According to Alasdair Cochrane, liberty can have value for most animals only because it allows them to obtain other desirable things, such as well-being. With this he concludes that humans can continue to use other animals as long as they treat them well. In this article, I reject this conclusion by arguing against the positive conception of liberty in favor of its negative or republican conception. I suggest that it is sufficient for a being to be capable of agency in (...) order to have an interest in liberty, which deserves to be protected by the right to be free. (shrink)

Plus qu’un régime ou un mode de vie, le véganisme est un mouvement social et politique visant à libérer les animaux du joug humain. S’opposant au carnisme, les véganes renoncent autant que possible à utiliser des produits ou des services issus de leur exploitation. Leurs arguments rencontrent aujourd’hui un écho de plus en plus favorable parmi les consommateurs, alors même que les animaux, sur terre et dans la mer, n’ont jamais été tués dans de si grandes proportions. Cet essai est (...) l’occasion pour ses auteurs de montrer que la société que les véganes appellent de leurs vœux (et préfigurent par leurs pratiques quotidiennes) repose sur une conception élargie de la justice. Une justice qui devrait embrasser l’ensemble des êtres doués de sensibilité. (shrink)

Daniel Bell and Wang Pei’s recent monograph, Just Hierarchy, seeks to defend hierarchical relationships against more egalitarian alternatives. This paper addresses their argument, offered in one chapter of the book, in favour of a hierarchical relationship between human and nonhuman animals. This relationship, Bell and Pei argue, should conform to what they call “subordination without cruelty:” it is permissible to subordinate and exploit animals for human ends, provided that we do not treat them cruelly. We focus on three aspects of (...) their view: their argument for a hierarchical view; their understanding of cruelty; and their account of the heightened duties they claim we owe to nonhuman animals who are intelligent, domesticated, and/or “cute.” We argue that the reasons that Bell and Pei offer fail to support their conclusions, and that, even if one accepts a hierarchical view, the conclusions that Bell and Pei draw about the permissibility of practices such as killing animals for food do not follow. We conclude by emphasizing philosophers’ responsibility to thoroughly test their arguments and to engage with existing debates, especially when the practices they seek to justify involve harms of great magnitude. (shrink)

Trophées, nourriture, sujets d’expérimentation, ressources, souffre-douleurs, jouets, vêtements… Depuis le Néolithique au moins, les êtres humains considèrent les animaux comme des moyens. -/- Pourtant, les critères sur lesquels repose cette hégémonie de notre espèce n’ont pas la pertinence qui leur permettrait de justifier de tels traitements. C’est ce suprémacisme humain que l’antispécisme entend dénoncer. -/- Dans ce court essai, Valéry Giroux bat en brèche les caricatures, et montre que l’antispécisme, par analogie avec l’antiracisme, est avant tout une base (...) de réflexion éthique et politique. En affirmant que l’humanité doit renoncer à certains des privilèges qu’elle s’est injustement octroyés aux dépens des animaux, elle défend l’idée qu’un monde délivré du spécisme serait non pas encore parfait, mais incontestablement plus juste. (shrink)

Legal systems in the Western world currently regard animals as property. This status implies that they are not subjects of rights. None of the recent legal measures aimed at protecting animals have conferred on them the legal status of person, which is arguably a necessary condition to benefit from the most fundamental individual rights. In this chapter, we argue that the type of control of animals that is based on property rights and domination is ethically unacceptable. We also argue that (...) extending personhood and its corresponding rights to all sentient beings is the best way to ensure that they are not made to suffer unnecessarily and that they are protected from domination. While there may exist morally legitimate occurrences of human control over other animals, justice requires that we abolish all forms of their exploitation. (shrink)

Tous les êtres humains sont égaux devant la loi. Tous ont des droits fondamentaux qui les protègent contre la torture, la mise à mort et l'asservissement. Tous jouissent du statut juridique de personne, par opposition à celui de simple chose susceptible d'être appropriée. Cela vaut pour les membres de l'espèce Homo sapiens sans exception, mais pour aucun autre animal. Une telle discrimination est-elle juste ?

