The Spirit of the Soil challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce.

Presents a collection of essays written over a period of 15 years by agricultural ethicist Paul B. Thompson. The essays address the practical application of ethics to agriculture in a world faced with issues of increased yield, threatened environment, and the disappearance of the family farm.

Paul Thompson’s excellent book, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, argues that contemporary food ethics persistently ignores the nature and actual impact of GMOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, food aid to developing countries, and more. On Thompson’s view, such philosophical analyses must incorporate empirical knowledge. Additional strengths of Thompson’s book: its attention to quality-of-life issues, its openness to the concerns of the marginalized, and its emphasis on the interconnectedness of problems in food ethics. I raise one area (...) of disagreement with Thompson: his treatment of GMOs is, I argue, insufficiently skeptical. I suggest a three-fold revision of the book’s treatment of the precautionary principle, and I levy an additional argument against GMOs, the Inductive Argument. Using the herbicide Roundup as a case study of the ways in which industry urges the use of technologies that have not been fully vetted or monitored, I argue that products originally seen as safe often turn out instead to be harmful to the environment and health. Significant inductive experience with similar cases gives people additional reason to be even more suspicious of GMOs than Thompson suggests. (shrink)

Bioethics coverage of the recent Ebola outbreak neglected the ethical issues associated with aspects of the outbreak having environmental significance. The neglect of environmental dimensions is symptomatic of the way that the current institutionalization of bioethics as a field of inquiry separates medical and environmental expertise. As visionaries who are recognizing the need for better integration of human and veterinary medicine with environmental health are starting to call for “One Health”, it is now time to recognize the need for “One (...) Bioethics.”. (shrink)

An environmental, climate mitigation rationale for research and development on liquid transportation fuels derived from plants emerged among many scientists and engineers during the last decade. However, between 2006 and 2010, this climate ethic for pursuing biofuel became politically entangled and conceptually confused with rationales for encouraging greater use of plant-based ethanol that were both unconnected to climate ethics and potentially in conflict with the value-commitments providing a mitigation-oriented reason to promote and develop new and expanded sources of biofuel. I (...) argue that the conceptual construct of technological trajectories provides a fecund approach to the ethical evaluation of R&D strategies in the case of plant-based liquid transportation fuels. The idea of a trajectory has a current use in the literature of science studies and aptly summarizes a number of themes that are critical to the evaluation of tools and techniques whose future shape, design, applications and potential consequences are necessarily somewhat speculative. In the case of biofuels, it is the imagined future trajectory that provides the basis for resistance to an emerging technology, rather than the present-day technical capabilities and the unexpected consequences of biofuel development. (shrink)

After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies (...) applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food system activists, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture break new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food -- he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy. (shrink)

The role of Amartya Sen's early work on famine notwithstanding, food security is generally seen as but one capability among many for scholars writing in development ethics. The early literature on the ethics of hunger is summarized to show how Sen's Poverty and Famines was written in response to debates of past decades, and a brief discussion of food security as a capability follows. However, Sen's characterization of smallholder food security also supports the development of agency in both a political (...) and an economic sense. Economic agency is discussed and tied to longstanding literatures on the moral significance of farming within political economy. Finally, while the newly emergent literature on food sovereignty includes many themes, it is shown to be re-articulating arguments that stress smallholder's economic agency as a development goal. This pattern of argument thus provides a way to reconcile at least some of the claims being advanced under the banner of food sovereignty with the human development.. (shrink)

Public controversy over animalbiotechnology is analyzed as a case that illustratestwo broad theoretical approaches for linking science,political or ethical theory, and public policy. Moralpurification proceeds by isolating the social,environmental, animal, and human health impacts ofbiotechnology from each other in terms of discretecategories of moral significance. Each of thesecategories can also be isolated from the sense inwhich biotechnology raises religious or metaphysicalissues. Moral purification yields a comprehensive andsystematic account of normative issues raised bycontroversial science. Hybridization proceeds bytaking concern for all these (...) elements to be a mark ofsound moral character. The advocate of hybridizationinfers that those who employ a strategy ofpurification seek to avoid accountability by dividingissues, and hence are not to be trusted. Lack of trustincreases perceived risk and challenges the legitimacyof government regulations to control social,environmental, and human health risks that areestablished under separate mandate, and administeredby separate agencies.The close alignment between government agencies, theiracademic affines, and the categories of purificationplaces the purified analysis in a favored politicalposition. Legitimation of science-based policy inareas like animal biotechnology becomes problematicbecause the concern of those who would take a hybridapproach (arguably the majority of lay persons) tounderstanding controversial science are excluded.Ironically, this exclusion heightens the perception ofrisk from animal biotechnology. The paper concludeswith a call for procedural approaches to incorporatingthe hybrid view of science‘s moral significance. (shrink)

Philosophical food ethics or deliberative inquiry into the moral norms for production, distribution and consumption of food is contrasted with food ethics as an international social movement aimed at reforming the global food system. The latter yields an activist orientation that can become embroiled in self-defeating impotency when the complexity and internal contradictions of the food system are more fully appreciated. However, recent work in intersectionality offers resources that are useful to both philosophical and activist food ethics. For activists, intersectionality (...) provides a way to preserve and strengthen the meaningfulness of protest and resistance, even in the face of complexity and uncertain outcomes. For philosophers, intersectionality chastens the tendency to regard moral problems as inherently solvable, and provides a way use tensions inherent in food system reform as a source of ethical insight. (shrink)

Replies to commentaries on my 2012 article ‘Synthetic Biology Needs a Synthetic Bioethics,’ note that I do not, in fact, call for some ‘new’ kind of ethics. The focus then and now is on integrating questions that relate to distributive justice and environmental quality more faithfully into the topics that have come to preoccupy mainstream bioethics as institutionalized in medical schools and medical research institutions.

