The COVID-19 crisis has left zoos especially vulnerable to bankruptcy, and the precarity of their financial situation threatens the lives and well-being of the animals who live in them. In this paper, we argue that while we and our governments have a responsibility to ensure the protection of animals in struggling zoos, it is morally impermissible to make private donations or state subsidies to zoos because such actions serve to perpetuate an unjust institution. In order to protect zoo animals without (...) perpetrating further injustice, governments should subsidize the transformation of zoos into sanctuaries and then facilitate the gradual closure of most of these sanctuaries. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the ethics of street photography. I firstly discuss the close-up ‘in-your-face’ style street photography made famous by American photographer, Bruce Gilden. In close-up street photography, the proximity of the camera to the subject and the element of surprise work in tandem to produce a striking and evocative picture. Close-up street photography is shown to be ethically contentious on wellbeing-related and autonomy-related grounds. I next examine the more orthodox ‘respectable distance’ kind of street photography. In orthodox (...) street photography, the photographer positions the camera some distance away from a nonconsenting subject that may or may not be aware a picture is to be taken. The main ethical problem with this form of street photography relates to the subject’s vanity and sense of self. When street photographers produce and publish images without the consent of subjects, they express their own creative freedom at the expense of the subject’s right to editorial control. I discuss the scope and potentially demanding practical implications of a right to editorial control. To conclude, I offer a workable solution to the ethical dilemma facing street photographers and discuss the implications of smart phones and photo-sharing social media platforms. (shrink)

Many people in animal studies favor the use of gendered pronouns for nonhuman animals, even in cases where the animal’s sex is unknown. By contrast, many people in gender studies favor the use of the default singular they for humans. Our aim is to show that the most obvious ways of fitting these pronoun norm proposals together—a hybrid option (“he”/“she” for animals, “they” for humans) and a uniform one (i.e., default to the singular they when gender identity is unknown, regardless (...) of species)—have serious costs. Animal advocates will worry that the hybrid approach marks animals as fundamentally different from human beings, while advocates for gender justice will worry that preserving gendered pronouns for animals will also preserve gender essentialism. However, switching to a universal default singular they—that is, where we use “they” for all individuals, both human and nonhuman—may set back animals’ interest in being seen as sentient individuals. Our aim is not to defend a solution to this problem, but simply to argue that this is a problem that deserves consideration when assessing candidate pronoun norms. (shrink)

The keeping of captive animals in zoos and aquariums has long been controversial. Many take freedom to be a crucial part of animal welfare and, on these grounds, criticise all forms of animal captivity as harmful to animal welfare, regardless of their provisions. Here, we analyse what it might mean for freedom to matter to welfare, distinguishing between the role of freedom as an intrinsic good, valued for its own sake and an instrumental good, its value arising from the increased (...) ability to provide other important resources. Too often, this debate is conducted through trading intuitions about what matters for animals. We argue for the need for the collection of comparative welfare data about wild and captive animals in order to settle the issue. Discovering more about the links between freedom and animal welfare will then allow for more empirically informed ethical decisions regarding captive animals. (shrink)