Ethical dilemmas and decision-making are a persistent feature of the everyday operations of animal shelters and animal protection organizations. These organizations frequently face difficult decisions about how to treat the animals in their care, decisions that are made all the more difficult by limited funding, material resources, and human labor. Moreover, animal protection organizations must also determine how to act within and toward the wider social and institutional environment in which non-human animals are routinely exploited. The first section of The (...) Ethics of Animal Shelters contains practical recommendations developed by ethicists in response to the ethical challenges identified by employees of the Montreal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. These challenges arise across the organization's activities, including its internal structure; shelter operations; public campaigns and advocacy work; dealing with the public, animal agriculture and governmental agencies; and their work with feral animals. The second section offers philosophical analyses of the ethical challenges unique to animal shelters. Issues explored include the killing of shelter animals; shelter animals' diets; medical decision-making procedures; adoption policies; and the role shelters might play in transforming social attitudes and norms. (shrink)

Dans son livre "L’imposture antispéciste", Ariane Nicolas prétend montrer l’incohérence et la dangerosité de l’antispécisme. Ce qu’elle montre surtout, nous dit Valéry Giroux, c’est qu’elle comprend très mal le sujet qu’elle cherche désespérément – et peut-être même malhonnêtement – à discréditer. Compte rendu d’une lecture désolante.

Dans son ouvrage La libération animale, Peter Singer développe trois grandes idées : le principe d'égale considération des intérêts, le rejet du spécisme et la nécessité de mettre un terme à certains types d'exploitation des animaux, notamment ceux qui ont trait à la recherche et à l'élevage industriel. Cette oeuvre phare a connu un retentissement immense, à tel point que sa publication, en 1975, a été présentée comme le moment clef dans l'émergence du mouvement éponyme. Cependant, le mouvement de libération (...) animale ne saurait se réduire à la seule pensée singerienne. Ce mouvement extrêmement protéiforme a fait l'objet de débats intenses à l'interne, entre les défenseurs des animaux eux-mêmes qui privilégient des approches diverses, comme à l'externe, entre ceux qui défendent le statu quo ou contestent les arguments animalistes. L'objet de ce recueil est de revenir sur le lien entre le mouvement de libération animale et les théories de Peter Singer qui, à tort ou à raison, en est perçu comme le père fondateur. Comment l'éthique animale de l'auteur a-t-elle été accueillie depuis la publication de La libération animale, et comment a-t-elle évolué? Quelle place la doctrine utilitariste occupe-t-elle dans le travail de Singer et dans les débats qu'il a engendrés? C'est en effet dans cette doctrine parente que résident les écueils auxquels s'est heurté le travail de l'auteur. C'est aussi là que son système a trouvé sa force et sa simplicité caractéristiques. C'est aussi, semble-t-il, ce qui fait la fécondité de ses idées. (shrink)