The traditional military-territorial model of the nation state defines international duties in terms of protecting citizens' property from foreign threats. In this 1992 book about the principles of the US agricultural policy and foreign aid, Professor Thompson replaces this model with the notion of the trading state that sees its role in terms of the establishment of international institutions that stabilize and facilitate cultural and intellectual, as well as commercial, exchanges between nations. The argument focuses on protectionist challenges to foreign (...) aid and development assistance programs, and engages with the views of a variety of economists, commodity organizations, and philosophers on world hunger and development. What emerges is a new interpretation of social contract theory that can determine goals for international trade and development policy. (shrink)

Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying ‘hacker (...) ethic’, which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted ‘substantial trust’. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust. (shrink)

Utilitarian ethics provides a model for evaluating moral responsibility in agricultural research decisions according to the balance of costs and benefits accruing to the public at large. Given the traditions and special requirements of agricultural research planning, utilitarian theory is well adapted to serve as a starting point for evaluating these decisions, but utilitarianism has defects that are well documented in the philosophical literature. Criticisms of research decisions in agricultural mechanization and biotechnology correspond to documented defects in utilitarian theory. Research (...) administrators can expect that application of a utilitarian standard ignoring these deficiencies will become the occasion for predictable attacks by critics. Administrators who are sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarian ethics are equipped to make a better allocation of research effort. (shrink)

Risk communication poses a challenge to ordinary norms of truth-telling because it can easily mislead. Analyzing this challenge in terms of a systematic divergence between expertise and public attitudes fails to recognize how two specific features of the concept of risk play a role in managing daily affairs. First, evaluating risk always incorporates an estimate of the reliability of information. Since risk communication is an effort at providing information, audiences will naturally and appropriately incorporate their assessment of the reliability of (...) the risk communicator into their assessment of the risk as such. Second, one conceptual and grammatical feature of the concept of risk is to categorize experience as non-routine and demanding further deliberation. That is, the whole point of calling something a risk can be to distinguish it from activities or phenomena that need no further attention. Risk communications that stress relative comparisons of measured probabilities and expected utilities can be inconsistent with both features of our concept of risk. At best they mislead; at worst they undermine our society’s capacity to cope with risk. While there are no simple answers to these two conundrums, technical experts should bear them in mind when communicating with the broader public. (shrink)

Agrarian political philosophies since ancient Greece stress the role of agriculture in forming political solidarity and civic virtue. More recent transformations suggest a way to conjoin these elements of what makes a polity politically sustainable with environmental sensitivity and literacy.

The emergence of individuality during the evolutionary transition from single cells to multicellularity poses a range of problems. A key issue is how variation in lower‐level individuals generates a corporate (collective) entity with Darwinian characteristics. Of central importance to this process is the evolution of a means of collective reproduction, however, the evolution of a means of collective reproduction is not a trivial issue, requiring careful consideration of mechanistic details. Calling upon observations from experiments, we draw attention to proto‐life cycles (...) that emerge via unconventional routes and that transition, in single steps, individuality to higher levels. One such life cycle arises from conflicts among levels of selection and invokes cheats as a primitive germ line: it lays the foundation for collective reproduction, the basis of a self‐policing system, the selective environment for the emergence of development, and hints at a plausible origin for a soma/germ line distinction. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Bolzano's concept of deducibility and Tarski's concept of logical consequence differ with respect to their philosophical intent. I distinguish between epistemic and ontic approaches to logic, and argue that Bolzano's deducibility presupposes an epistemic approach, while Tarski's logical consequence presupposes an ontic approach.

Each of four sections in this paper sketches the philosophical problems associated with a different dimension of sustainability. The untitled introductory section surveys the oft-noted discrepancies between different notions of sustainability, and notes that one element of the ambiguity relates to the different points of view taken by a participant in a system and a detached observer of the system. The second section, “Sustainability as a System Describing Concept,” examines epistemological puzzles that arise when one attempts to assess the truth (...) or falsity of claims that attribute sustainability or non-sustainability. In particular, such claims generally presume bounded systems, but boundary conditions are value-laden. The third section, “Sustainability as a Goal Prescribing Concept,” examines puzzles that arise in attempting to define sustainability in normative terms. In particular, the question of whether sustainability is an intrinsic or instrumental value is examined. The final section, “Sustainability and Bliss,” offers an analysis of the moral responsibilities that human beings have, given the fact that knowledge of conditions for achieving sustainability can never be complete. (shrink)

The forcing construction Pmax, invented by W. Hugh Woodin, produces a model whose collection of subsets of ω₁ is in some sense maximal. In this paper we study the Boolean algebra induced by the nonstationary ideal on ω₁ in this model. Among other things we show that the induced quotient does not have a simply definable form. We also prove several results about saturation properties of the ideal in this extension.

Explores the interactions of fiduciary law and personal and political trust in private, public and international law.

Afghanistan: Forging Civilizations along the Silk Road. Edited by Joan Aruz and Elisabetta Valtz Fino. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Symposia. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Pp. viii + 134, illus. $35. [Distributed by Yale University Press] Afghanistan: Forging Civilizations along the Silk Road. By Frank L. Holt. Hellenistic Culture and Society, vol. 53. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. Pp. xxi + 343, illus. $39.95.

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.