In Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals, Josh Milburn thinks through the implications of feeding animals by focusing on the relationships between humans and three different groups of animals: (1) animal companions; (2) animal neighbours; and (3) wild animals. In my comments, I concentrate on how the actions and agency interests of these animals problematise some of Milburn’s assumptions and normative prescriptions. My overall aim is to show how giving animal agency more prominence in our thinking about what we (...) owe to them has significant implications. It is my view that current theorising about other animals focuses too heavily on their experiential welfare and not enough on what animals do and the normative significance of what they do. Though I agree with Milburn that all animals have a right against being killed and made to suffer, a full ethical analysis of our relations with other animals must also consider their (equally weighty) interest in self-determination. (shrink)

This article comments on a special issue of Politics & Society that examines “quiet politics” and the power of business in an era of “noisy politics.” The scholarship brought together in the issue shows that the world of business has indeed changed in the decade since Quiet Politics and Business Power was published, but also that quiet politics as a mode of low-salience interest advocacy seems alive and well. Building on this research, the article analyzes the different ways in which (...) the rise of populist, noisy politics challenges business, how it challenges scholars studying business power, and how it challenges the functioning of the central feedback mechanism connecting political elites to mass publics in democracies—the media. (shrink)

Not so long ago, being reasonably trustworthy was good enough. But soon only the extremely trustworthy will thrive. In the age of smartphones and social networks, every action an organization takes can be exposed and critiqued in real time. Nothing is local or secret anymore. If you treat one customer unfairly, produce one shoddy product, or try to gouge one price, the whole world may find out in hours, if not minutes. The users of Twitter, Yelp, and similar outlets show (...) little mercy for bad behavior. The bar for trustworthiness is higher than ever and continues to rise. Bestselling authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., argue that the only sane response to these rising levels of transparency is to protect the interests of customers proactively—even if that requires spending extra money in the short run to preserve your brand reputation in the long run. The payoff of generating extreme trust will be worth it. With a wealth of fascinating research as well as practical applications, this book will show you how to earn—and keep—the extreme trust of everyone your company interacts with. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1958.

Does feature evolution stop once we have acquired sufficient features to perform a recognition task? With extended practice, novices may develop a more sophisticated feature space that allows them to perform more accurately or quickly. Our work on perceptual expertise indicates that feature learning and reorganization can continue even after an initial set of features is available to represent a novel class of objects.

Scientific interest in genomics in Africa is on the rise with a number of funding initiatives aimed specifically at supporting research in this area. Genomics research on material of African origin raises a number of important ethical issues. A prominent concern relates to sample export, which is increasingly seen by researchers and ethics committees across the continent as being problematic. The concept of genomic sovereignty proposes that unique patterns of genomic variation can be found in human populations, and that these (...) are commercially, scientifically or symbolically valuable and in need of protection against exploitation. Although it is appealing as a response to increasing concerns regarding sample export, there are a number of important conceptual problems relating to the term. It is not clear, for instance, whether it is appropriate that ownership over human genomic samples should rest with national governments. Furthermore, ethnic groups in Africa are frequently spread across multiple nation states, and protection offered in one state may not prevent researchers from accessing the same group elsewhere. Lastly, scientific evidence suggests that the assumption that genomic data is unique for population groups is false. Although the frequency with which particular variants are found can differ between groups, such genes or variants per se are not unique to any population group. In this paper, the authors describe these concerns in detail and argue that the concept of genomic sovereignty alone may not be adequate to protect the genetic resources of people of African descent. (shrink)

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)

In this article, we develop and defend an account of the normative significance of nonhuman animal agency. In particular, we examine how animals’ agency interests impact upon the moral permissibility of our interactions with them. First, we defend the claim that nonhuman animals sometimes have rights to self-determination. However, unlike typical adult humans, nonhuman animals cannot exercise this right through the giving or withholding of consent. This combination of claims generates a puzzle about the permissibility of our interactions with nonhuman (...) animals. If animals sometimes have rights to self-determination, but lack the capacity to consent, then when, if ever, is it permissible for us to touch them, hold them, bathe them, or confine them? In the second half of the article, we develop a solution to this puzzle. We argue that while we cannot obtain animals’ consent, they can engage in authoritative communications of will through acts of “assent” and “dissent.”. (shrink)

This book was written primarily as a contribution to the field, but its plan excellently suits it for use as a text in courses in metaphysics, types of ...