This is the first philosophy textbook in moral psychology, introducing students to a range of philosophical topics and debates such as: What is moral motivation? Do reasons for action always depend on desires? Is emotion or reason at the heart of moral judgment? Under what conditions are people morally responsible? Are there self-interested reasons for people to be moral? Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction presents research by philosophers and psychologists on these topics, and addresses the overarching question of how empirical (...) research is relevant to philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Valerie Trollinger, “A Reconception of Performance Study in the Philosophy of Music Education”Paul LouthAs an educator who is a former professional trombonist I can certainly appreciate the issues raised in this discussion. Because I am inclined to agree with the spirit (if not always the substance) of Trollinger's remarks, I would like to respond with some thoughts on the manner in which she tends to frame (...) this debate, because I believe that this has crucial implications and may explain the cause of some of the very problems she mentions.Charlene Morton writes that a "bias for procedural knowledge... unwittingly immerses school music in the polemic arising from the false hierarchical dichotomy between 'hard' and 'soft' forms of knowledge."1 By this she means that the Cartesian mind/body split, which has led to our conception of thinking and doing as exclusive matters, is not remedied by our discovery of the importance of purely procedural knowledge, because we merely reinforce this dichotomy through acknowledging the latter term as a separate category from theoretical knowledge. Trollinger is correct in asserting that the act of performance is often overlooked and is not treated as a serious concern in music education and I believe that this may be largely due to this dichotomy, which manifests itself in the way that we divorce performance from its original holistic context.In general, if we accept this argument, then debates about performance versus listening, theorizing, and so on are inherently problematic because the discourse itself reinforces an artificial dichotomy. If we fail to address the remnants of this "Cartesian anxiety," then in our attempts to address a lack of concern over performance, we may be left with a performance model that is purely utilitarian, in the sense that the body can only justifiably occupy a central place in the curriculum if there are direct, utilitarian outcomes that we can associate with it and so long as those outcomes are supported by the free market. In North America, progressive educators have been struggling for some time against the concept of school as a locus of training for the market place. This model becomes more difficult to resist, I would argue, as long as we continue to compartmentalize performance and other aspects of musicianship. Such practices reinforce an artificial distinction between procedural and theoretical forms of knowing (and, by extension, between mental and manual forms of labor) that Apple, Giroux, and other critical pedagogues would argue atomizes student knowledge in preparation for the marketplace; yet musicianship can serve many other valuable purposes.2 [End Page 231]Trollinger, in using the word "holistic," reminds us of the connection between body and mind that exists in performance. Further, she correctly states that until relatively recently, those who taught music were musicians. I would add that in Canada (where I teach), the idea that music should be taught by musicians has often been used to justify its exclusion from schools, which is indicative of our tendency to exclude those things that we deem corporeal from the life of the mind. In my home province of Ontario, recent emphasis on "the basics" has meant that music programs have vanished in great numbers, while music study is relegated to the conservatories which, with their widespread tendency to essentialize musical experience as performance in the most limited sense of the word, have contributed further to this dichotomy.My point is that all of us, including Trollinger, may wish to reconsider the nomenclature that we carry into this debate from the outset. Because the word "performance" has become strongly associated with this particular pole (it is no accident that we use this word to describe car engines and stock returns) I suggest we can best elevate our estimation of the term by replacing it with the word "musicianship." In this way we can repair some of the damage done by the Cartesian split and the consequent de-valuing of performance that has occurred through separation from its original context. Within such an integrated model, it would become problematic to debate the relative importance of performing, listening, theorizing, or any number of activities with regard to the overall goals of musicianship... (shrink)

Robert Johnson argues that virtue ethical accounts of right action fail because they cannot take account of the fact that there are things we ought to do precisely because we do not possess virtuous character traits. Self-improving actions are his paradigm case and it would indeed be a problem if virtue ethics could not make sense of the propriety of self-improvement. To solve this serious problem, I propose that virtue ethics ought to define right action in terms of the virtuous (...) agent's reasons for action instead of defining right action in terms of the actions that the virtuous agent performs. I argue that this revised definition of right action makes sense of the rightness of self-improving actions and that it can be given a genuinely virtue ethical interpretation. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Evolution Evolutionary Psychology Ultimate vs. Proximate Causes of Behavior An Example of an Evolved Psychological Mechanism Solidified During the Pleistocene Epoch Summary Postscript: Counterpoint References.

The aim of the book is to encourage discussion among experts on De ira, a text of philosophical nature, by reading it page by page, from a philosophical, philological, and literary perspective (a multidisciplinary choice which is the conditio sine qua non of all judicious research on Seneca). Moreover, the way in which each of these close readings is conducted adds an additional value: they each deal with a section of the text, presenting all the data necessary for its understanding. (...) All together, they cover the whole work. Each of them is also an attempt at a global interpretation of the treatise, examined through the particular framing of the textual passage around which the “Lectures plurielles” are conceived. Around this “polyphonic” analysis of the text, we have built a structure that aims to offer the reader a complete reference work on all the issues of the De ira. Sources, manuscript tradition, images, political and philosophical concepts, posterity – in short, all the aspects that a traditional commentary of the text would not have allowed us to distinguish so clearly – find their place here. This book is therefore aimed at specialists as well as students or anyone interested in the thought of emotions in antiquity. (shrink)

Social problems such as racism, sexism, and inequality are often cited as structural rather than individual in nature. What does it mean to invoke a social structural explanation, and how do such explanations relate to individualistic ones? This article explores recent philosophical debates concerning the nature and usages of social structural explanation. I distinguish between two central kinds of social structural explanation: those that are autonomous from psychology, and those that are not. This distinction will help clarify the explanatory power (...) that each type of SSE has, points of convergence with methodological traditions such as critical theory and rational choice theory, and the difficulties that each type of SSE faces. (shrink)

