works on Italian existentialism have appeared. The series was inaugurated by two books by the writer of this article: Introduzione all esistenzialismo, second edition, 1947 ; and Filosofia religione scienza, 1947. These were followed by Pietro Chiodi, L'esistenzialismo di Heidegger, 1947; Armando Vedaldi, Essere gli altri, 1948; Uberto Scarpelli, Esistenzialismo e marxismo, 1949; Enzo Paci, II nulla e il problema dell'uomo, 1950; Luigi (...) Pareyson, Esistenza e persona, 1950; and Armando Vedaldi, Struttura della proprietà, 1951. (shrink)

L'ŒIL, Observatoire d'Ethique Interculturelle de Lyon, a pour objectif de préserver la dimension éthique de notre société démocratique et pluraliste dans son approche de l'homme. De nouveaux savoirs et techniques, le dynamisme de la recherche scientifique, les forces du marché, le souci de juste allocation des ressources, ainsi que les demandes de la société, mettent les acteurs des systèmes de santé dans des situations confuses. Cet ouvrage est le premier témoignage des rencontres et des recherches décidées par ces auteurs venus (...) d'horizons divers, engagés dans l'ensemble du monde francophone à partir de Lyon où se sont tenues les Premières Journées internationales francophones d'Ethique interculturelle, en 2004. Pour les auteurs de cet ouvrage, l'humanité peut mieux se constituer en s'ouvrant sur le différent, sur le multiple. Par regards croisés, ils questionnent la place relative du progrès, abandonnant le mythe simpliste selon lequel seul le progrès techno-économique entraîne les progrès sociaux, politiques et moraux... Au contraire, ils adoptent les principes d'incertitude et de complexité. Ils s'interrogent sur l'éthique interculturelle résultant d'une interaction à géométrie variable entre nos appartenances à différents groupes humains - culturels, sociaux, professionnels... sur le bon usage de la vie qui peut présupposer d'avoir en tête un archétype de la vie humaine, une vie exprimée dans sa plénitude. Certaines cultures ont exalté le héros, le chevalier ou le saint, avant de mettre en avant l'homme engagé ou l'entrepreneur accompli. Ils partagent la conviction que l'univers, la vie en général et la vie humaine en particulier ne sont pas des réalités monolithiques, mais résultent de l'interaction entre des polarités apparemment opposées, mais complémentaires. En effet, chaque être humain résulte des relations tissées avec l'Autre, s'enrichissant personnellement à travers chacune d'entre elles, s'ouvrant ainsi progressivement à toute l'humanité dans sa diversité. Nous construisons notre singularité en fonction de notre ouverture sur l'universel. Ce livre multidisciplinaire intéressera médecins et autres soignants, philosophes, spécialistes des sciences humaines et de l'éducation, des sciences exactes, voire responsables politiques. (shrink)

La philosophie hegelienne de la nature est le lieu singulier ou convergent la conscience scientifique moderne et la metaphysique pour fusionner en un moment inedit dans l'histoire de la pensee. Car nous opposons toujours d'une certaine maniere "theorie scientifique" et "discours philosophique", il nous est impossible de saisir la nature de la pensee de Hegel. L'auteur nous livre une interpretation de la mecanique de l'Encyclopedie des sciences philosophiques (1830) qui degage la pensee de Hegel des reductions kantienne et romantique. L'enracinement (...) du discours hegelien dans la conscience scientifique moderne est a la mesure des tensions qu'il entretient avec la science des modernes. La critique qu'opere Hegel de celle-ci n'est comprehensible qu'au regard de sa lecture de la Physique d'Aristote comme modele accompli du rapport entre philosophie et science empirique. Loin de se contenter d'une critique des sciences de son temps, Hegel nous engage dans la voie d'une theorie explicative du mouvement. (shrink)

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN BUSINESS ETHICS, 6E introduces readers to business ethics by focusing on the influence of market mechanisms and social values on workplace norms. And because business is increasingly a global enterprise, this edition emphasizes the role of ethics both at home and abroad.

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

Urban animals can benefit from living in cities, but this also makes them vulnerable as they increasingly depend on the advantages of urban life. This article has two aims. First, I provide a detailed analysis of the concept of captivity and explain why it matters to nonhuman animals—because and insofar as many of them have a (non-substitutable) interest in freedom. Second, I defend a surprising implication of the account—pushing the boundaries of the concept while the boundaries of cities and human (...) activities expand. I argue for the existence of the neglected problem of pervasive captivity, of which urban wildlife is an illustration. Many urban animals are confined, controlled and dependent, therefore often captive of expanding urban areas. While I argue that captivity per se is value-neutral, I draw the ethical and policy implications of harmful pervasive captivity. (shrink)

Can animals be agents? Do they want to be free? Can they have meaningful lives? If so, should we change the way we treat them? This paper offers an account of animal agency and of two continuums: between human and nonhuman agency, and between wildness and captivity. It describes how a wide range of human activities impede on animals’ freedom and argues that, in doing so, we deprive a wide range of animals of opportunities to exercise their agency in ways (...) that can give meaning to their lives. (shrink)