The 2008 bailout is often taken as evidence of the domination of the US political system by large financial institutions. In fact, the bailout demonstrated the vulnerability of US banks to government pressure. Large banks in the United States could not defy regulators, because their future income depended on the US market. In Britain, by contrast, one bank succeeded in scuttling the preferred governmental solution of an industry-wide recapitalization, because most of its revenue came from outside the United Kingdom. This (...) was an exercise of structural power, but one that most contemporary scholarship on business power ignores or misclassifies, since it limits structural power to the automatic adjustment of policy to the possibility of disinvestment. We show that structural power can be exercised strategically, that it is distinct from instrumental power based on lobbying, and that it explains consequential variations in bailout design in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany. (shrink)

This empirical study explores aspects of how companies that are positively recognized by their workforce as “Best Companies to Work For” convey the underlying principles of their “trustworthy” culture. The study examines the normative ethical frameworks and affective language utilized in the ethics statements. Although multiple studies have considered normative ethical frameworks in individual ethical decision making, few have considered normative ethical frameworks in organization ethics statements. In addition, this study expands the analysis to include the ethic of care. Of (...) the “Best Companies to Work for” in this study, 93 had accessible online ethics statements. Findings indicated 70 % of the ethics statements utilized combinations of three types of normative ethics studied, while 30 % used a single framework. In statements with combined frameworks, the deontological framework had the highest frequency, while the ethic of care was present in 33 % of statements and the teleological framework had the lowest frequency. In ethics statements with a singular framework, the framework rankings were consistent with findings for combined frameworks. Using the Dictionary of Affect in Language, there were statistically significant differences on pleasantness between statements that mentioned ethic of care and those that did not. This study sheds light on how these trustworthy companies communicate by publishing their ethics statements and by using a multidimensional approach in their ethics statements that has greater pleasantness when an ethic of care is utilized. (shrink)

In virtue of their capacity for political agency, political agents can possess special rights, powers, and responsibilities, such as rights to political participation and freedom of speech. Traditionally, political theorists have assumed that only cognitively unimpaired adult humans are political agents, and thus that only those humans can be the bearers of these rights, powers, and responsibilities. However, recent work in animal rights theory has extended the concept of political agency to nonhuman animals. In this article, I develop an account (...) of political agency that identifies the capacities that one must possess to be a political agent and captures the fact that political action is a distinctive type of action. Crucially, this account makes sense of the standard assumption that only some humans count as political agents, and explains why few nonhuman animals, human infants, and severely cognitively impaired humans are likely to possess the capacity for political agency. I go on to reject the view, recently advanced by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, that nonhuman animals can be ‘nonintentional political agents’. I conclude by suggesting that most nonhuman animals, as well as human infants and humans with severe cognitive impairments, cannot straightforwardly be assigned rights to political participation. (shrink)

Socioeconomic differences in behaviour are pervasive and well documented, but their causes are not yet well understood. Here, we make the case that a cluster of behaviours is associated with lower socioeconomic status, which we call “the behavioural constellation of deprivation.” We propose that the relatively limited control associated with lower SES curtails the extent to which people can expect to realise deferred rewards, leading to more present-oriented behaviour in a range of domains. We illustrate this idea using the specific (...) factor of extrinsic mortality risk, an important factor in evolutionary theoretical models. We emphasise the idea that the present-oriented behaviours of the constellation are a contextually appropriate response to structural and ecological factors rather than a pathology or a failure of willpower. We highlight some principles from evolutionary theoretical models that can deepen our understanding of how socioeconomic inequalities can become amplified and embedded. These principles are that small initial disparities can lead to larger eventual inequalities, feedback loops can embed early-life circumstances, constraints can breed further constraints, and feedback loops can operate over generations. We discuss some of the mechanisms by which SES may influence behaviour. We then review how the contextually appropriate response perspective that we have outlined fits with other findings about control and temporal discounting. Finally, we discuss the implications of this interpretation for research and policy. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the claim that many sentient nonhuman animals have a right to privacy. I begin by outlining the view that the human right to privacy protects our interest in shaping different kinds of relationships with one another by giving us control over how we present ourselves to others. I then draw on empirical research to show that nonhuman animals also have this interest, which grounds a right to privacy against us. I further argue that we can (...) violate this right even when other animals are unaware that we are watching them. (shrink)

In this article, I expand the existing discourse on climate justice by drawing out the implications of taking animal rights seriously in the context of human-induced climate change. More specifically, I argue that nonhuman animals are owed adaptive assistance to help them cope with the ill-effects of climate change, and I advance and defend four principles of climate justice that derive from a general duty of adaptation. Lastly, I suggest that even if one can successfully argue that the protection of (...) human interests in adaptation ought to be prioritised, nonhuman animal rights will continue to place significant constraints on climate change action. (shrink)