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply ‘wisdom’), which is the understanding required to make reliably good decisions about how we ought to live, is something we all have reason to care about. The importance of wisdom gives rise to questions about its nature: what kind of state is wisdom, how can we develop it, and what is a wise person like? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about proper methods for studying wisdom. Is the study of (...) wisdom the proper subject of philosophy or psychology? How, exactly, can we determine what wisdom is and how we can get it? In this chapter, we give an overview of some prominent philosophical answers to these questions. We begin by distinguishing practical wisdom from theoretical wisdom and wisdom as epistemic humility. Once we have a clearer sense of the target, we address questions of method and argue that producing a plausible and complete account of wisdom will require the tools of both philosophy and empirical psychology. We also discuss the implications this has for prominent wisdom research methods in empirical psychology. We then survey prominent philosophical accounts of the nature of wisdom and end with reflections on the prospects for further interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice? Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, (...) then debiasing interventions are structural interventions. One upshot is that the utility of the individual versus structural distinction is not apparent for the purposes of intervention. (shrink)

This paper argues that some widely used laws of implication are false, and arguments based upon them invalid. These laws are Exportation, Commutation, (as well as various restricted forms of these), Exported Syllogism and Disjunctive Syllogism. All these laws are false for the same reason – that they license the suppression or replacement in some position of some class of propositions which cannot legitimately be suppressed or replaced. These laws fail to preserve the property of sufficiency of premiss set for (...) conclusion. They are false, and can be seen to be false, independently of their respon- sibility for the paradoxes. Hence the main ‘independent’ argument for the paradoxes – that they follow from an allegedly immaculate set of laws – is undermined. Counterexamples to all these laws are produced. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that what we ought to do collectively does not imply anything about what each of us ought to do individually. According to this line of reasoning, if cooperating will make no difference to an outcome, then you are not morally required to do it. And if cooperating will be personally costly to you as well, this is an even stronger reason to not do it. However, this reasoning results in a self-defeating, yet entirely predictable outcome. If (...) everyone is rational, no one will cooperate, resulting in an aggregate outcome that is devastating for everyone. This dismal analysis explains why climate change and other collective action problems are so difficult to ameliorate. The goal of this paper is to provide a different, exploratory framework for thinking about individual reasons for action in collective action problems. I argue that the concept of commitment gives us a new perspective on collective action problems. Once we take the structure of commitment into account, this activates requirements of diachronic rationality that give individuals instrumental reasons to cooperate in collective action problems. (shrink)

A collection of spiritual essays written by Black thought leaders and teachers that discuss what it means to be Black in the world today.

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West (...) Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine. While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day. (shrink)

The number of distributors selling Fair Trade products is constantly increasing. What are their motivations to distribute Fair Trade products? How do they organise this distribution? Do they apply and communicate the Fair Trade values? This research, based on five case studies in Switzerland, aims at understanding and structuring the strategies and the managerial practices related to Fair Trade product distribution, as well as analysing if they denote an engagement with Fair Trade principles. The results show a high heterogeneity of (...) strategies and engagement. In general, strategies implemented by mainstream actors contribute to increase Fair Trade global sales but do not convey the transformative message of Fair Trade through their engagement. The latter is rather communicated through alternative channels. Problems and potential solutions to this issue are discussed. (shrink)

As of this writing, twenty‐one states have passed laws barring transgender youth‐athletes from competing on public‐school sports teams in accordance with their gender identity. Proponents of these regulations claim that transgender females in particular have inherent physiological advantages that threaten a “level playing field” for their cisgender competitors. Existing evidence is limited but does not support these restrictions. Gathering more robust data will require allowing transgender youth to compete (rather than preemptively barring them), but even if trans females are shown (...) to retain some advantage, this would not have greater moral significance than the many other “fair” physical and economic advantages found across sports. These regulations deprive transgender youth, an exceptionally vulnerable population, from the vast physical, mental, and social benefits of sports. While we advocate for transgender inclusion under our current, gender‐segregated model of sport, we propose changes to the overarching structure that would promote a more inclusive and fairer athletic environment. (shrink)

