International Conference "Ethical Perspectives on Animals 1400-1650" (original) (raw)
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Italian Philosophy before the Animals Review of Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy
Journal of Italian Philosophy, Volume 5 , 2022
At the stormy beginning of a new millennium, the theme of animality has gained popularity in philosophy, possibly due to the intensifying grip of governmental devices on the biological aspects of human and non-human life. Contagion, nutrition, reproduction, environment, and others have become political themes of the utmost importance. They have overtaken subjects of greater prominence from the last century, such as freedom, equality, justice, and independence. A further element that characterised the 'animal turn' was the growing importance of the relationship between humans, animals, and the ecosystem. In this regard, it is useful to recall that, starting in the 1970s, Peter Singer and Tom Regan called for greater moral consideration for animals, thus opening a debate that is still ongoing today. At the beginning of the 2000s, two texts were published that had a profound impact upon the terms and concepts of that debate: The Open: Man and Animal by Giorgio Agamben and The Animal That Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida.
Animals and Ethics – table of contents and preface
Broadview Press, 2009
Can animals be regarded as part of the moral community? To what extent, if at all, do they have moral rights? Are we wrong to eat them, hunt them, or use them for scientific research? Can animal liberation be squared with the environmental movement? Taylor traces the background of these debates from Aristotle to Darwin and sets out the views of numerous contemporary philosophers – including Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Mary Anne Warren, J. Baird Callicott, and Martha Nussbaum – with ethical theories ranging from utilitarianism to eco-feminism. The new edition also includes provocative quotations from some of the major writers in the field. As the final chapter insists, animal ethics is more than just an “academic” question: it is intimately connected both to our understanding of what it means to be human and to pressing current issues such as food shortages, environmental degradation, and climate change.
EATING ANIMALS AND THE MORAL VALUE OF NON-HUMAN SUFFERING (Authors: Salim Hirèche, Sandra Villata)
The purpose of this article, which takes the form of a dialogue between a vegetarian and a meat eater, is twofold. On the one hand, we argue for a general characterisation of moral value in terms of well-being and suffering. On the other hand, on the basis of this characterisation, we argue that, in most cases, the moral value attached to the choice of eating meat is negative; in particular, we defend this claim against a number of objections concerning the nature of animal suffering, its moral value, and the moral responsibility of meat eaters.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2016
The paper would attempt to dwell into the wider philosophical and ontological implications of vegetarianism and in the process offer a deconstructive critique of the more physicalist currency of vegetarianism advocated by many animal rights activists, philosophers and writers like J.M. Coetzee. Taking up Jacques Derrida's notion of Anthropocentric "Carno-Phallogocentrism" , the paper would argue how any parochial notion of vegetarianism (including those by J.M. Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello) actually reserves the kernel of a certain anthropomorphic Enlightenment humanism and thus partakes in a kind of epistemic violence upon the animal "other" even while it poses to speak on behalf of them. The trajectory of this paper would take up post-humanist thinkers like Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas to trace the kernel of anthropocentric humanism even in the positing of the post-cartesian subject and attempt to locate an etymological anthropocentric inheritance of the same in the differential humanism of animal philosophers like J.M. Coetzee.
Is Animal Suffering Really All That Matters? The Move from Suffering to Vegetarianism
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2019
The animal liberation movement, among other goals, seeks an end to the use of animals for food. The philosophers who started the movement agree on the goal but differ in their approach: deontologists argue that rearing animals for food infringes animals’ inherent right to life. Utilitarians claim that ending the use of animals for food will result in the maximization of utility. Virtue-oriented theorists argue that using animals for food is callus, self-indulgent, and unjust, in short, it’s an unvirtuous practice. Despite their different approaches, arguments for vegetarianism or veganism have a common step. They move from the notion of suffering to the conclusion of vegetarianism or veganism. In this paper I suggest that the notion of animal suffering is not necessary in order to condemn the practice of animal farming. I propose the possibility of defending vegetarianism or veganism on the basis of arguments that do not rest on the notion of animal suffering, but rather rely on aesthetic principles, the avoidance of violence, and preservation of the environment, and health.
Catholic Moral Theology and the Moral Status of Non-Human Animals (2014)
There has been an almost complete marginalizaton of consideration of non-animals animals in Catholic theology generally and Catholic moral theology more specifically up until very recently. But something remarkable has happened in just the past few years. No longer excluding animals from view, there is a veritable flowering of interest in non-human animals among Catholic moral theologians. Instead of accepting and reinforcing the binary between humans and animals, Catholic moral theologians now acknowledge they are ‘other animals’ with which we share animality as common creaturely kinds, even if we note that humans are specific kinds of animals. Perhaps it is as in other topics, moral theologians are slowly following the lead of moral philosophers, who have been writing extensively on this topic for the last 40 years. But on the other hand, on related topics such as environmental ethics Roman Catholic discussion proved to be far more open, so that elements of environmental concern started to show up even in official Catholic social teaching at more or less the same time as environmental ethics was established as a field of study in the late 1960s and 1970s. There was something, then, about the specific concern for non-human animals that seems to have been resisted among Catholic moral theologians in a way that seemed to pose questions about the animal as even more threatening compared with environmental concern. One possible suggestion as to why this might be the case is that on the one hand, environmental concern, when viewed in a global context, showed up the necessary relation between the flourishing of human beings and that of ecological contexts. Other animal concern, on the other hand, seemed to take away from concern for humans as it focused on the individual lives of animals, rather than much more generalized ecological contexts for human flourishing. Both ecological ethics and animal ethics challenged lifestyles in particular ways, but animal ethics arguably presses for more immediate and radical change, even among city dwellers.