ANGIE PEPPER | : This paper attempts to bring some clarity to the debate among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists on the issue of who or what can count as a candidate recipient of justice. I begin by examining the concept of justice and argue that the character of duties and entitlements of justice sets constraints on the types of entities that can be recipients of justice. Specifically, I contend that in order to be a recipient of justice, one must (...) be the bearer of enforceable moral claim rights. I then suggest that this has important implications for the dispute among sentientists, biocentrists, and ecocentrists. In brief, I show that sentientists cannot exclude nonsentient entities from the domain of justice merely by denying that they have “the right kind of interests,” and biocentrists and ecocentrists cannot move seamlessly from some feature of living things or ecosystems to entitlements of justice. I further argue that ultimately this disagreement on the bounds of justice bottoms out in a normative disagreement about which entities possess moral claim rights, and that the case for biotic or ecosystem rights has yet to be convincingly established. | : Le présent article vise à clarifier le débat parmi sentientistes, biocentristes et écocentristes autour de la question de qui ou de ce qui peut valoir comme un récipiendaire légitime de justice. Pour débuter, j’examine le concept de justice et soutiens que la nature des obligations et droits de la justice impose des contraintes sur les types d’entités pouvant être récipiendaires de justice. Plus particulièrement, je prétends que tout récipiendaire de justice doit être titulaire de droits de revendication morale applicables. Je propose ensuite que cette thèse a des conséquences importantes pour la querelle parmi les sentientistes, les biocentristes et les écocentristes. En bref, je démontre que les sentientistes ne peuvent exclure les êtres nonsentients du domaine de la justice simplement en niant qu’ils ont des « intérêts de la bonne sorte », alors que les biocentristes et écocentristes ne peuvent passer sans difficultés d’un aspect quelconque des êtres vivants ou des écosystèmes à des droits de justice. Enfin, je soutiens que ce désaccord sur les limites de la justice repose, en fin de compte, sur un désaccord d’ordre normatif à propos des entités possédant des droits de revendication morale, et que l’argument pour des droits propres aux êtres vivants ou aux écosystèmes n’a toujours pas été prouvé de manière convaincante. (shrink)

While there exist extensive literatures on both distributive justice and senior executive pay, and a number of authors (notably the French economist Thomas Piketty) have addressed the implications of high pay for distributive justice, the existing literature fails to address what senior executives themselves think about distributive justice and whether they consider high income inequalities to be morally acceptable. We address this gap by analysing a unique dataset comprising the views of over 1000 senior executives from across the world, which (...) was constructed using a survey instrument designed by the authors based on a thought experiment resembling John Rawls’s original position. We report four main findings. First, executives conceptualise distributive justice in a pluralistic manner, endorsing different and sometimes apparently conflicting philosophical principles: to explain how this plurality can be accounted for we propose a novel field-theory framework for conceptualising beliefs about distributive justice. Second, executives support similar philosophical approaches at both society and company levels of analysis, thus countering the idea that companies should leave matters of distributive justice exclusively for governments to deal with via the tax system. Third, executives believe that they live in societies and work for companies that fall short of desirable distributive justice outcomes. Fourth, the distributive justice views of the executives in our sample fall into four distinct clusters that are correlated with certain socio-demographic markers. Finally, we note the distinction between distributive justice beliefs and behaviours, from which we derive a number of managerial and public policy implications. (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)

"World hypotheses" correspond to metaphysical systems, and they may be systematically judged by the canons of evidence and corroboration. In setting forth his root-metaphor theory and examining six such hypotheses—animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism—Pepper surveys the whole field of metaphysics. Because this book is an analytical study, it stresses issues rather than men. It seeks to exhibit the sources of these issues and to show that some are unnecessary; that the rest gather into clusters and are interconnected (...) in systems corresponding closely to the traditional schools of philosophy. The virtue of the root-metaphor method is that it puts metaphysics on a purely factual basis and pushes philosophical issues back to the interpretation of evidence. This book was written primarily as a contribution to the field, but its plan excellently suits it for use as a text in courses in metaphysics, types of philosophical theory, or present tendencies in philosophy. (shrink)

The Oslo "peace process" changed the modalities of the occupation, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever." He soon became an architect of the US-Israel proposals at Camp David in Summer 2000, which kept to this condition. These were highly praised in US commentary. The Palestinians and their evil leader were (...) blamed for their failure and the subsequent violence. But that is outright "fraud," as Kimmerling reported, along with all other serious commentators. (shrink)

The Oslo "peace process" changed the modalities of the occupation, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever". He soon became an architect of the US-Israel proposals at Camp David in 2000, which kept to this condition. At the time, West Bank Palestinians were confined to 200 scattered areas. Bill Clinton and (...) Israeli prime minister Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth enclave, a small area of East Jerusalem, the centre of Palestinian communications. The fifth canton was Gaza. It is understandable that maps are not to be found in the US mainstream. Nor is their prototype, the Bantustan "homelands" of apartheid South Africa, ever mentioned. No one can seriously doubt that the US role will continue to be decisive. It is crucial to understand what that role has been, and how it is internally perceived. The version of the doves is presented by the editors of the New York Times, praising President Bush's "path-breaking speech" and the "emerging vision" he articulated. Its first element is "ending Palestinian terrorism" immediately. Some time later comes "freezing, then rolling back, Jewish settlements and negotiating new borders" to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. If Palestinian terror ends, Israelis will be encouraged to "take the Arab League's historic offer of full peace and recognition in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal more seriously". But first Palestinian leaders must demonstrate that they are "legitimate diplomatic partners". (shrink)