How should you live? Should you devote yourself to perfecting a single talent or try to live a balanced life? Should you lighten up and have more fun, or buckle down and try to achieve greatness? Should you try to be a better friend? Should you be self-critical or self-accepting? And how should you decide among the possibilities open to you? Should you consult experts, listen to your parents, or should you do lots of research? Should you make lists of (...) pros and cons, or go with your gut? These are not questions that can be answered in general or in the abstract. Rather, these questions are addressed to the first person point of view, to the perspective each of us occupies when we reflect on how to live without knowing exactly what we're aiming for. To answer them, this book focuses on the process of living one's life from the inside, rather than on defining goals from the outside. Drawing on traditional philosophical sources as well as literature and recent work in social psychology, this book argues that to live well, we need to develop reflective wisdom: to care about things that will sustain us and give us good experiences, to have perspective on our successes and failures, and to be moderately self-aware and cautiously optimistic about human nature. Further, we need to know when to think about our values, character, and choices, and when not to. A crucial part of wisdom, the book maintains, is being able to shift perspectives: to be self-critical; to be realistic; to examine life when reflection is appropriate, but not when we should lose ourselves in experience. (shrink)

Price is a central analytic concept in both neoclassical and old institutional economics. Combining the social network perspective with old and new institutionalist approaches to price formation, this article examines technological, economic, institutional, and political factors that shaped the earliest pricing systems for electricity used in the United States, between 1882 and 1910. We show that certain characteristics of electricity supply led to ambiguities in how the product should be priced, which created a politics of pricing among electricity producers. In (...) particular, we investigate why the “Wright system,” arguably inferior in productive efficiency to other alternatives, was widely adopted by 1900. We argue that this outcome resulted in part from the political and organizational clout of its supporters, as well as from their particular conceptions of the boundaries and future of the industry itself. The Wright system best suited the “growth dynamic” strategy promoted by the managers of large central stations in their fierce competition with smaller and more decentralized installations. Thus, even in this apparently highly technical and mainly economic issue of how to price the product, there was ample room for social construction and political manipulation. The outcome reached was by no means inevitable and had a highly significant impact on the shape of the American industrial infrastructure. (shrink)

Freedom of conscience is a core element of human rights respected by most European countries. It allows abortion through the inclusion of a conscience clause, which permits opting out of providing such services. However, the grounds for invoking conscientious objection lack clarity. Our aim in this paper is to take a step in this direction by carrying out a systematic review of reasons by midwives and nurses for declining, on conscience grounds, to participate in abortion. We conducted a systematic review (...) of ethical arguments asking, “What reasons have been reported in the argument based literature for or against conscientious objection to abortion provision by nurses or midwives?” We particularly wanted to identify any discussion of the responsibilities of midwives and nurses in this area. Search terms were conscientious objection and abortion or termination and nurse or midwife or midwives or physicians or doctors or medics within the dates 2000–2016 on: HEIN legal, Medline, CINAHL, Psychinfo, Academic Search Complete, Web of Science including publications in English, German and Dutch. Final articles were subjected to a rigorous analysis, coding and classifying each line into reason mentions, narrow and broad reasons for or against conscientious objection. Of an initial 1085 articles, 10 were included. We identified 23 broad reasons, containing 116narrow reasons and 269 reason mentions. Eighty one narrow reasons argued in favour of and 35 against conscientious objection. Using predetermined categories of moral, practical, religious or legal reasons, “moral reasons” contained the largest number of narrow reasons. The reasons and their associated mentions in this category outnumber those in the sum of the other three categories. We identified no absolute argument either for or against conscientious objection by midwives or nurses. An invisibility of midwives and nurses exists in the whole debate concerning conscientious objection reflecting a gap between literature and practice, as it is they whom WHO recommend as providers of this service. While the arguments in the literature emphasize the need for provision of conscientious objection, a balanced debate is necessary in this field, which includes all relevant health professionals. (shrink)

The article explores the place of affect in community relations with respect to trauma following the closure of a steelworks for a working-class community in the South Wales valleys in 2002. A review of sociological approaches to community demonstrates the poor handling of relational and affective aspects which, it is argued, are central to the way in which community relations were formed and provided a safe and containing skin against the uncertainty of industrial production. Using psychoanalytic approaches to affect which (...) stress the importance of skin, particularly the work of Bick, Tustin, Winnicott and Anzieu, the article explores how a sense of a containing skin provides a feeling of ontological security for a community beset by uncertainty and insecurity. It is argued that, following the closure of the steelworks in 2002, this skin is ruptured and that it is difficult for the members of the community to find a way forward. Using examples taken from psychosocial interviews with community members, the case is made for a range of affective relations and practices through which the skin is created. The absence of these practices and relations creates a profound sense of lack of safety and fear of death within the inhabitants, which needs to be addressed, but is rarely discussed in approaches to community or regeneration. (shrink)